The War of Six Crowns: The Vanished Knight

A Dream of Fire and Dread

The damp air reeked of blood. Callan staggered back in an effort to escape the scent, but immediately lost her bearings in the dusky light.

Fog distorted everything. Shouts and screams and clashes thundered nearby. She ran toward the noise, through looming black shadows that turned out to be trees. They fell away with a sharp cliff, forcing Callan to stop. The sounds drew her closer to the edge and she found a battle raging on a road in the ravine below.

Red-clad soldiers flung themselves at those in black, slashing them apart. Red archers shot flaming arrows from the opposite cliff, completely overwhelming their enemies. The few arrows that missed the soldiers in black hit old, yellowed leaves, lighting them like kindling. Callan watched, transfixed by dancing flames and flashing blades.

"Don't kill him!" The voice shouting the order sent shivers down her neck. Something about it stirred the evil entity in her soul to life. It stretched, filling her with dread.

Callan cried out and woke up. She pried her eyes open and did an internal check. No...the entity had only stirred. It hadn't escaped the cage she kept it in. She pressed her pillow to her face and moaned. The entity frequently kept her awake with dreams of medieval knights hacking each other apart. It used her subconscious against her, cruelly turning the heroic bedtime stories her father used to tell her into torture. This wasn't any different from any of the others.

Jittery. That's what she was. She'd made it through one fostering without someone getting hurt. Today she'd finish packing and go to the next. And she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The entity stirred again, mocking her. She shut her eyes and pushed at it, making sure it stayed behind its confines.

It did.

Callan got up and drove her fingers into her tangled mess of hair. She barely had space to move now that her trusty old suitcase was out and packed. Even on the best of days, her closet of a room didn't have space. She could touch both drab walls by stretching out her arms.

The suitcase barely weighed a thing when she lifted it onto her unmade bed.

She checked one last time that she hadn't left anything out. Only the too big T-shirt she'd slept in remained. She pulled it off and put it into the suitcase before starting her morning routine. Her outfit for today waited in the small wardrobe stuffed into the corner. She went to it and got dressed. Loose, hand-me-down jeans. Huge, baggy sweater.

She used the mirror to put on her makeup, changing her skin tone from fair to pale. Then she brushed her dull, mousy colored frizz until it acted like an impenetrable curtain about her face.

Now, she was ready to face the new foster family, whoever they were. She hadn't bothered to find out details. It didn't matter as long as they didn't take her too far from the riding club where she worked.

She needed the money to buy herself a life once she was old enough to leave the foster care system. Only two more years to the big eighteen, then she'd be a tiny bit freer from the constant worry nagging her.

After one last check in the mirror, Callan lugged the suitcase down the narrow staircase and into the kitchen. All the cupboards were locked. Callan shook her head and dug in her jeans' pocket for two hairpins. She kept them for exactly this sort of emergency. After boosting herself onto a counter, she stuck the pins into the lock and easily worked it open. This was why she'd been the one to call the foster worker for once. The woman who'd fostered her wanted a free maid. And had locked the food and everything else away as if Callan was a criminal.

She took a box of cereal from the shelf and ate it dry, too lazy to unlock the fridge. The phone rang and she picked it up, still munching. Her caseworker, informing her that her foster parents would arrive in a black car. Their name was Braden.

Callan sighed and hung up. 

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