Abaddon

Prologue

A/N heya this story has been an idea for ages. I mean ages. Like since last year so I told myself I would just publish the prologue because that was the most difficult thing to feel like I got right. I just have the rest of the story to formulate.

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1832

If we can't have it no one else can, it has been ours for generations. That was our logic behind our actions. It was beautiful to watch. It drew us in along with the surrounding air. The myriad of oranges and yellows licked and caressed the trunks which stretched up to the sky polluting with air with a grey hue of smoke. It was beautiful to watch when you didn't think about the damage it was causing. It was warming and inviting. I couldn't resist. It was alluring and misleading until it turned around and started chasing us and catching up.

It was their idea that we set it alight. I was a follower in it all. Ava and Caleb promised we would all be alright. They said everything will be better once we lost everything, that we could just start again with a clean slate. I don't think they included us losing ourselves in that everything though. We ran but I couldn't get past the property line in time before Noah and Klaus were engulfed. I was too slow to run alongside them. They were nothing but screaming shadows in the flames to me.

My feet hurt from running and my legs burned but not from the flames which kept on reaching out. I had to keep running. We all did. Adrenalin built up in all of us pushing us further towards life and away from the fire and the end.

It was futile.

I wasn't slow though, the flames were too fast for me. The heat of the flames burnt us because we underestimated its power, it was teaching us a lesson. It clouded our judgement and took the opportunity to take advantage.

If we couldn't have it, no one could. That was what father had said when he thought we had all left the room. We took it out of context and way too far. I was the one to pour the oil. Klaus didn't trust me to start the fire like the rest of my siblings. Caleb planned it out, how it would start. Where it would start, how it would end and which way we would run to escape because the fire would go a different way. I was the one to pour the oil the way we ran, I was confused and Caleb left me to it. I was the reason we burned but they never caught on. They thought it was the fire and the forest. Unpredictable and wild.

The flames grew and the air became sparse. It was now stroking the highest leaves and the smoke went up into the atmosphere covering the town with a blanket of smoke. Men and women from the town were starting to wake at the roaring and the crackling of the burning Greenacre forest. We weren't just about to give up our land for the trees to be cut down for the houses which would be built. But then again burning them was indirectly giving them what they wanted. By now, no amount of effort from the townspeople to extinguish the fire was going to be successful. They just had to wait it out now.

The first flame reached out to my right arm experimentally testing its grasp. Leaving the smell of singed hair and burnt fabric as a result. The second time the fire, more confidently grabbed my body. Swallowing me whole and blinding my vision to darkness.

Waking up in the forest with flawless skin and no burns was weird. I thought it was a dream until my brothers and sister were lying around me over the property line. The forest was black and ash was falling making it look like dirty snow. Their peaceful expressions unrecognizable behind the scorched faces. I couldn't even tell who was who. They made it over the line but fire doesn't stop for anyone.

I was untouched but I know that the fire got me. I looked down and there I lay on the forest floor. Mauled and mangled, a face of pain and suffering. I was the guilty one. I am the reason their plan failed. You could read it all over what was left of my face.

"Noah! Klaus! Ava! Are you here?" I yelled turning around hoping to see them flawless and alive away from their remains but no one showed. "Caleb! Why aren't you here?! I'm Sorry! Come back!" No response. 

I ran away, back to the house away from my dead siblings and my remains. Mother and father cried as the sheriff broke the news of the damage and deaths to them. Townsfolk stood at the gates to see what had actually happened. As a goodwill gesture, I heard the sheriff say the lands would remain ours. Our plan had worked! but at the expense of five young people

"Mother?" I spoke cautiously. Her eye flew up, filled with fear and I felt myself become stronger and more alert.

"Are you sure they're all dead!" She wailed, backing away from me as she fell into father's arms. The sheriff nodded in confirmation and offered his condolences. "All my babies are dead!" When her eyes locked on me she began to mutter in comprehensive words and her body started to shake violently yet her eyes didn't break eye contact with mine.

"Who on earth are you talking to?" My father exclaimed to her. His emotions shielded. "We are the last of the Goodearls. Silas is dead, along with the rest." Couldn't he see me?

I went to correct her when two men rode up the pathway with a wagon. On that wagon lay our bodies. Why was I alone? Why hadn't they stayed by my side? Why am I the only one still here when my body lay there charred?

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2018

My soldiers stood tall, evenly spaced. Over the years they have grown to be stronger, as have I. Some have been scarred by lovers over time, carving messages of eternal love into them. Nothing is eternal, except perhaps my existence and that of these trees I am responsible for. Protected by me, in return they protect me. Un-moving, forever loyal to the ground they sit in. They are my family, my company. They help me feed off fear, add to the atmosphere. They do as I say.

My home has fallen into disrepair. No one has moved in despite the fact it has been selling for 5 years. I have that to be responsible for but one family has not cared for my efforts to push them away. Even the locals could not keep them away. Over a century of my haunting to keep Abaddon mine.

I am trapped in between. I am a monster, a ghost. According to the town, I perished in the Abaddon fire of 1832. Our names are carved on graves in the family plot of the cemetery. So long has passed the names are barely legible but every year on the anniversary of the fire I take the trip to the Abaddon property line and pay my respects and grieve. Not to myself but to my parents and siblings who failed to join me in residing in the in between; I was forced to live a life of death and a death of not being able to live...

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So that was the prologue... hope you enjoyed it :) x