Prologue

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Ascension

The man stalked the woman. Half of his face was cut off from the blade the woman had smashed into him. 

An angry snarl exploded from his lips as he wiped his bloody hand on his stained white shirt. 
The women lay hidden in the corner of the darkened room, frozen with fear and perspiring with every sense of hope that diminished as he neared.

Another man with darker hair watched the scene happen upon him while chained to a chair in the little light that the moon had let in. He screamed and shouted for his wife. A little girl sat in the wooden crate and tears exploded from her as the man in the white shirt hit the crate. The girl wanted to run to her mother who sat in the darkness.

The woman held back the muffled sound of her tears as they rolled down her face. Her dress was ripped off her body, hanging pitifully on her small frame. 

"Tilli!" The man's gruel voice joined with a burst of mangled, starved laughter. "Come here, Tilli. I just want to have a little fun. After all...I deserve it after EVERY DAMN THING YOU DID TO ME."

The woman silently cursed him.

"Tilli," she could hear him enter the room she was occupying. "Tilli. Tilli."

The little girl crunched inwardly, hoping she'd disappear from this nightmare. 

The girl watched as the man in the chair finally broke from the chains and slipped them off like water. He was quiet with his actions so that the man near the woman wouldn't hear. 

Slowly, the dark-haired man opened the lid of the crate and the girl stopped peaking through the whole of the wood. She looked up to the man as he took her in his arms and tip-toed out the small cottage and near the broken window that the scary man had landed into.  He stepped through the sill with the girl still in his arms.

He then sprinted off out of the small village and into the deep forest. The girl could still hear yelling coming from the cottage. As the man jumped across a log, she heard the last thing before she fell into darkness. 

A blood-curdling scream of a plunge of a dagger in flesh. The man laughed wickedly as the little girl finally was swept away into sleep. 

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