Imprisoned

Chapter 1

Present Day.

“Welcome to the world, Princess Arianna of Graeline. My gift to you, pretty girl, is the gift of everlasting love. A love so strong, you’ll be chained to its darkest promises. The day you meet your soulmate, you’ll begin the fight to find the goodness within the world you’ll soon believe in.”

“Princess Arianna of Graeline, my gift to you, on your eighteenth birthday, is for you to discover both heaven and hell. Good luck.”

Gasping awake, I stare around the room, searching for the source of the nefarious laughter. Every night for weeks, I’ve been having the same dream—a night terror, really—of a curse cast upon me. The trouble is, I don’t know who the source is or why.

The words, the evil intent, haunts my every waking hour now. It’s all I think of, and when I try to speak to Mother or Papa about it, they brush me off. They tell me it’s only a harmless nightmare. Trouble is, tomorrow is my eighteenth birthday, and I’m no longer able to ignore the niggling feeling that this is the day I will get sucked into hell.

Sitting up, I toss my covers back and stand. Grabbing the robe off the bedpost that I hung it on the night before, I wrap it around my body as the morning chill from my open window invades my body. Every year on my birthday, ever since my tenth, the village of Cherish holds memorials for the lives lost on that day those long eight years ago.

We still have no ideas as to how or why the attack happened. Nor who was behind it. We just know that we lost dozens of lives, and our people still reel with the loss.

I’ve been locked down on the castle grounds ever since, and I believe now is the time for me to leave. To seek the answers we have yet to discover on our own.

“You had one again, didn’t you?” Callista asks from behind me. She’s the only one who openly discusses my dreams with me.

“They’re getting stronger. The images, the words. I can feel the devilry filter through my mind.” I turn to assess my confidante. I have no idea how old she is, but she appears my age, with long blonde hair and bright violet eyes. Her beauty is unmeasured.

“You must be careful these next few days," she warns. "With the mourning that will take place today, we do not know who could be here.”

Callista is my only true friend in the world; I trust her with my life, but I can’t do as she requests.

“I have to get out there. I have to find out what happened,” I tell her.

“You know exactly what happened, Ari. We watched it together. We stopped it together.” She swears she was only able to end the ensuing chaos because I lent her my strength. I’m far more skeptical.

“No. Something caused that mayhem and destruction. Something we haven’t been able to look into before, but we can now, Calli. We can search until whoever it is gets brought to justice. Our people deserve that.” Guilt has eaten at me for years because, perhaps, if we weren’t celebrating my birth, then we would have foreseen whoever it was coming after us.

Striding towards me, Calli puts her hands on my shoulders and shakes me. “You have to get that notion out of your head right now. It was never your fault. You are not to blame!”

Taking a deep breath, I try to find the same peace in her convictions, but I don’t buy into it. Whatever took place that day was aimed at me; I know it was.

“Knock, knock!” I hear Mother's chipper voice and place a finger over my lips, signaling to Callista. I don’t like discussing this in front of her.