Excalibur Rising

My name is...

Chapter 1

The playground was buzzing with excited chatter as the September sun burned brightly in the air, cliques had already formed separating the students into their allotted groups and it was only the first hour of the first day of term. Several older students, who were rebelling against the school rules, had removed their ties and were covertly smoking a pack of cigarettes that one of them had pinched from their mum. Girls were lined up on the edge of the painted basketball courts, fawning over the boys running across the tarmac in a particularly tense death match, the Populars vs. the Unpopulars, the A-team vs. the B-team. Both sides equally competitive but the A-team, being the schools starting team, were at an advantage. Over on the opposite side of the small playground was a select group of eight people. They had only admitted one member into the group since pre-school and as was expected, they kept to themselves and everyone else kept away from them. It didn’t stop them getting their own band of merry followers who wanted to become part of the elite but they never quite had the ‘special stuff’ required to be part of the group.

                Despite the cliques that separated them, the students collected in the playground all had one thing in common, they were too busy to notice when a bottle green Volkswagen pulled up outside of the school gates. Maybe they would have noticed if the car was a Porsche or something equally expensive but as it was, not one person turned their eyes to the perfectly ordinary vehicle as a petite girl with hair as blonde as the whitest rose climbed out of the car. They didn’t notice when, with sure and practiced movements, she flicked her wrist outwards so that the small stick she was holding extended into a large white cane. Nor did they notice as she tapped her way through the gates into the Mini-kingdom of Tyler Court Secondary School and Sixth form centre.

                She paid no mind to the cliques either as she passed by each of them, instead the girl walked with her head held high and her steps confident as her cane explored the path before her, luckily coming in contact with nothing other than concrete, whilst her unseeing eyes were staring blankly through the tinted lenses of her sunglasses. She was dressed in regulation school uniform apart from the sunglasses and cane but for her the Head of school had made an exception, not that they could really say anything anyway.

                The warning bell for registration reverberated from all the surrounding buildings and the girl was left in momentary confusion as she tried to locate the direction that was best to go in. It was fine when she knew the place but this school was foreign, and she hadn’t even had the chance to spend the weekend mapping the place out to get her bearings because she had only arrived in this small town yesterday. She paused and waited for the rush of footsteps to catch up with her, her cane being retracted so that it lay flat against her leg preventing it from being knocked from her grasp. Only when people started bumping into her did she start moving towards the largest of the three buildings, swept along by the crowd so fast that she almost fell to the floor several times. Her face contorted as each person hit her, her head whipping from side to side as if she was seeing a million different images all at once. It wasn’t too far from the truth because if she hadn’t been wearing the glasses she was sure that the people surrounding her would have noticed her eyes changing all different shades of mundane browns, blues and greens as each person came in contact, momentarily borrowing a part of the essence so that she got a flash of the world around her. She manoeuvred her way to the edge of the steam of students and once she reached the wall she held on tight as the bodies continued to jostle past her, sending her a confusing array of images.

It wasn’t until they had dispersed and she was left on her own, that her eyes reverted to their original colour, one was the brightest violet and the other was the brightest and purest blue. Most found her eyes unnerving, they said they weren’t natural, and so to save problems she kept her eyes covered. It stopped her having to answer a lot of questions in the long run as no one could quite explain away changing eye colours, the last person who had seen the teen’s eyes change had passed it off a trick of light as a moment later, when she stepped away, the eyes had been the unnerving mismatch they were before. Though, it had managed to send a few people to see a shrink as they believed that they had seen a demon rather than a teenager.