DEMENTED | Romance | Fantasy | Slight Thriller

Prologue pt. 1

Please listen to the above music while reading.

Crimson.

A color that could be found in creations as beautiful as roses, yet a color that became ugly as soon as the world became filled with it—in the form of something different—blood.

Ebony despised the color dearly, along with the one who bore its name—her twin sister. Queen Crimson, although a symbol for all of Absinthe, bore a history as bloody and as tantalizing as her name. She drew swords of despair, and thrust them at anyone who dared fall on her path, tainting her malicious world in their rusty blood.

However dark her sister's past was, Ebony's was far darker. Wisps and shimmers of shadows and darkness lined her childhood with demented insanity. Curls of smoke shrouded a fiery history, which gave off a curious shade—black. This was Ebony's world; a world of madness. Ebony herself was so frightening that, according to the Absinthian folk, no shadow dared come close.

But she didn't know that yet.

Absinthe was a world of fear; a world cut off from the others in the Wars of the Realms. If you dared enter Absinthe, you'd never see another world again.

The Macabre twins were exact opposites, yet you'd wish your death for both as soon as you came across them.

Once upon a time, in a land of lava-washed trees and sand darker than one's cruelest conspirings, lived a Queen and her children; twins aged impossibly four years apart. The elder was of red hair more vibrant than blood and skin tinged red, while her younger sister had a head of long midnight-black hair and pale gray skin much like her parents and subjects. But the only difference she shared was in her eyes--not the soulless eyes of black and emptiness she'd gotten used to seeing all around her, but instead a vibrant purple--much like the chunk of amethyst she wore around her neck on a gold chain.

Her name was Ebony, and she stared up at her mother almost adoringly as she told her little girls the story they'd come to know as their beginning.

"Gather 'round, my dear children," she'd said, scooping them up into her arms, "for I have a story to tell."

The child of red hair, named Crimson, groaned. "Must you always tell this same story every night?"

The mother glared at her. "You will learn to remember this story and pass it on to others, for it is the story of how our realms came to be." She kissed her daughter's head, quieting her and preventing her from arguing further, then cooed at her other daughter, merely more than a toddler.

"Once upon a memory, there was a time when Absinthe was nothing but an idea, stark and cold in one future queen's mind. For, you see, this queen was the first Absinthian. And the first living creature in all the realms."

"The Goddess," Ebony struggled to say, still learning how to properly form her words.

"That's right," the mother smiled, congratulating her. "She was the Goddess Eternal. And the Creator of the realms as all Absinthians, or otherwise--know it.