Dominion

Chapter One: Family Lost

Chapter One: Family Lost

"What's a star?"

Such a simple question and yet, one I could not truly answer.

"Where did you hear that word, Ash?"

She smiled at me. "Grandma's diary."

Our late Grandmother. Always telling us stories of how the world used to be, wishing we had been born in an age where you could look up in the sky and not see the alien worlds that shared in the Earth's fate.

"So what is it, Gregor?" she asked again. Always impatient, my little sister. But her smile made it impossible not to give in.

I thought about how to answer her and gave her the best definition I had for them. "Stars are little lights that used to fill the sky."

She laid down on her back and looked up at the sky. "Where'd they go?"

I laid down next to her and looked up at the sky as well, recalling Grandma's description of what it used to look like. I looked over at her, eagerly awaiting my answer. "They didn't go anywhere. We just can't see them anymore."

She started playing around with a loose thread on her tattered shirt. "How come?"

"Someone turned them off."

She looked at me with those eyes of hers, filled with dreams. "Will you tell me the story Grandma always used to tell us before bed?"

I glanced over my shoulder, to our village at the bottom of the hill. Its glow, like all other towns in what the earth had been reduced to, was a constant light in a world forever gone dark. It was always nighttime here. No sun, no moon like Grandma remembered. Mom always said she just made up those stories to not have to face the world as it was. All that what was here was The Dominion. "It's getting late, Ash."

"Please??" she begged. I took a deep breath of the stale air, the cold of the ground filling my back. She smiled a full smile, and I was sold. No resisting now.

"Alright," I said, and she smiled, turning toward me. I did my best to recall our Grandma's favorite story to tell us. I took my little sister's hand. "Close your eyes," I said, and she did, still smiling. "And imagine a world better than ours..."

And then Ash and her smile disappeared, replaced by the look of dread she'd held months later when our parents had been executed by Dominion soldiers.

Hidden and silent under the wooden table as mom and dad had instructed us to be, we'd watched as the soldiers of hell killed them for denying their accusations.

It had been a raid. Someone had tipped them off that our town was harboring rebels and they had come to insure any possible rebel sympathizers paid the price. No matter the cost. They had found no definitive proof and thus, to be sure, they burned our village to ground - beginning with our home.

Our father's bottle of whiskey had been hurled to the ground and shattered, spilling across the wooden floor. Then one of the soldiers lit a torch and thus began the fire that forged my life.

"ASH!" I remembered yelling minutes, with all my heart. I had climbed atop a pile of hay resting by the village gate after we got separated. Smoke filled the air and the orange-red glow of fire was all that gave light to the surrounding dark. "ASH!"

She was nowhere to be found. Villagers raced past me, grabbing what belongings they could and trying to stay out of sight of their executioners, the Dominion soldiers. I saw neighbors gunned down, strangers burned alive. But none of them mattered to me. I had to get Ashley out of here. She was my responsibility now. We were all we had left and I wasn't going to let her down.