✓ | The Crown of the Dead

My Extremely Interesting Hero Origin Story

My name is Bianca and my parents are dead.

   You know when your parents leave to go somewhere: they give you a kiss on your head, tell you they love you and that they'll be back soon?

   That's exactly what my Dad and Papa told me before they left four years ago on 'business' to California.

   They left me at home with a family friend and told me they'd be back in three weeks tops. Her name was Meg— I knew her from Christmas and Fourth of July and other holidays when my family would throw big parties and invite a bunch of friends. Aunt Hazel and Uncle Frank, my cousins Emmy and Eli, my Aunt Piper (who isn't really my Aunt, but you get the idea), Cecil and Lou Ellen and Delta and Cadence, Gramma, and a few other people.

   She was chaotic and fun, and almost made me forget that it had been four weeks, then five, then six, until one day my Aunt Piper came to pick me up and bring me to her house.

   I remember the initial feeling setting in; an eight year old's worst nightmare coming true. Papa and Daddy weren't coming back.

   "They're not coming home. Are they?"

   Two days before Aunt Piper came. Meg had been tucking me into bed.

   I remembered the way her muscles tensed up, and how her grip on my blankets grew tighter. She just... froze.

   "Are they?" I repeated. I was hardly eight, barely old enough to not be considered a baby. So oblivious, so sheltered, so kept from the world and the horrors of it.

   Meg stuttered. "They'll be home Bea." She gave me a kiss on the head. "They'll be--"

   "When?" My voice had started to shake.

   Meg couldn't answer. She pulled my blankets up farther. "Go to sleep, Bea. I'll see you in the morning." She turned off my lamp and left.

   Then I knew something was wrong.

   They never found any evidence. They just stopped looking. (Later to which I blamed the government system as a whole for, after learning that this happened more frequently than acceptable.)

   Aunt Piper took care of me after that; four years all alone with her. I think I might've gone slightly insane, considering I was so young and such an important part of my life had been cut out. It screwed me up, made me angry— to the point where at the  age of fourteen my only outlet was to scream at my last two family members and make them feel like they caused my pain, when all of us were suffering the same consequences.

   They were the ones who truly kept me from going insane, but in the end I might as well have just left them alone to fend for themselves considering the way I treated them.

   But this isn't about that part of my story— at least not yet.

   Piper McLean was raised in SoCal, until she was about sixteen years old. She moved to Tahlequah, Oklahoma when her dad-- a famous movie star-- went bankrupt. She used to tell me stories about living out there, most of which were old Cherokee myths her grandpa Tom would relay to her.

   Piper raised me. I was eight or so when I was dropped off at her house by CPS, and I was twelve when things between us... changed. That's your whole core childhood right there.

   She might as well have been my mother, considering I was never informed about who my biological mother was. I didn't really want to know, and for a time I actually thought it might be her. I completely ignored the fact that I looked like both my parents combined, and just told myself there had to be someone.