Sea of Embers

For Betrayal burns through her

I know your secrets by Liv Ash 

The image above is Denahi.

There is something Wrong With your Character if Opportunity Controls your Loyalty.

-Sean Simmons

"Happy birthday babygirl!"

My dad's smiling face greeted me as I opened my tired eyes. His newly shaven face reeked of his aftershave. It had to be an old one, noted that it smelled all the more potent the more it aged.

I searched my surroundings groggily... was this...?

No, this couldn't be right.

It was my sixteenth birthday... again. Only there sat my dad, brushing some of my crazy hair out of my face as I watched him. This wasn't happening... it couldn't have been.

Could it?

"Papa?" I murmured, although my voice broke and my throat, the little jerk, was severely dry. I cleared it before hesitantly adding, "Papa, you died."

He looked taken aback. "Died?"

I nodded. The slight friction of that simple movement cause my hair to frizz up and crackle with electricity. I shook my head a little, and smoothed down my hair, hoping to remove some of the frizz... but resulted in shocking myself instead.

"Oh, sweetheart it must have been a dream."

I nodded again, this time undoing all my hard work and frizzing the crap out of my hair. It was now to the point of no return.

"Yeah," I whispered real quiet, my eyes trained on the swirling designs etched into my cotton blanket, "a dream."

Was this the dream? Or was the last year of hell I experienced...? I had no clue as to what was real and what was not. All the heartache I had experienced, all the pain... it seemed awfully real to me. Never had I experienced a nightmare of that length, but at this moment I didn't know up from down, or forward from back.

In my distracted state, I almost did not feel his hands grab my arms and pull me up into a warm, fatherly embrace.

I sat there, stiff and unsure of what to do. No one had hugged me like this in years... I had forgotten what it felt like. I had forgotten what it was to trust someone... and trust them entirely.

Hot, wet tears welled up in the corners of my eyes, before spilling in fat drops down my face as I squeezed my eyes shut and hugged him in return. I heard a small chuckle of surprise come from him at my intensity, but I continued to hug him even harder.

"Papa," I murmured into his shoulder, my tears rolling off of my face and down his back, leaving a trail on his evergreen colored shirt.

"Dena," Papa chuckled my nickname into my hair, "It is your birthday! Be happy, you don't have to work today! We have your favorite breakfast in the kitchen and presents to open."

"Bacon?" I questioned, feeling excitement bubble up into my chest, my earlier pain shoved deep into the back of my mind. It could wait, if this was a dream, I was surely going to make it count for however long it lasted.

His face became gleeful, a big smile on his lips as he said,

"Only the entire pig!"

It was then that my belly decided to announce its presence with an enormous gurgle. The sound was loud enough to bounce off the walls of my sixteen year old designed room.