The Protectors

Chapter 1

•Chapter 1•

I woke up screaming. Begging for him to run, because for some reason he couldn't see them. He didn't listen, or perhaps he couldn't hear. Yet I knew in my heart his fate. I was too late. Too late.

I've had the dream before. All of us have. The initiation process scars you in ways you've never known, torments you until it's clouded your thoughts and chilled your blood. But you stay in and battle through because only the bravest can finish, because only the bravest succeed. And get to become one of THEM.

My brother Uribe runs in. He must have heard my screams and known that I was having the nightmares again. It is more than kind the way my brother acts towards me. He hugs me until I stop crying. Which takes quite a while, by the way. Because the man was my father.

My mother left us when I was seven. She couldn't handle a family and work when our father died of an ambush by the Horrors. The attack left no survivors. The only thing that was left of my father was his pendant, a blue orb with a silver moon charm, the one that bound him and my mother for eternity. So, one day, she just... disappeared. Uribe has taken care of me ever since. We're all that we have left.

"It's okay Emity. It's okay. You're going to be fine. I won't let anything hurt you."

I eventually get over it. Tell myself it was just a dream. I know they're perfectly normal, that everyone gets them, that it's just the process of turning 16 and becoming one of the protectors of our city. They are anonymous, but everyone calls them "The Protectors". An it is the highest badge of honor to be one of them. Because few survive the initiation.

I never knew just how much becoming a Protector could end up changing the course of my life, or how it would be all I would have left to hold my sanity together.