The Thorn

Prologue

The icy, winter water swelled and lessened around the girls feet as she skipped through the waves. The water jumped and swirled around her, splashing the skirts of her long, impractical dress. Wind whipped her long hair around her face in a frantic dance, tangling it, ignoring the fact that the girls mother had spent half an hour brushing out the previous tangles just earlier that morning.

Now, you may be expecting this girl to be the main character, but in fact she isn't. She is only the beginning, the start of a story, the introduction into a new world. She is very important, yet this is her only moment of fame.

And yet, the girl didn't know this. She didn't know that she was the beginning. She thought, and would die thinking, that she was average, that there was nothing special about her at all. But she couldn't be more wrong. No.

A gull squawked above her, swooping and souring in the endless grey sky of Victorian England. The sand was gritty and hardly pleasing underneath the girls feet. It had scratched them raw, and there were cuts and bruises all over the bottoms of them.

And that was the real beginning. Because, as the girl played in the sea, forgetting her worries, hunger and loneliness, her blood mixed with that of the sea, and was washed out into the distance.

Now, you may be thinking, how did that affect anything? Well. The blood of the little girl was washed out for miles, spreading out into the grey green depths. That blood mixed with the blood of other joyful children, the blood of other hopeful souls. Blood swirled in the endless currents of the ocean. Blood was everywhere. And that blood was all drawn to a tiny island, where a hopeful young boy sat on the beach with his sister, where the sand was less scratchy, and where the sea and sky where more blue. The blood all condensed, turning the sea red. It swirled and spun and created a huge wave of hope. The boy was scared, but he'd been cut on a single sharp shell, and was bleeding freely. When the wave crashed down, his blood mixed with the ocean too, and a portal was formed.

Through that portal you would find another world, a world that has always been there, but had never been found. A world of magic and mysteries. And that is the world that this story is about. But without that little girl on the beach in Victorian England, or the little boy on the island, there would be no way to know that that world was ever there at all.