The Hunter and The Healer

Prologue

Alani pov
It had been a year. My first away from home. I travelled to Elophe when I turned seventeen to continue my education, and left my family in Tylenn. I was coming back today. I couldn't believe that I was done my first year.

I lifted my bags and stepped away from the carriage. It had been a long ride. I slept through most of it, but the road was bumpy, and the sleep was unsatisfactory. I made my way to the great building looming above me, and the line of people forming in front of it. There weren't many, since the area behind the line was depopulated. It was only in Tylenn that this would happen.

It was my turn, and standing in front of the open door, the guard held a paper in his hand as he searched for my name.

"Hali Nasrin." He grunted. I nodded and stepped over the threshold.

I hated the name. Having a fake name was one of my father's conditions to let me leave home in the first place. My parents had always been overprotective of me and my little sister, and they had unnecessarily strict rules we had to follow.

I stepped out the building and into Tylenn, into home. And they were there, waiting for me.

"Alani!" Cora's shrill voice echoed in the street. She was jumping up and down, waving her hands. She couldn't contain her excitement. I couldn't wait either. I chuckled as my mother put a restraining hand on her shoulder, but she ignored it and ran up to me.

Cora was my little sister, five years younger than me. She had wavy brown hair just like mine that she didn't seem to be able to tame, and the same high cheekbones and straight nose. That was where the similarities ended. Her gray eyes were my father's, which turned black with anger or blue with happiness. She was still a head shorter than I was, but she had grown since I had last seen her.

In other ways, she hadn't changed a bit. She was still the excited little girl who loved stories and adventures and fairy tales.

"Hey, kiddo." I slung a bag over my shoulder and held her tightly in a one-handed embrace. She didn't let go, even as we started walking back toward our parents. She still had an arm clutched around my waist as I greeted them.

My mother hugged me tightly as silent tears streamed down her cheeks. In the year since I'd last seen her, I had grown taller. I had always looked like her, and now I was starting to see it. We had the same build, tall and lean, but we looked slight and delicate. She put her hands on both sides of my face and I saw my own golden eyes staring back at me. She kissed my forehead and stepped back to give me some space.

My father was a broad man. He was still fit for his old age, if his graying hair was any indication. I had taken more of my father's personality than his appearance. He was the same person who would be mad a second then laugh about it the next, or make spontaneous decisions and plans. He had always been like that. Unpredictable. He wasn't a sensitive person, and neither was I. He hugged me and lifted a bag off my shoulders, then led the way home.

Tylenn hadn't changed at all since I had last seen it. It was still the small village with the dusty old, abandoned houses lining the main street. Vines made them their homes as they wound themselves around their chimneys and scaled their walls. Our house was a little further down the road, in the only populated part of the area. Everyone knew one another in Tylenn, as there were no more than fifty occupied houses in the neighborhood.

I asked my father why they didn't move away. Somewhere different, better, where the sun shone and there weren't guards at every entrance. His answer was always the same: you'll grow to love it. I stopped asking after a while.