Chapter 1

I don't dare move a muscle. If I were to even move an inch, then he would surely see or hear me. I watch him from up above in the trees. I look down at his stock figure, his well build muscles from all the years of hunting. His slender, pointed ears twitch at ever sound, listening for me.
His hazel eyes scan the perimeter again, knowing that I had been through this part of the woods, but still not knowing where I was hiding.
He looks around once more, then seems to have given up. He moves foward, out of my line of vision, hidden by the branches below me.
I listen with my pointed ears which matched his. They twitched as they hear his footsteps gradually become silent as he walks farther and farther away. He must be a few miles away, because my ears can only hear up to 10 miles away. I take in a deep breath and sigh in relief.
"Found you." I yelp and almost fall out of the tree. His roaring of a laugh is heard directly behind me.
I spin gracefully around and smack him roughly on the arm.
"Ow! Cara!" He yells, caressing his, now, sore arm.
"You do that again and I will banish you from the kingdom!" I say, looking into his hazel eyes, which are now shining in amusement.
"Right. Well The Queen has asked for your presence at once and I was sent to get you, but you were nowhere in sight. But, here you are." He says, extending his arms while still balancing with ease on the branch."Right," I say sarcastically. "Well Knight Derek, lead the way to the castle."
"Of course Princess Cara." Derek says in the same tone I had used.
He jumps off the tree first, landing several feet below with great ease. I follow his example, but show off by doing a flip in the middle of my fall.
"Show off." Derek says with a smirk, then walks off towards the trail that leads back to the castle. Our home.
"Hurry now Princess, we wouldn't want you to get lost, now would we?" Derek asks in a teasing tone.
Derek has been my best friend since we were practically born. We were always together. Our mothers even imagine us marrying in the future. But that won't happen for a while, I'm only fifteen years of age.
But Derek has always been there for me. Always the brave and heroic one. That is why he graduated and became a knight at the early age of 12. It's been 5 years and he is still a knight. But he still acts as my best friend. He's somewhat my own personal knight, although of course I would never say that aloud.
"Cara, you're spacing out again." Derek says with a chuckle.
I roll my eyes but make no comment. I continue to walk behind him, his right hand laying on the hilt of his sword.
"Derek, you know I don't need any protcetion. I have this in case of emegencies." I say, shouldering the bow and quiver that are slung across my shoulder. The quiver is filled with twelve well balanced arrows.
"Yes Princess, but still...I wouldn't want anything to happen to you." Derek says, his voice almost in a whisper.
Sometimes I don't know what my feelings are for Derek. When he says stuff like that, it's weird. I know I'm going to marry him in the future. But do I really want that?
I mean, yeah I could handle living with him for the rest of my life. But do I really love him? He always makes me happy and always makes me smile when I'm sad. Is that love? What is love anyways? Everyone always talks about it, but what is it really?
I continue to walk behind Derek as we reach the end of the woods and the beginning of our villiage. Many man-made houses lay on both sides.
"Princess," An old woman says as she crosses my path, bowing her head so as not to look at me in the eyes.
"Hello," I say in a kind voice, so as not to frighten her.
The old woman looks up and smiles and soon leaves with a wave of her bony hands.
"We need to hurry. Because of your little hiding game, we might be late to the meeting The Queen is holding." Derek says.
He grabs my hand and pulls me along. It is a good thing today I desided to wear leather green pants and a white shirt instead of my usual white dress. If I had been wearing it, I would have probably torn it by now.
Derek leads us to the big wooden door, which are open. We run past many people in the courtyard. We run into the castle, down the corridors, and into the ballroom.
There, standing in the middle of the room are three people. The woman that turns first has long black hair and green as grass eyes. Her red lips turn into a smile as she looks at us.
"Well hello daughter." My mother says.
The second woman to turn around has short brown hair like Derek's and chocolate brown eyes. She smiles at us, opens her mouth and says, "Hello Princess," She turns to Derek, "Son."
The third to turn around is a guy. He is about Derek's age. He has short blonde hair and gleaming blue eyes. In the light of the ballroom, his skin looks ghost white. His ears, are as pointed as Derek's and mine, and they just twitched just like ours when we hear sounds.
"Derek, Cara, I would like you to meet Prince Richard. He is from the far East." My mother says.
There are four major castles. One in the East, West, South, or North. Our castle is located to the North.
"It's a pleasure to meet you." I say, awkwardly curtsying in my leather pants.
"The pleasure is all mine." Prince Richard says, kneeling to the ground in a respectful manner.
I turn to Derek, who has yet to introduce himself. Derek is standing next to me, but is tense. Unlike before where he was joking around and relaxed.
"It's a pleasure to meet you too Sir Derek." Prince Richard says, nodding at Derek.
Derek continues to stare at Prince Richard, as if he could not believe he was here. Which, I could not believe either.
"I'm sorry Prince Richard about my son, he is just un shock." Derek's mother, Lady Claire, said.
"Lady Claire, it's alright. We're all here for Cara anyways, right?" Prince Richard says, turning his gaze back to me.
"What do you mean everyone is here for me?" I ask, looking at Lady Claire's and The Queen's faces.
"You see Cara," My mother says, "Lady Claire and Derek have to move to the far South to help with the war that is ragging over there. And since you are already turning sixteen in two weeks, we need you to marry."
"Wait, what?" I ask.
I've never heard of such a thing. I thought everyone married at the age of twenty-one, when you're old enough to be on your own.
"I would have asked Derek to be your soon-to-be husband, but it seems he won't be around for much longer. So I have asked Prince Richard to come and marry you since his kingdom is so close." My mother says, as if this is the most normal thing anyone could hear.
"But mother," I plead, "I have yet to turn twenty-one."
"Yes, yes, but when you're royalty you have to be married by the age of sixteen."
"I have never heard of that rule." I complain.
It's not that I would mind be married to a handsome prince like Prince Richard, but it is a little scary. I barely know him and already he's going to be my husband? I wouldn't mind marrying Derek at this age.
Derek...Oh no. If I don't marry him, then will he go off to the South and marry some other girl? He is already seventeen, he can wait four years to marry a girl, if he really loves her.
"I-I have to go," I say, tears threatening to spill, just by the thought of me marrying someone besides Derek and him marrying someone besides me.
I turn around and run out of the ballroom, leaving a stunned Lady Claire, a confused Prince Richard, a taken aback mother, and a steaming Derek.
I run up the stairs towards my room. I slam the wooden door behind me and slide down, my back pressed again it.
How did this happen? I couldn't just go and marry someone, I thought.And if I did, what would Derek do? Is this aching in my heart called love? Is the aching caused by the though of Derek and I never being together? Or just the thought of me marrying a stranger?
Tears slid down my cheeks as I kept seeing an image of an older Derek. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the door, watching the image roll in my head. He's twenty-one years old in his knight uniform. He isn't wearing the helmet and his sword is nowhere in sight. Which only means one thing. He's about to be wed. Knights can never wear their uniform, without their helmet and their swords, it has been an unwritten law for the past three centuries.
Doors on the other side of the room, bang open. Here comes a girl with long legs and a beautiful figure. But a sheet of silky cloth covers her face. She walks elegantly towards Derek, who has a happy grin plastered on his face.
I want to yell at him to stop. To not go through with any of this. But my voice fails me. And soon the two couple are being wed. I watch, waiting to see the brides face. Derek picks up the brides vail ever so slowly...and
My eyes snap open.
I-I was dreaming? When did I fall asleep, I questioned in my head. And what did she look like?
Before I had a chance to see the bride, I awoken. I get up from my spot against the door. I open it silently and turn to look both ways to make sure no one was guarding my door.
As soon I see the coast is clear, I walk out and down the corridor, towards my younger sisters room. Needing something to take my mind off anything and everything tht had to do with marriage.

Chapter 2

I walk down the corridor until I made it to end of the hall, which held a single wooden door. Even as a child, I would decorate my door with my drawings, but my sister's door was bare. Nothing on it except for a few stains from her experiments that didn't go all too good.
I knock on the door and hear her soft voice shout, "Come in." I open the wooden door and see a girl with short blonde hair, moving around the room. Her blue eyes scanned the permimeter, as if searching for something.
"What are you looking for?" I ask.
Keighly, my little sister, looks up and smiles. "Some herbs. I'm making a potion that could potentially help us all."
Even at the age of nine, Keighly already practices magic, and she's quite good too. Keighly will either be found in her room making new concoctions, or in the kitchen eating away. But with her slim figure, you would never guess she ate more than anyone in the kingdom.
"Can I be in here with you?" I ask.
Keighly nods, her blue eyes trained on whatever she was doing at the moment. I walk fully into her room and close the door behind me. I walk to Keighly, until I'm standing by her side.
"So what kind of potion are you making?" I ask, looking down at her mixtures.
Some ingredients I recognize, others are still slightly foreign.
"I'm making a teleportation spell. For now I'm only going to make it go to the kitchen, but as soon as I master the potion. Then I will probably make it teleport somewhere farther away."
I nod, and continue looking down at Kieghly, but it still didn't take my mind fully away from the thoughts of Prince Richard and Derek.
"What's wrong?" Keighly asks suddenly, looking up from her work to stare into my eyes.
For the hundreth time, I notice how different we look. At first glance, you would never pair us as sisters. With my chocolate brown hair that curled naturally and yellow eyes, everyone calls cat eyes. My hourglass figure and tall height. While she had short hair that is so light, it can only be described as blonde, and her blue eyes that everyone calls even bluer than the Arabian Sea. Her stick figure and short height.
Our mother said our father, before he died, had blonde hair and blue eyes. She always compliments Keighly on her beauty and how she is the spitting image of our father. While, look like none of them. My mother says I look like her mother, but I don't believe her. I feel as if there is something else. I may have my mothers green eyes, but that is all. Maybe she's hiding something...something like-
"Cara, can you help me?" Keighly asks, breaking into my thoughts.
"Huh?" I turn to look down at her.
"Well I asked you what was wrong, you blanked out, and know I'm asking you if you want to help me." Keighly says, her voice patient and clam.
"Help you with what?" I ask, fully submerging from my previous thoughts.
"I want you to drink this," Keighly says, holding up a purple liquid potion.
I take the potion and drink it, nothing happening. I trust Keighly, she would never let me drink something that she might think is dangerous.
"Nothing." She says in disappointment.
Suddenly, a warm feeling begins to spread over me, starting from the middle of my back, to my whole body. The warm, tingling, feelings begins to intensify. The temperature turning from warm to increasingly hot.
"Keighly! Ow, ah!" I scream.
"Cara?" A voice asks, footsteps coming from the hallway.
"Derek, in here, something's wrong." Keighly yells frantically, tears beginning to well up in her eyes.
"It's burns! Help me!" I yell pleadingly.
I don't remember Derek or Prince Richard entering the room, but here they are, both by my side. I curl into Derek's chest, the scortching heat never subsiding. I squeeze my eyes shut, hoping to shut the pain out.
"Cara!" Derek yells frantically.
But even as he yells, his voice seems to be getting farther and farther away. Still, I don't dare open my eyes. The fire suddenly stops. Everything seems quiet, until I hear an annoyed voice yell, "Get out of the road!"
My eyes snap open to come face to face with a...thing

. It was shiny and blue, a person sat inside it. What is happening? I turn in a full cirlce and my eyes widen.
Where am

I?

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 26.01.2012

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Widmung:
To my friends that inspired me to become a writer. Ya'll know who you are.