^_^ There aren't huge differences between the revised version and the original, read note at the bottom for explanation. (p.s. Bear is now a boar. So yeah, old readers should read this and save me from wrecking the story with my alterations).
Apparently, the man who said ‘you are what you choose to be’ was a liar. A really horrible liar who took joy in making innocent little children believe that they could choose their own destiny and be whoever they wanted to be. If he’s still alive, someone should help him realize the error of his ways. It will start like this: “Sir, since you can choose your destiny, why don’t you decide you’re going to live while me and my knife decide you’re going to die, and see who’s will is stronger.”
Staring at the words she’d just written, Yazra emitted a cry in frustration, realizing the immoral direction her thoughts had taken. “Why is it so hard to be good?” she wailed. “I haven’t even written a page and it’s already corrupted!”
As if he’d made a comment, Yazra turned to Dr. Halon and sighed. “Don’t lie to me, doctor. You didn’t believe that ‘you can do and be anything you set your mind to’ crap either. Thanks for the journal though—so generous of you. Which reminds me…”
Yazra tucked her new journal into a pocket hidden in the many folds of her multiple shirts and stood, pushing back the thick, wild, brown curls that framed her thin face. She went to lean over the doctor where he slumped in his chair and gave him a warm, flirtatious smile. The irony made her vivid green eyes sparkle, but she sobered quickly. She reached into his cloak and retrieved his purse, doing a quick search before she standing up and slipping her spoils into various hidden folds in her shirts. He’d never notice them missing, he was dead after all.
She looked one last time at her handiwork, wondering if anyone would believe he’d committed suicide. She was sure there would be at least a few people who were happy to see the doctor gone; she highly doubted she was the first girl he’d tried to force himself on. Remembering the feel of his warm breath on her neck and his hands on her hips, she shivered violently. “You brought this on yourself,” she said quietly, wishing she felt something stronger than indifference for her actions.
Hearing someone outside, she quickly left the doctor’s office and hurried upstairs. From the attic she’d be able to climb up unto the roof and make her getaway. By the time Mr. Maybell, the owner of the tavern down the street, served her the dinner the kind doctor’s purse had provided for her, she’d completely put the afternoon’s sins behind her.
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The man who gave me this journal is dead, mainly because I killed him. I’ve never kept a journal before, but then again I’ve never killed anyone either. Not that I know of anyways. I’m pretty sure fat, greasy old men don’t die just because you stab them in the leg, right?
This is probably a bad way to start, but these days it seems everything I do is bad, so it will have to do. It shouldn’t matter. Everyone I’ve talked to says journals are for two things: keeping a record and expressing your true feelings. But I think from now on I will call this my diary. I prefer the letter ‘d’. Which is sad in itself, since ‘d’ happens to be the first letter in the words death, destruction, doom, depression, drought, decapitation, disease, despicable, dread and… well you get the point. I can’t even think of a single good word that starts with ‘d’, though I’m sure they exist. That’s just how my mind works.
I blame my parents.
My mother was a witch, and not just any witch: The Dread Witch herself. She got her powers by eating the rotted heart of a holy man and bathing in his blood. I kid you not. She used to be a healer, actually. I never found out why she decided to become a witch, she always said it was just in her nature.
She had quite a reputation, my mother. She dwelled, like all witches must, in an abandoned shack in the middle of a forest. From there she sold curses, hexes, poisons, and the like, only occasionally (thank the Creator), leaving to lay waste upon and torment some innocent people. She taught me everything she knew, which wasn’t so bad, since a lot of the things I learned are very useful, like which plants are poisonous and how to identify a spell.
The part where she tried to get me to eat a holy man’s heart? Not so much. I can’t count the number of times she spilled some horrible concoction on me and told me the only way to get it off was to bathe in a holy man’s blood. Or the times she tried to disguise a rotting heart with vegetables. I wish I could say I hated her for it, but she really was just doing what she thought was best for me.
I also wish I could say I was scarred by the horror of it all, but we had so many hearts in jars and blood in buckets…well you just get used to it. Just like normal kids grow up used to dolls and mud cakes. I know all about mud cakes: mix the with poison, coat them in special potion twenty-three, and when it is finished cooking it will look and smell like the tastiest pie you’ve ever seen.
I went off pies at an early age.
Yazra heard a twig snap somewhere so she silently shut the journal and tucked it into her bag, her free hand simultaneously sliding towards her boot knife. Time slipped by, and only the sounds of the forest filled her ears. The maples waved at her in a slight breeze and the deep brown of the ground calmed her. She settled back against the large maple tree and let out a sigh. She’d half hoped it had been someone… but no. She had made up her mind: she’d live alone from now on. No more trouble.
Seeing that the sky was darkening, she decided it was about time to settle in for the night. It wasn’t hard; she just climbed up the tree she’d been sitting against, found herself a nice sturdy branch, and lay down, using her bag as a pillow. It was an odd way to sleep, but she’d grown up in a forest and as her mother had often told her: “The forest takes care of it’s own, Yazra. You trust it to take care of you and it will.”
So far her mother had never been wrong, not once. Which was just another fact that added to the list of reasons why she was doomed. Her mother had also told her being a witch was in her blood.
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As horrible as she seems, my mother was actually a very good parent to me, and very loving. I know because she never let me play with the potions, because she’d take me on walks through the forest and teach me everything she knew, because she never hit me, because when I didn’t come home at night she would always find me. If you just closed your eyes for the whole ‘witch’ part, she was like any other mother, really. Which I guess is why it’s so hard to break free of my parents: they were bad people, but they were loving parents.
I guess the real question people would ask is: How, if I was raised in such a twisted environment, can I tell that what my parents did was wrong? Until my mother died, I never set foot outside the forest. I started to gain a conscience watching people who came into the forest and who came to see my mother. Their tension and fear was a mystery to me, since my mother was always kind. I slowly began to realize that there was something I wasn’t seeing. And then my mother told me about the birds and the bees. And I’m not talking about the way of a man with a woman. It went like this:
“Yazra, you’re six now and old enough that I think you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you,” she’d said, sitting me on her lap. “In this world, there are birds, and there are bees. The bees are every day people like the ones who come and see me here. They live normal lives, all bunched together like bees in a hive. Wasting their lives, trapped in a never-ending cycle. They work and work, slaving away mindlessly, eager to please a queen who cares nothing for them, and then they die.” It occurred to me that my mother wasn’t talking about the King, but rather a greater being that she blamed for man’s pitiful existence. “But there are always more of them, because even though she knows their lives are pointless, she keeps giving birth to more, maybe out of a cruel belief that somehow they are happy. But they aren’t, my love. They just think they are.”
As she told me this, the hand she used to stroke my head seemed to get heavier and heavier. She had that tight voice she only ever used when she rambled about thinks she disliked. Namely people. But I didn’t need to stop her from rambling; she came back to herself and continued cheerily.
“And then, there are birds, Yazra. Beautiful birds that soar free, slave to no one. They know that the bees live pointless lives and that to the bees freedom and happiness are nothing but illusions. These birds start off trying to help the bees because they are winged brothers, but the bees are so blind and stupid they only fear the birds and their ways. And so the birds give up on the bees, and decide to forget they were ever winged brethren. Those birds, Yazra, are like you, your father, and I.” I liked the idea of being a bird, I was six after all. “And sometimes, we birds lash out at the bees because their ignorance frustrates us so much, but it doesn’t matter because their lives are meaningless.” This was where she started to lose me a little, because I had remembered a woman once coming to my mother with her son; if their lives were so meaningless, why had the woman guarded her son so protectively?
“But we birds are fewer than the bees, and this is what you really have to understand, Yazra. Alone, the bees are weak and hopeless creatures, but sometimes their fear drives them to unite and they kill the birds out of mindless fear. That is why birds must fly high and away from the bees.”
I soon came to understand that the reason my mother hid me away when people came to her was to protect me, because she feared that if ever the ‘bees’ united against her, they would hurt me too. Though really, I wasn’t worried. Either because at eight, I’d seen my mother crush a group of angry villagers who’d dared to advance on our home, or because my mother had raised me to accept death as a natural part of life, especially when assisted by such things as poison.
My father, for his part, believed that the world was filled with only two kinds of people: wolves, and rabbits. To illustrate this point, he once brought me a snow-white rabbit to keep as a pet. My mother made it into a stew. Rabbits, it turned out, existed only for the sake of satisfying the hunger of wolves.
Where my mother allowed her knowledge and (twisted) wisdom about nature and witchcraft to settle within me over time so that I would never be unable to care for myself, my father believed in shock therapy. When I was fourteen he took me out into the world and taught me everything I needed to know about how to survive in the real world, preferably while destroying it.
Yazra looked up from her diary; the forest had suddenly become very quiet, which she knew was a sign something was wrong. It seemed as if the whole forest had become a silent and frozen painting, yet a tenseness made it feel as if it was simply holding in it’s breath. Suddenly, a loud and angry roar erupted from the woods, waking the still forest and sending dozens of birds into sudden, panicked flight. Yazra knew the animal to be a boar, just as she knew she wouldn’t be able to outrun said boar if it was on some kind of rampage. She quickly packed up the roots she had dug up for breakfast along with her diary and got to her feet. The best thing to do was get off the ground and stay there until the boar was gone.
Once again, a roar permeated through the woods, but this time Yazra heard agony. To her it was obvious that the boar was injured, which ensured it was extremely dangerous to be around. Finding herself walking quickly in the direction the sound had come from, Yazra realized it was just as obvious she wasn’t going to be able to sleep with a clear conscience unless she tried to help.
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Feedback questions
1) Did you find Yazra's mother's metaphor on the birds and the bees to be a bit long?
2) What scene, if any, did you find could benefit from more description?
3) What do you think of Yazra so far?
Comparative feedback questions (for old readers)
1) I got rid of her putting the book in her pants. Happy? =P
2) I also got rid of the scene with Toby. I figure I can work how she feels about kids into a scene later on. Yes?
3) Added some description. Not enough?
NOTE
The prologue didn't see like it needed much changing, but I am going over it none the less. I'll be posting it in four parts, each with it's own thread. I'm starting a 'Revision Update' list.
Update list: list of people I PM when I add a new part to DoaV.
Revision Update list: List of people I PM when I make noticeable changes to all sections labeled 'revised'. Essentially I won't be messing around with the originals and will leave them as they have been posted (minus grammar corrections). Parts with 'revised' in the name will be subject to possible scene changes and plot alterations as I receive input, suggestions and notice plot holes. Chapter One and the Prologue are the only chapters I expect to be revising in the near future, since once I get back on track with the rest of the novel I shall just forge onward and worry about changes later. Let me know if you want on this list, if not you won't get spammed when I post new revised versions or make major changes to already posted revised versions. ^_^
*hugs all her awesome readers and tells them to poke her if she has forgotten to add them to her friend list*
^_^ Keek!
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I'll try not to repeat any and, if I do, I'll only elaborate. 
