The Journey to My Heart [Updates Every Thursday!!]

Chapter Three ~Crista

"Do you think he'll show?" I whisper to Lucy who sits to my right at the dining table. I make sure to keep my voice as low as possible. It seems everyone in Lumbridge is feeling the effects of Zaria being gone. The king and queen somberly sit at the head of the table, waiting for everyone to join around for dinner.

My mother and father and father are having dinner together in Senwain. Today was supposed to be one of our dinner nights together away from the palace, but I haven't been able to even think of my father without feeling sick to my stomach, nonetheless, sit and eat across from him.

I try to keep telling myself he had to. Eden had told him that a time would come when she would require payment for letting him live. Ever since he changed his allegiance because he fell in love with my mother, Eden has been looming in the shadows, waiting to strike. His time of hiding was up and the cost was being left with the responsibility to poison Zaria.

And my mother. She branded us all with fake marks using her magic. It was all such a hoax. I was wondering when the poison would start to set in. When would I start to feel my body turn against me? When would I start to feel as though I was slowly dying? That feeling for me never came. That feeling never came to any of us whom my mother marked.

But Zaria, who had the real mark felt the effect right away. I could see it. I could see her skin turn white, her eyes glowing unnaturally green. I could see the little fat on her body already starting to dissipate. When Axil held her in his arms and brought her to the Crystal Cave... she didn't look like the Zaria I know.

She looked like a different person, in a different time, in a different life. Looking at her, bloodied and hollowed it crossed my mind that she shouldn't have ever been here. This was not the life that she was supposed to be brought into. What a pessimistic thought. In Lumbridge, she finally got free from her father. A father who hated her. Shot her. She was free from the life of being a criminal. She could finally know what it's like to not look around every corner. She found family and friends. She got to meet her mother... however short their meeting was. She found happiness.

But she also found new enemies. As bad as it sounds, Zaria could handle Damian. He was scared of her, I know he was. I could feel it. The was a hesitation in the back of his mind with everything he did or said to her. Zaria could handle John, even when we all thought he turned evil. She could handle it.

But Eden...

Eden is a woman clothed in nightmares. She a force to be reckoned with. No one can handle Eden. It got both of our mothers killed once, and Zaria's a second time. Zaria can't handle Eden and she shouldn't have had to in the first place.

If she had stayed in Flesherg, she wouldn't be far off better, but she wouldn't be here... on the verge of death.

She could be dead if she was in Flesherg and you know it, I try to convince myself, but that's the Common Realm. In the Common Realm, death is just death.

But she has magic, I hear myself whisper over and over in my mind. I know how lost I felt thinking I didn't have any magic. I stripped myself of the very thing that made me who I am, and if Zaria hadn't come here, she would never truly know who she is and just how powerful she can be.

But she wouldn't know. She wouldn't know any of it. And that's the difference.

"Like I said," Lucy whispers, glancing at Tyrian across the table. "I had a vision of him here, tonight."

"How do you know it's tonight?" I ask, getting more anxious as I watch the big Roman clock tick closer to dinner time.

"It's tonight," she says tightly weaving her fingers together.