Avalon's Adventures - Merlin's Prophecy

Chapter 1

Today is her funeral.

I stand with Noah and Sarah on the end of this street, waiting outside Aunt Imogen's house
on the edge of Abbots Leigh in Bristol, which compared to the rest of the houses on the chaotic street is tiny. All the other houses are huge with two garages and clean, cut-back gardens. In front of us is two black limos lined up behind a big, black hearse with vibrant, rainbow-coloured flowers in the rear window on top of a polished coffin.

Our Grandmother's coffin.

Granny Cassandra.

She's gone.

The most important woman in the world.

No more of her crazy, curly red hair or squealing
laughs or her ballerina dancing as she cooked in the kitchen, burning stuff as she went along. I keep forgetting – I know, it was silly, but all this doesn't feel real. A part of me hopes that I'll wake up and all this would be a nightmare. This time pinching myself does nothing, and I'm still trying to breathe through it all.

Shouting reaches my ears from Imogen's house. Jake and Pansy. Our cousins. And by the
sounds of it, they're still fart-assing around. We've been waiting forty-five minutes for them,
and we're supposed to be at the crematorium now. At this rate we won't get there until Christmas. I glance over at Noah and Sarah with a tight-lipped frown, jaw tightly clenching as I grind my teeth together.

This is fucking ridiculous. Can't they hurry the hell up or something. We're late, so late and I
can't stand it because this is important. Maybe I should do something. Get them to hurry
their arses up or something.

No, I should definitely do something.

Fists clenching to the point that my nails are digging into the palms of my hands, surrounding skin stinging, I'm about to take a step forward when Sarah grabs my wrist and pulls me back.

She frowns at me, shaking her head with a long sigh.

Damnit.

She knows me so well. No telling them to hurry the hell up or losing my temper with them. I bite down hard on my bottom chapped lip, grimacing as a rustic tang spread across my tongue.

Damn.

This is ridiculous.

No.

What's ridiculous is that I can't shout at them for doing this or smack them one.

Sarah always says that violence is never the answer, but I disagree, there's always some special cases. And I would say this is one of them. The only thing is, I promised Sarah. I promised her this morning that I would be on my best behaviour for Granny's funeral.

Sometimes with the way Sarah acts, you'd think she's the oldest and I'm the middle kid but
no, that's just Sarah being Sarah.

Sarah's got on this posh fancy dress for the funeral. Her fuzzy, strawberry-blonde hair is
whipped back into a tidy bun. Blue eyeshadow is painted above her dark brown eyes, eyes that look like Granny Cassandra's. And her eczema is peeling on the bottom of her nose.

Sarah has always struggled with eczema, no cream helps.

And Noah looks so smart and adorable with his black tux on. His short, messy uncontrollable hair is standing on end, looking as if it's been struck by lightning. If I didn't know any better and I hadn't brushed his hair for him earlier, I would have thought he hadn't done anything to it. He has freckles all over his cheeks and nose, some bleeding as he constantly picks at them - something Granny used to scold him for. And we both share the same hazelnut brown eyes, which we got from our father.