The Heritage of Sephtis: The Returning

1: The Letter

OK. First things first.

You're about to be disappointed, but that's OK, things can't always go your way.

Second, I'm going to have to start from the beginning of a different story, for you to understand the one you currently know. This story isn't about a girl named Vara, or a hunter named Theron, and it definitely isn't about an elf named Justine. That's OK, life will go on. This story is about a boy named Jack.

Jack is the average teen, in appearance at least. Shaggy blonde hair, average height. Average, just average. Except one thing, but we'll get to that in a second. His family is one of the those things in his life that isn't average. He had no parents. At least not his parents. He had been adopted, and it wasn't all that hard for him to figure it out, though he had been adopted at a young age. The parents he knew had blonde hair and they were average height; just average. No something else pointed to his adoption. You see his eyes were special. They were blue, but the iris had a golden ring around it. That was the only thing his birth parents had left him.

Jack was always a stand-offish kid, with few friends. And his eyes made him a bit of a laughing stock sometimes, which did make his life upsetting. And you may be tempted to think this made him upset about life in general. But, that's not true. Jack was quite happy actually. He didn't care what people thought, unlike many teenagers, and that's part of how he had survived school so long. His parents, though not his birth parents, loved him, and he them. He really did have a good life, when he looked past the fact that he would never know his birth parents, and was picked on quite a bit.

The one thing that helped him the most was the fact that his parents were Christians. You may not believe in a god, but whether you do, when you have faith in something, anything it does give you courage. That is a fact.
And of course, Jack was the stereotypical Christian kid. You see, he'd always tried to do the right thing, and hated doing the wrong thing. He always tried to follow his parents rules.

That's why it was so weird that it happened.

He was walking home from school that day. He'd missed the bus, because he'd stayed back with a teacher, and now he had to get home before supper time. Or else his parents would be upset. See, that was one of their rules. So he walked home, jogging through the bad neighborhoods, and finally stopped for a breath in front of his door. But, he got this weird feeling. It wasn't much, just a little tingle, but it almost felt like a tap on his shoulder. He turned around and looked behind him. Nothing, but he now had an overwhelming urge to go back to the end of the sidewalk. So, as any good horror film character would, he did. He looked around in hope that maybe something would happen. He stood there for a few seconds. No monster. No ghost. No neighbor waving hello. Yet, he still didn't feel right. He looked around one last time and turned. The mailbox was open, and there was a letter leaning gently against the side. Jack walked up to the mailbox and pulled it out. It was old looking, really old. So old, it was yellow, and it felt rough like parchment almost. Placed squarely on the front of the letter was a string of flowing calligraphy that read,"forgotten one."

It had been an hour since he'd come inside. He laid on his bed trying not to think about it. But, no matter how much he banished the thought, the letter stared at him from the corner of his little desk. He still felt weird. He just couldn't shake that feeling, and he couldn't quite grasp it either. And worst of all, he couldn't make up his mind as to what to do with it. In a normal situation, he'd just give it to his parents, but this wasn't normal. There was a weird aura that surrounded the entirety of the letter. And, of course,  his mind still told him to give it to his parents, but his heart said throw it away and his gut feeling was overwhelming with the question of what was inside that letter.

He had sat down in bed and tried to do his homework, he had pulled out a book and tried to read, he had even turned on the TV, but no matter what he did, his mind had kept straying back to that letter sitting on his desk. He had gone to open it several times in fact, but every time he stopped. It was like it was calling to him and forbidding him simultaneously, like a locked room.