Sapphire Maiden

The Thief

It's been hours and there is still no sign of the thief or of anything that could lead me to think who the thief could be. I decided to go to the castle's safe, where my crown was stolen from. I told my guards that I was leaving and started heading down there. As I made my way down there, I see a blood trail. It looks like the thief was injured by one of my guards before they got away. My guards were trained by the best and they make sure they don't go down without a fight. Judging by the amount of blood, it was a decent cut, but not too big of one that would kill the thief instantly. They must not be far if they are losing blood.

I look a little further down the hall and notice the blood leads to somewhere. My instincts instantly kick in and I start to follow the trail. Since I never got to spend time with my father, I couldn't learn survival skills from him. However, Irene took care of me since I was a child and she made sure I learned how to fight and survive from the best this country has to offer. She wouldn't let the prince, who would soon take over to become king and rule the kingdom, not know how to protect his country. Irene did everything she could for me, since my parents couldn't. Without Irene I would be nothing.

After, what seemed like a good solid five minutes, I end up at the back entrance of my castle.

"So this is where they got out," I say to myself while walking out the door. "They couldn't have gone far. They had to have stopped to patch up their wound."

As I'm walking further away from the castle, I notice that the blood trail stops. That's odd. There's no blood pile from them stopping and trying to fix their wound. In fact, there's no sign of them even stopping. There's no sign of anything. It's almost like they vanished into thin air.

"Where the hell could they have gone to?" I ask loud enough for me to hear. I stop at a tree and look around to see if anyone could be around.

I'm confused as hell right now.

Just as I am about to go back to the castle, an arrow suddenly flies past me and gets stuck in the tree. I look at the arrow and see it's an arrow with poison on it. So somebody wants me dead, huh?

That's not normal poison. That's poison that was homemade by someone who studies spells and death. By law, we banished them to the White Forest for the safety of our people, but there are outsiders who come in our kingdom and practice these illegal activities. The White Forest takes away the abilities of a human to function. People are driven insane and, as a result, they can't get out of the forest. They, eventually, die in there and are just left there. It's cruel, but it's execution for the prisoners who tried to harm the royals. Sometimes, it's gone to my parents' head.

The outsiders, however, come from other kingdom. Generally, they are banished from their kingdom, most likely from being criminals, so they cause more trouble in other kingdoms. don't just come here to practice, but they come here to use people as test subjects. When they find the right one, they try to get into the kingdom and assassinate the royals. There has been one attack and it damaged the kingdom greatly. Many lives were lost, including my father's.

I turn to look at the direction to where the arrow came from and see a figure with a white robe with yellow stitching on it. I take a look at the crest that is stitched in the front of the robe.

"Yellow stitching and and a yellow bird for your kingdom's crest," I started off. "I should've known it was you Adela."

Adela takes her hood off and looks at me with a smirk of pure evil.