Shattered Mirror [Rewriting]

Prologue

Corliss gazed listlessly at the laptop screen, her writer's block a thick brick wall between her and her creativity. The cursor flicked impatiently, urging her to carry on but the words necessary escaped her. This would be the fourth novel she'd started and failed to complete, the characters left to become nothing in the void of her imagination. Sometimes she would imagine 'The Forgotten' lining up in her head, chanting and calling to be released from their eternal prisons. She could almost feel their sense of betrayal at the hands of their creator, some characters far more verbal than others.

"It's not my fault," the girl muttered to herself as she snapped the laptop shut and sat back in her chair, trying to shake the spike of terror that crawled up her spine, "not really." She had no idea who she was trying to convince and why but it felt right saying it aloud. It wasn't as if the characters were real in any sense. They couldn't attack her in the dead of the night when she was least expecting it. With a sigh of desperation at her own runaway imagination, Corliss rose from her chair and flopped into her bed, pulling the covers to her chin. Maybe tomorrow would hold some new inspiration for her other than the slightly crazy imaginings she was having of her characters tearing her apart. If only Corliss could channel some of those emotions and ideas into a story she could finish... As Fate would have it though, her dreams were useless in providing her the breakthrough she sought and she woke the next morning feeling as dull as she had the night before. It was to her great disappointment that she came to the conclusion: nothing about her current story, or any of her others for that matter, was managing to catch her attention anymore. The same depressing end she'd come to before she moved on to what her friends called 'greener pastures'.

What the writer didn't know though as she dragged the unfinished novel to the bin on her laptop was that some of those characters were fed-up with their shackles and were ready to break free. Yes, some of her favourite characters had decided to come back from the story graveyard in her mind. And some with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance.