Chapter 1: Chapter 1

I woke up on the forest floor, curled around myself, protecting my head and my heart from the horror that waited for me just outside the tree line. Every sound of twigs snapping, or blasts in the distance caused me to curl tighter into my self, until I made my self so small that I could barely breathe. Though I wasn't sure if it mattered whether or not I kept breathing. Everyone I ever knew and loved was dead, their bodies reduced to ash and smoke that plagued the night sky. I close my eyes tightly as I picture my father in the house where we have always lived, crying over the body of my mother as the roof began to cave. I see how he looked at me, with empty grey eyes. His eyes had always been full of emotion and joy. Every time my mother walked into the living room from the kitchen smiling at us, his eyes lit up like tiny grey flames filled with nothing but love and longing, his smile so big that the lines permanently marked his face, even as his world crumbled around him. He looked at me like his soul had left his still breathing body and followed mom into death, leaving me alone. As the smoke and fire rose around us, tears spilled down my cheeks like a River, never drying even for a moment. I pleaded and begged him to stand up, to stay with me, to live, but he just stared at me with his dead grey eyes, no longer warm like a flame, but cool like stones at the bank of the river that ran from the mountains in the distance and through the wilderness that surrounded our home, smooth and polished by frigid rushing water. He opened his mouth, the one that would never smile again, never kiss my mother's cheek or kiss me on the top of my head, and he spoke his last words. Run Dahlia, run and never look back.