First off, anyone who was reading this story in the past will notice that the 25 chapters that were here have been deleted. I did this because I am revamping the entire thing. This is a story I started when I was 16 and now I'm twenty so I would say it really needed it. I will try to post chapters as often as I can, for now I'm only going to post the first two, just to give a taste of what I've changed. I will try to post two chapters a day if I can. We will see. Also the last time around there really wasn't much of a plot, it was a lot like the series, just filler. I am trying to change that this time around. Anyhow, read and review and let me know what you think ok guys?
Prologue
"Where in the bloody hell did I put that bag…" A young woman's voice emanated from a closet into the silent bedroom, inhabited only by a fuzzy little creature hiding in a cloth pouch on the bed. The eyes of the tiny fur ball watched curiously as a girl of about 17 emerged from the closet with a large duffel bag, spitting the dust out of her mouth as she patted off more of the stuff from her shoulder. "I found it Victor." She smiled at the large brown eyes of the furry animal named Victor as she turned to stare down the closet once more. Victor watched in silence as the girl sorted through the various articles of clothing, more often than not rolling up the item of inspection and placing it neatly inside the pack. When just about everything from the closet was inside the pack the girl moved on to a dresser in the corner. Here she opened a drawer and began to remove and place into the pack various other items, mostly of the undergarment type, as well as her new swimsuit.
She crossed the room back to the closet and pulled out a smaller black case. She took this back to the dresser and began to fill it with hygienic items, such as her toothbrush and toothpaste, small bits of makeup, two king-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, as well as a bar of organic soap. She stopped at her hairbrush and ran it through her shoulder-length wavy hair. It shined blood-red in the poor light of the small lamp in the corner. She added this to the items in the case and zipped it shut.
She left the room for a few minutes and returned with a load of various food stuffs. She packed these boxes and bags into yet another bag and looked around the room. "Only a few more things Victor and we'll be ready to go." She smiled again at the tiny creature hiding itself in the cloth pouch. Another set of eyes appeared then, slightly larger than the first. "Oh, Victoria, you're awake finally." She lightly patted the pouch and continued packing. Victor and Victoria watched in curious silence as the girl added a few random items from the room to her backpack. She placed an iPod and a few notebooks of plain drawing paper into it as well as pencils pens and an assortment of small knives. The final item was a rather large leather-bound book that looked positively ancient; she gave this a hug as she placed it gingerly into the bag.
She lowered the bags quietly out of her bedroom window to the ground just below. As this was happening Victor and Victoria crept into the light just outside of their safe little pouch. "You two need to get back in there." The girl scooped up the pair of Sugar gliders and placed them back into their pouch as she strapped it to her belt.
She then lowered herself to the ground below the window and awkwardly packed all of her bags toward a barn in the darkness. Even with the large bundle of items her form seemed lithe in the darkness and
she moved with an inhuman grace. She had always moved like that, a few people had said she should have been a dancer.
A few minutes later her shadow emerged from the barn towing a four-legged animal with long ears. They passed under the light on the outside of the barn and the donkey she was towing stopped momentarily. "Come on Jack, we've got to move quickly, I don't want to be caught." She rubbed the animal's neck lovingly and he moved forward with no more complaints. All of her packs were now strapped to a harness the animal wore as they slipped into the darkness of the nearby forest.
The group of three animals and one human moved quietly through the woods, the girl's semi-light mood of earlier having evaporated into an anxious determination like no other. There was no turning around now. This was the point of no return.
She had decided last week that it was time to leave. She couldn't take living there anymore. Her step father had made it quite clear in their argument that there wasn't anywhere else she could go. He would only hunt her down, and even if he didn't, she couldn't make the money to survive in this world. She had never worked before and she had no marketable skills. She made decent grades in high school but there was no way of being able to afford college and she had no idea of what she would major in anyway. Besides all of that, she was different. She wasn't a normal person; that she knew. There were things she could do that no one else could. Her real father was the same way. He told her when she was little that they were sort of like witches. She wasn't sure if that was true or if he just couldn't come up with a better explanation for a 5 year old to try to understand. The leather book was her "Book of Shadows" as he had called it. He said it was just a cool name and he liked it. He never let her mother know about it, it was hers to keep and she had done a good job since her father's death of not letting her mother know of its existence. It wasn't that her mother was a bad person, at least not while her father was alive. But after his death she went into this terrible fit of depression and ended up hooked on a lot of bad things, bad things that she could get for free when she married her supplier and made him the girl's step father.
"Kira, everything's gonna be fine when I marry Doug, you'll see. We'll be happy forever and ever." The girl mocked her mother's words as she walked through the woods. "She was too high to even know what she was saying; I'm surprised she even got my name right. Come on Jack, no stopping, we gotta keep going." Kira kept her pace going and went over in her head the reasons she was leaving, fortifying her resolve in this.
Kira was only 7 when her mother chosen to marry Doug, and the shock of moving from their nice little house they had shared with her loving father to Doug's nasty little trailer was horrible. It wouldn't have been so bad if Doug didn't match the trailer completely. He was a sweaty, greasy old pervert that was frequently drunk, high, or both with his buddies in the living room and yard. A couple of his friends really took a liking to Kira, and even at the age of 7 she knew that was a horrible thing. They often tried to get her to join them, to take pictures with or for them and to sit in their laps or hug them. She was lucky in that they were usually too stoned to catch her. She always ran straight to the woods and would hide in a
tree for hours until she could no longer hear them partying at the house. There were occasions when she would stay the entire night in one of those trees.
"Disgusting filth," Kira sneered as she stepped over a fallen tree and coaxed the donkey to follow suit.
It didn't take long for her once sweet mother to become just as filthy and horrible as Doug was. She didn't hate her mother; she pitied her more than anything. She tried to help her mother, and once she even got her to go to a rehab center. But when Doug found out they both received a horrible beating. Kira had finally decided there was no saving her mother; she was to the point now where she no longer wanted to be saved. But she wasn't going to allow herself to stay there; she would save herself even if she couldn't save her mother as well. She had been looking around in her father's book to see if there was anything there that could possibly help her, and she had found just the thing. She was only hoping for something to maybe make leaving easier or make it difficult if not impossible for Doug to find her when she left, but she found something that seemed better. In one section of the book there was a list of symbols which had special abilities. There was a rune by the name of Uris. It looked like an inverted angular U with one side longer than the other. This rune supposedly allowed one to travel. There was an accompanying set of instructions on how to find where one belonged.
She had decided upon finding this that she was going, and there was no stopping her.
Kira finally stopped in a bare patch of the woods that she had found the night before. She had already set up most of her supplies here; 5 white candles and some crystals she had bought in an occult bookstore in town. She tied the donkey to a stake in the center of her workspace, pulled the book from her bag and set about following the complicated directions.
About half an hour later she stood up and admired her work. She had drawn a rather large pentacle on the ground around the donkey, each point having its respective symbol inscribed in the dirt. She had all the various herbs, crystals and objects precisely where the diagram had said to put them. She made sure everything was ready and used her fingertip to dig the rune Uris into the earth in the center of the circle, being sure that it faced in the proper direction as specified by the book. She ran her finger through the shape and charged it by speaking its name out loud. She did this 3 times as the book told her to do. Kira picked up the book and patted the dozing donkey to her left. She read:
"By the power of the god and of the goddess and of the rune Uris, I pray thee take me away, I pray thee take me to my home, my one true home, to the world and land in which I belong."
She repeated this thrice, each time the world becoming just a bit fuzzier, as though she was staring at it through a sheet of water. She closed her eyes and held tightly to the book and the mane of the donkey beside her as a bright flash of light enveloped her vision of the dark forest. The last thought to go through her mind as she slipped into darkness was, "Gods, I hope this works…"