Cries of the Stars

The Journey Begins

The grass is damp, I know this because I've fallen to my knees. Warm tears are streaming down my cheeks, I can't breathe, I can't breathe. The string on my bow relaxes and the arrow falls to the ground. It's rolling across the shortly cut grass. It travels with quite high speed until it stops. Something has stopped it. A small hand.

I look at the arrow and at the small little hand beside it. My eyes travel up the arm and onto the person's face. It's a little girl, not older than 10 years, her eyes stare blindly up into the air, blood is streaming from her mouth, across the cheek and onto the ground. She's dead. Just like all the others. My hand trembles as I reach out my hand to close her eyes,

"I wish you the greatest luck on your next travel my lumen, and I wish you the greatest luck on the travels after that," I whisper under my breath.

That's when I start feeling something. Something that grips onto my whole existence and spreads throughout my body. I clenched my jaw and stand up on shaking legs. I am going to slaughter every single person responsible for this. Their blood shall be painted on my face and I will stare into their eyes as they leave this world. They shall know, in their hearts, that there is nothing, nothing, that's going to stop me from reaching this goal. Nothing.

I hear a stick breaking somewhere behind me and I fire an arrow in that direction. The arrow hits the man in the throat and he falls down. I ran up to him and check his coat after information of why he has done such an awful thing. There's a map in his inner pocket, I open it to see a map over the three ruledomes, the snowscapes, the ocean valley and the green fields. Four places are circled on the piece of paper with a red pen, two of them also crossed over, the Lumen, the Phoenix. Another tear falls down my cheek. Something at the bottom of the page catches my eye. It's a picture of a black sun. I feel like I've seen this picture before, but I can't remember where.

I feel a hand on my shoulder and I spin quickly around and put an arrow on the string. When I look up I see two women and a man wearing coats not much different from mine. One of the women stand closer to me, she must have been the one who touched me. She takes the hood off her head and reveals long, curly brown hair, not tight curls, more beach waves. She goes down to her knees.

"What's your name?" she asks me, her sweet like summer rain and soft like a meadow of flowers.

"Avaline Bothynus," I whisper. For some reason, I don't know why, I don't think she's here to kill me. I feel like I can trust her, a feeling I haven't felt in a very long time.

"Avaline Bothynus," she says, "which master do you serve?"

"I serve to no one," I say, still whispering. The woman stands up and says something to the other two and they nod as an answer. She turns back around and reaches out her hand to help me get up again. I grab her hand and stand up.

"It's an honor to finally meet you Avaline," the woman says, "My name is Ofelia Aerheart, and we're going to take care of you"

I nod. The four of us start walking north, Ofelia starts talking to me again but I'm not listening. All I can think about is that black sun, and where I've seen it before.

We walk north until it darkens, Arcturus walking beside me the entire time. We set camp underneath a spruce. Ofelia and the other woman whose name is Esmeralda secure the premises and check if we've been followed. The man, whose name is Carter fixes the sleeping area by taking dry leaves and spruce branches and putting them in a pile. I caught him looking at me multiple times. I still haven't taken off my scarf or my cloak.

It's pitch-black out when Ofelia and Esmeralda comes back, Ofelia and I take the first guard of the night, not that I can sleep anyway, not that they know that but I still like to feel helpful.

"You probably have a lot of questions right now," she says as we sit by the burned out fire. "I will try to answer all of them, at least as many as I can," she continues.

I pull out the map I found in the man's pocket. She looks at me with big eyes as I unravel it.

"I found this in his coat," I start, "I don't know why, but I feel like I've seen this sun before"

Ofelia grabs the map and looks closer at the point where I'd pointed. "I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that this is the sign of the phoenix," she says after looking at it for a long time. "But that doesn't make any sense," I start saying, "you can see on the map that there's a cross over the phoenix, just like over the lumen." I show her the crosses on the map and she nods of understanding. "Then what is this sign?" she asks me, pointing at a small diamond in another corner. I definitely have seen this one before. It's the sign of the lumen. "That's the lumen," I say, not understanding why I didn't see it before. "When I checked the map earlier this wasn't there," I tell her, but before she has the chance to answer a branch crack somewhere in the dark.