IMMORTAL SECRETS: THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB

CHAPTER TWO - SOLOM

Have you spoken with Accalia Gerheart? Such a sweet, troubled girl. Are you convinced her troubles stem from me? Surely, she has painted me with a paintbrush of negativity.

Yes, as her guardian, I am hard on her; indifferent most of the time. And let us not forget cruel. Whenever she feels the need to speak, I can be quite brutal. I will admit I am a horrible parental figure to her, especially when allowing Nicholas and his friends to abuse her so viciously. But, before you draw your own nasty conclusions of me, allow one question. How would you treat a lamb raised to feed your starving family?

I assure you would not name it. Kiss it. Becoming emotionally attached would mean death for everyone but the lamb. Such a bond is dangerous. Accalia is my lamb. My starving family are the mix-breeds I hide from certain death. Do you understand me now?

Good and bad are mere perceptions, and when you are in the throes of war, their lines become more blurred. Remember this ...

Is it not better to sacrifice one so countless others can live? Is Accalia Gerheart's life more precious than thousands of other innocents? Why make the choice at all? Because at the time of her conception, she was marked with a prophecy:

Pure of heart, but not of race,

Gathered power, filled with grace;

To freely live, let those to end

To freely die, thy name is friend.

She must freely choose between her life and the lives of her peers in seventy-six days, oh forgive me, seventy-five days now, as the new day prepares to dawn. Should she choose her life, her peers will cease to exist. Should she choose their lives of her own free will, her life cannot move forward, but theirs will flourish.

Accalia is naïve to the prophecy. The prophesied are never allowed to know what is foretold of them. To do so would interfere and the result could be catastrophic for all involved. I simply act out of necessity to help Accalia make the final decision. She will be more willing to end her life, if she does not cherish it. I will win the war against them when she dies. They will win if she lives and then all other mix-breeds are dead.

Do my harsh words and actions make more sense?

I will persuade Accalia Gerheart to kill herself and bond her powers to me. If she must die for the good of every other mix-breed, why should her powers be wasted? They will live within me, continuing to help mix-breeds, the way this man's power is about to. Persuading him was easy. He stands in front of me; his brown eyes with fire undertones peering at me through his blood-soaked face – blood that is not his own. His snow-white clothes are hardly white anymore.

Do not mistake, he is no human or mix-breed. He is a purebred Dragonnian. His race were once dragons, and Nepha is their true home. Nepha is the sixth dimension with a window into the dimension of humans, the third, but, thousands of years ago, purebred Dragonnians were forced to live on Earth as humans, eventually becoming permanent residents. Previously, they had only visited the Earth when ordered, causing mayhem and havoc as ways to force humans to come together through adversity, but to also cull their growing numbers. Purebred Dragonnians seemed to enjoy their charge too much, though, and would often find devious delight in mass casualties of which they held no empathetic connection. Eventually they, those who ordered, realized the mass killings were beyond their control and bound the purebred Dragonnians to Earth, along with two other races, forcing them to pass as humans, their true forms hidden within disasters, in an attempt to teach them empathy in the hopes of quelling their ravenous appetite for human death. As such, the purebred Dragonnians became the full-time protectors of Earth, protecting it from humans, but not with the same zeal they previously held. Purebred Dragonnians work through controlled chaos to remind humans of their humanity in the forms of wildfires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and any other seemingly natural disaster.