“You did that. You got them killed.”




“N-no. It wasn’t my fault.”






“Yes, it was.”




“Stop. Please.”




“YOU KILLED THEM!”
I forced myself to open my eyes; to awake from the horror that was my mind. My phone rang. I raised my hand to my ear to answer but before I could say anything Talen’s overprotective mother voice was in my head.



“Rouge, what is going on? Your heart rate spiked. What happened? Are you okay?”



“Talen, I’m fine. It was just a nightmare.”



“Tell me.”



“It was about the Sanders family,” I lied.



“Rouge, we talked about this. You can’t save everyone.” His voice comforted me but also made me want to unhook the wires that connected me to him.



“It’s my job to protect everyone and they still were taken,” I said, my voice still full of regret.
I thought back to my very first mêlée. People from a small village were being taken by enormous bird like creatures that my nemesis, Mal, had created. I was moving everyone under the church building and destroy the creatures. I had ensure, if not for them, for me, that these people were safe. Most everyone was safe, until I saw that foul creature taking away the ten year old boy of the Sanders family. His parents under the church, drowning in fear and sorrow for him. I hurdled myself directly into the side of the creature. It shrieked and soared higher, so high that we were above the cloud bank, I yelled, a fierce battle cry, drawing my bow back and letting the arrow sail into the heart of the beast. It began to fall and I was already falling with it, holding the hand of the boy, lodged in the creature’s mouth, never to be let free. The ground got closer and closer… I cringed.


“Focus on the people who lived, Rouge. You are their hero.”


“I am going to get Mal.”


“You are, indeed.”
The thought of him made me so hateful that I flew to the top of a tree and sped straight back down to the ground, breaking every branch with my bow held out in front of me on the way down, landing back on my feet.



I sighed and looked around, letting the familiar sent of pine needles and sweet sap soak in. The ground was moist and soft. Browned needles spread all over the earth around me, thickest piles at the base of each tree. Sun light streamed in all around me from the gaps in the branches that had been sowed together by nature. It was beautiful. And silent. No animals, wind, nothing.


“Talen—“


“Wait,” he snapped out of mother mode, “I have detected movement to the east of you.”


“How far?”


“Close, very close.”
I stopped, listened. Silent. I listened harder. A twig snapped to the right of me. Instantly my bow was loaded and aimed. Nothing.


“Rouge, there is someone right there.” Talen’s tone was serious and eerie.
There was the call of a strange bird; anther twig snapped.



“Oh my, how you have grown,” a shadowy voice said behind me. As I whipped around, my arrow left my bow.