Angels Born of Hell and Fire

[Part Two: Chapter One]

Sunlight filtered through the shear dark curtains, throwing water like shadows against the white walls. Outside the call of morning birds pierced my ears, drawing my conscious further from its dreamlike state. Dark lashes fluttered into awareness, revealing my light sensitive eyes to the bright morning glare. I blinked several times, not for the first time wondering why I was so much more sensitive to light than what seemed normal.

Though I was far from being considered normal.

Rising from the warm confines of my bed I went to look out the window to the view I had become so familiar with. Large, rocky mountains rose on either side, a deep valley spread out under me, sheltered and hidden by towering walls. It’s been a year today.

Briefly I wondered where all the time had gone. It didn’t feel like it should be a year already, yet at the same time I felt like I had always been here. This room had always been my own, I had always woken up to this view. Three hundred and sixty five days had gone by. It might as well have been years.

On this day, a year previous, I had been locked in a cage, taken away from my family and everyone I had known, and brought here to this mansion. At the time it had seemed so mysterious and ominous, every shadow posing a threat against me. The only thought in my head back then was how to get away and return to everything I had once known. I was so stupid.

I sighed, a long dreary thing, and decided I had better get ready before Savannah showed up at my door hounding me as to why I wasn’t already down eating breakfast. I wasn’t necessarily hungry, but I wouldn’t hear the end of it if I didn’t at least attempt to eat something. Ever since I had been imprisoned I rarely ate. Even now, after all this time the memory of that place was enough to turn my stomach.

A lot and yet nothing at all had happened since then.

For one, I had died. It was weird, knowing that I had actually died. The fact that my heart had legitimately stopped beating for a whole day before suddenly restarting itself was still something I found hard to believe. I honestly couldn’t remember any of it. There had been no white light, no wondering around without a body, just nothingness. No feeling, no sight, no sound: nothing. I couldn’t be sure if maybe it was just my mind blocking out what had happened, or if that really was what happened upon death- nothing.

It terrified me. To someone who was constantly in a field of emotion, who heard a conversation three rooms away, that nothingness was so foreign, so alien, I couldn’t even think about it without chills going down my spine. It was somewhere I never wanted to experience ever again. I would rather be sent back to those cages than ever return to that horrible abyss.

When I had finally woken back up, three days after the fact, it was to a room crowded with people, hovering around my bed and watching with expectant eyes. To say it had been sort of creepy was an understatement.

As it turned out Adam had sent Marie and Taylor in to take care of my lifeless body; ridding me of my torn and bloody clothes and basically making me look presentable before placing me back into my own bed. This also was pretty creepy to hear. It reminded me of what people did at funerals, where the corpse is dressed in their Sunday best, their hair neat and tidy, looking like they would spring up at any time. I had woken up with my hair perfectly braided and smelling freshly washed, my pajamas pressed and not even wrinkled. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed by all the people hovering over me crying I would have been pretty freaked out by it.

Either way it had been a bewildering night.

Taylor had been in charge of “watching my body” like it was going to get up and walk away while I was gone. Upon hearing this I apologized, confident that it could not have been pleasant spending three days with a dead body. At the time Taylor had laughed, saying that it was no big deal, but that girl had never been a very good liar. Even now I knew she refused to sleep in a room by herself at night.

After that night, Adam had disappeared for a while, which wasn’t surprising as he often did. Upon returning he had seemed fairly over joyed to see me walking around again like nothing happened. He was so glad his little experiment had been successful.

Personally, so was I. Despite how much I wished to be rid of the man, I hadn’t wanted to die. I still didn’t.

With deaf fingers I braided my dark hair, which had grown out to now fall mid-way down my spine. I did this action by feel, now used to the act. I didn’t have any mirrors in my room. In fact, I avoided mirrors like a plague, too afraid of what I might see if I ever dared to peer into one. I would rather not know. I hadn’t actually seen my own reflection for a very long time now.

Over the past year Jasper and I had settled into the roles designed for us. Jasper had been so distraught over my dying, so overall disturbed, that she had vowed to never do something to anger Adam again. So we had lived quietly, going day to day without thoughts of the world beyond the mansion. Gradually Adam allowed us to walk around on our own, no longer needing a guard at all times or our doors locked at night. Well, I was free to walk around, Jasper was always escorted by one of the three Guard members until she retired to her room, in which case there was still a soldier posted to keep watch at her door. This is was more for her protection than to make sure she wouldn’t run away. The ever precious Empress could not be harmed. This was something Adam and I agreed on.

The… programming… of my thoughts had not wavered over time. If anything the more into my role as ‘General Chaos’ I dove the stronger the compulsion became. I long ago decided to just allow it, as there was nothing else I could do. I was beginning to believe there was nothing I could ever do to disrupt the forces driving my life.

I reached an arm under my bed and pulled forth a small cardboard box: My box of secrets. Lifting the lid I pulled from it a mass of black torn fabric, the coarse threads stained darker in certain places. This was the jacket I had been wearing when I died. I had asked Taylor for it and she hadn’t wanted to give it to me but finally relented when I continued to press her for it.

I don’t exactly know why I had kept it, or any of the other objects hidden away in this box laying before me. There was the small leather folio that told of Jezebel and Marie which I had stolen from the library. There was also the dagger which had essentially killed me. That had been harder to get my hands on, taking me weeks before I managed to track down the weapon. Beneath that was a small piece of paper, on it where the names of my family members, scrawled there just in case I ever forgot.

It was surprising how easy it was to forget. The world outside this valley didn’t seem to exist, everything from before I had been here was nothing but a dream, a figment of my imagination. Or at least that was what Adam wished for us to believe. I had written down these names the day I had closed up this box to remind myself that I was still human. Or at some point I had been, now I wasn’t so certain any more. Maybe in a way that was why I kept this box. Here was the evidence that what had happened was real, it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t something that Adam had placed in my head; this was reality.

This was my own personal, fucked up reality.

There was a loud banging at my door, and the cranky barking voice of Savannah came from the other side. Quickly I shoved everything back into the box and pushed it back into its hidden space. I would probably pull it all out again to puzzle over later.

Opening the door I smiled at Savannah’s impatient look. Of course not everything about my life was so bad. I had managed to make some friends, wrapped up in all this madness. Despite our rocky beginnings Savannah had become someone I was fairly close to. She was still as harsh as ever, never giving me an inch to slack off or be lazy, but I now knew it was because she wanted me to do well. In her own special way the older girl had just been looking out for me.

“If you don’t hurry to eat you won’t have time before ShadowWalker comes to collect you,” Savannah said, dragging me down the hall.

“Yes, yes, I woke up late,” I said easily, accustomed to this sort of thing.

“Both you and the Empress are late this morning it seems,” she muttered and I looked up at her in surprise. Jasper was never late, for anything.

“Was she? That’s odd,” I said and Savannah shrugged.

“She’s been pretty busy planning this ball or whatever Adam’s cooked up,”

I grimaced, thinking about the subject of her words. A few weeks ago Adam had made a grand announcement about a party we were going to have. Now you have to realize that things like parties, or celebrations of any sort, did not happen here. Never. So the news that we were actually going to be holding a party was pretty big news. Everyone was extremely excited about it. Everyone but me and Savannah that is.

“Oh…. Right… party…” I mumbled and Savannah grunted an unenthusiastic response.

We entered the small dining room that was used just for the Guard members to hold their meals. This was also of course Jasper’s private dining room. At some point she decided that she was fed up always eating in the library or her room so Adam had this space set aside just for us. Two random soldiers stood on ‘door duty’, they saluted as Savannah and I walked in.

I had gotten used to this, and also had started taking over certain duties assigned to me. It had surprised me that there was actually quite a bit of paper work and such involved in running Adam’s army. It was now my own, and Jasper’s job to sort through it. Yeah, we we’re leaders of a giant army that was set to destroy all of humanity, and we still did paperwork. It sounded so dangerous didn’t it?

The scent of fried meat, eggs, and butter filled my nose as we entered the room. My stomach did the same little flip flop it always did at meal time as I prepared to force myself to eat.
Jasper waved her fork at me in greeting as I took the seat directly across from her. Beside her were the ever present figures of Peter, to her right, and Gabriel to her left. Both of them had already finished eating while Jasper was still hurriedly shoving food in her mouth. Over the year Jasper’s and Peter’s little ‘thing’ had turned into a full-fledged relationship. A carefully hidden relationship of course, the only people knowing about it would be me, Savannah, Gabriel and Taylor. Only when it was just that small group were they allowed to show their emotions, otherwise they were nothing more than master and servant.

Knowing Savannah’s dark eyes were on me I dutifully picked up a bread roll and bit into it. It was delicious of course and I knew the maids had been hard a work all morning to produce the delicate substance. The whole army was on carefully divided rations of course, but they ate well, the menu directed by Marie.

“’Morning General,” I lifted my gaze to see Peter’s grinning face.

“Mmm, morning,” I muttered as I chewed.

“You excited about your shadow training?”

He was talking about my training with ShadowWalker, tagged ‘shadow training’ by the soldiers. Jasper called it ‘ninja training’.

“Yeah I am actually. My goal is to be even better than you are at it,” I said with a grin.

Peter scoffed, “Good luck with that sweetheart.”

“She will,” Jasper said sipping her water.

Peter shot her a pained look, “You put so little faith in my abilities?”

“No, but I know she can beat you,” Jasper sent a wink across the table at me.

“Hey, that’s cheating,” Peter complained. He was talking about Jasper’s ‘ability’. They had
discovered it while I was still dead. Jasper could see the future.

“It’s not cheating, I’m just telling you what’s true,”

A few low chuckles were still going around the table when ShadowWalker entered the room.

“General, if you’re ready, its time to go,” He said after bowing his head respectively in Jasper’s direction.

“Yeah, let’s go,” I jumped up from my chair, having only eaten a roll and a piece of ham. I’m sure Savannah would shove something on me later to make up for it.

I waved at the people I called my friends, and went off gladly to my ninja training.

[End: Part Two Chapter One]