Courting Tragedy

Courting Tragedy (14)

14

I was curled up in a chair later that evening, looking around the library Gage had showed me after I'd calmed down and gotten myself cleaned up. The room had a delightful smell that I always associated with libraries, and books lined the walls from the floor to the ceiling. There was a whole stack of books sitting on a small table next to my chair, and a thick, dusty volume sat in my lap, unopened. My thoughts were fully preoccupied with thinking about what Gage had said earlier in the bathroom.

He said he wanted to know what the feelings he had meant, and if I wasn't confused by that, the things he told me afterwards definitely finished the job.

Gage had told me that there was a killing in his country many years ago, and that it was well known because it was uncommon. The people killed had been lower class, working peasants, almost. Their bodies had been found brutally mutilated in their house, but the body of their only child, a daughter about 16, was never found. They didn't find any trace of her, and it still remained one of a few unsolved cases today.

There had been word, rumors mostly, whispered among the people of Wilea, the kingdom his family ruled, that the prophecy was being fulfilled. After hearing this, his family had scrambled to uncover the prophecy, long forgotten and dust-covered, in the Royal library. They were discouraged to find that indeed, the prophecy did seem to be put into action, and far earlier than anyone could have guessed.

The prophecy had been written only a hundred years before, by a very respected Protector called Valentine Nielsen. Called Valentine's Prevision, the prophecy fortold of the destroying of all evil and the restorement of Earth's natural purity.

Gage wrote it down for me, saying that he'd read or recited it so many times in the last year that he had it memorized. The paper was sitting on top of the book in my lap, and I stared at it blankly while my mind raced.

For a nation of lost souls

With tempers alight like hot coals

Comes along a tragedy to refresh

Shared torment teaches them how to mesh

A family torn apart by death,

Only one left with a living breath

Stolen by the one without a soul

She will be the one to achieve our goal

With a neverending light

Her feat will clear our sight

Her actions will destroy what she most desires

Her dreams set in neverending fires

Alas the world will be cleaned

The kingdom forever grateful

Her heart belongs to the one with eyes of good

On her 18th birthday she will be Queened.

In all honesty, the whole prophecy made my head hurt. All the 'her's almost drove me to insanity. I'd started taking it apart, one verse at a time, and my writing littered the paper, rushed and messy. I looked back at it again, my eyes skimming over the last paragraph. That was the part that bugged me the most.

Gage was convinced that I was the girl from this prophecy, but if it was, I was in for some scary stuff in the next few days. The prevision told that I would be crowned Queen on my 18th birthday if it was about me, and that was in five days. That meant that I'd have to save the world sometime between now and then.

I pondered, thinking about their sister and what she would think of this whole predicament. Gage and Logan had spent awhile telling me about her, to the point where I felt like I knew her. She was funny, bold, loud, agressive in a playful way. She was a lot like me, minus the disasterous past and suicidal tendencies.