Silvestrus's Savior

Chapter 1

I'm trapped in a cage, with small people surrounding me. They are grimy and ugly, with long beards that reach the floor. They poke and prod at me from between the bars.

"Enough!", goes a booming voice to my left.

I turn my head, my hands gripping the bars of the cage. Recognition clicks in my head. I've read about them before; they are dwarves. All the dwarves around me fall to their knees, bowing for their king. He is much larger than the others, about the size of a grown man, but his hands are as big as a backpack. He approaches me, and though he is a foot away, his putrid breath still fills the air with a horrid stench. He pulls a bronze key from his braided grey beard and shoves it into the rusty lock. His large hand reaches for me. I back into the farthest corner of the cage, trying to escape his inevitable grasp. He wraps his overly large fingers around my waist and pulls me out. I screech and fruitlessly struggle against his mighty hands while his subjects laugh.

He squeezes harder and harder, until it's painful. I try to pry his fingers off my body. I feel my legs tingling, as if they're falling asleep. The tingling reaches a point that it is painful. The tingle spreads up, my body going limp. My eyelids feel heavy, so I shut them.

Chapter 2

Emalie woke up to her beeping alarm clock. She groaned and slammed her fist on the snooze button repeatedly to try and shut the machine up.

"Shut up, already!", she snapped.

She snatched the cord out of the wall and threw it down on the floor. Emalieyanked the covers over her head, trying to get back to sleep.

"Ooh, Emalie! You're gonna get in trouble!", Kara said.

Emalie's little sister had always been a tattler. Being five years older, Emalie always picked on her ten-year old sister. Emalie pulled the blankets from over her head and winced at the bright sunlight streaming through the open window. She lifted up her pillow and pulled out a red journal, and went to work sketching out her dream, then flung herself out of bed and stared around at the room Kara and her shared. They had one bed between the both of them. Her sister had the bottom two drawers of the four in the one dresser they shared.

"Emalie Maya Smith! Get down here this instant, or you're not getting any oatmeal!", her mother shouted up the stairs. Her mother was a hard working woman, who worked two jobs a day, making up for the fact that Emalie's father had left them.

Emalie thundered down the steps and hopped off the last one. She plopped into the chair to eat her now cold breakfast. Kara sat at the table, a smug smile firmly planted on her face, her milk chocolate eyes twinkling mischievously. The oatmeal looked like lumpy paste, grey and tasteless. There was a certain sliminess to it that you had to swallow more than once to get down. Some butter and cinnamon would spice this up, she thought. But being poor meant they only bought necessities. Washing down the remnants of her meal, she ran back upstairs to get dressed for school.

Emalie ran her hand along the wall of the hallway. There were plenty of cracks that her mother had tried to cover with a yucky mustard yellow paint. The house reeked for weeks. The walls didn't just contain cracks; they contained memories. A dark brown splotch on the wall brought another memory to the front of Emalie's mind.

Emalie and her sister had attempted to make her mother breakfast in bed for her birthday. Then, Kara tripped over the rug in the hall and the plates and cups went soaring. The cup of coffee had splashed all over the wall. Emalie giggled at the memory. A doodle of a girl dancing masked the corner of the wall. Another memory surfaced. Emalie's mother had bought a set of wash-off markers. Her mother had let Kara draw on the walls, then she would wipe it off. But one day, Kara got a hold of a permanent marker and drew on the wall. Her mother tried desperately to scrub it off, but it was there to stay. Emalie's mother hadn't bothered to cover it up yet.