Trilogy Of Fallen Stars ~ Book 1: The Blinding

Chapter 1: Decaying Hopes

Credit to @DragonPower05 for the covers! And she made me three, which is why I've made them the chapter covers. Enjoy!

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The grass was greener in the other world, the trees were taller, the flowers thicker... The moonlight echoed in the other world. The stars would smile and tell tales, where here... The silence was unbearable.

Lyric knew it well, she'd lived here all her life. If only she could gain the courage to run... Past... The border.

It was that time of night when the daylight animals would be fast asleep, where the creatures of the night would be roaming the bright paradise of Earth. The Tames Mountains loomed in the distance, shadowing the lively night in a peaceful shadow. Well, not anymore, that world is dead to everything that knew it.

Over here there was no freedom. They say your life is yours, but to speak the truth, your life is owned by fate. Freedom is a distant luxury, here your life is chosen for you.

By the time your thirteen you've already been snatched from your homes and forced into a Testing Chamber. Here you will spend several months, being the subject of foul tests. Each generation of young are getting weaker, soon the human race will perish. They think they can destroy us, destroy the human race.

If you ask me, I think this was always a dying species. Our race was meant to die long ago, we've already poisoned our world. Now we were about to poison our world's twin.

Arudami is Earth's shadow, it is a magical world that lives inside ours. Sometimes the creatures down there get free, that's where all those myths come from. All those creatures in the fairy tales, those bedtime stories your parents used to tell you. They were all true.

Until we burnt them to the ground. The creatures used to live here too, used to roam our forests with the other animals. We started to hunt them... We did not stop until every single one of those creatures were dead and hanging on our walls.

And now we've paid the ultimate price. The curse of our race started six years ago, when I was seven years old. A seven year old girl going through the punishment that was caused by something that happened before I was even born.

By now pretty much all of our population was already gone, dead, forgotten. The other half were ill, suffering from insanity and madness. Soon they would be gone too. Then who was left? Just the thirteen year olds. And there were only seven of us left. We were the only ones left who had the immunity in our blood to repel the curse.

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Time was up. It was easy enough to say it, I mean.. We all knew it to be the truth. It was just the sheer shock, that we were all going to die.

And not next week, or tomorrow, or maybe next year. We were going to die, today.

I opened my eyes slowly, staring deep into the eyes of the Snatcher. It was time, and I was ready. But the other six teens chained to the wall beside me were not, I feared. They were too soft to be going through this...

"T-t-t-t-t-times u-up!" The Snatcher snickered.

He had the head of a hyena, or at least, something that resembled a hairless hyena. It had the body of an unidentifiable beast, the tail of a snake and the wicked claws of a bear. Whatever it was, it was freaky, and it was also known as the Snatcher.

I felt the heat of it's stare on my face, which was curtained by dark hair. I could smell the acidic stench of its breath, the wrenching reality of it's hideousness bright and clear in my mind.