Young Writers Society

Here is my biblical reference for this story. (There is one for nearly all of them.) It's from Job in the old testament:

3:4 Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above,

neither let the light shine upon it.

3:5 Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell

upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.

*****

Chapter One: Death of a Hero

Dead. After eighty-five years of life, Gregory Arbor was dead. Some assumed that old age killed him. The obituary column hadn’t mentioned the cause of death, and most found this peculiar after the initial shock wore off. Like the brain-washed drones of the government they were always accused of being, they didn’t question how he died, and went on with their lives leaving other more daring souls to wonder. Some of those more daring souls, in order to find something to argue over, thought that there had been a government conspiracy to cover up Arbor’s murder. This was not a common or popular theory for many reasons. One being that most people were afraid of what Arbor’s death could mean in such a risky political situation. Another reason was simply public fear of them being attacked next. After all, Gregory had always been a popular figure and no one who had lived in the past ten years had truly hated this kind, old war hero.

The only ones who would ever have dared to challenge such a man were the Veenoils, but they had all been dispatched a decade before so, in order to keep themselves from believing what they already knew to be true as people often do, they told themselves that there was nothing odd about Arbor’s death. He was still an important person in all of their lives, and the people were all deeply affected despite their deliberate denial. After his death, there was a general consensus between most people that all life would soon end and the Earth would stop spinning. However, the people moved on as they always do after a tragic death. They continued their lives. Odd, isn’t it how quickly one recovers when joy is before us? The fact that Gregory was killed just two days before the festival to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the defeat of the Veenoils, who he had helped kill was odd as well. Odd, indeed.

*****

Trilamor was a word that brought feelings of pride in the magical world. Even if their world was hidden from normal humans, they were still overwhelmed with joy at the thought that they were superior. Places like Trilamor, a city hidden deep in the Appalachian Mountains, are marks of that superiority, marks of a once brilliant civilization that was destroyed by prejudice. There were other things that lent to the destruction of magical dominance, such as their own hatred of each other, but the main thing was humans’ hatred of them.

In fear, a much more advanced and dominant civilization buried itself from those who had killed its people and burned its leaders leaving only small remnants of the fact that it existed at all. The humans forgot. They forgot all of the trouble they had caused. They told themselves that those people had not really been witches, but were simply innocent victims, but magical beings could not forget or tell themselves that something else had happened. The damage was too deep for them to let go.

Neither hiding nor forgetting took away what had happened though. Some things cannot be forgotten, like elves. Once you’ve seen a pointy-eared Queeblah elf, you never forget the experience. Some things cannot be hidden from, like humans. Humans will keep searching for the supernatural and the unusual even if they don't know quite what they are searching for. If you are what the humans are searching for, they will find you or spend their entire life and savings trying.

Sometimes, when a group of witches made enough mistakes or a group of humans remembered enough, there were more killings or things leaked out. The ones who looked back on them didn't take them seriously though. There was an odd increase in these instances in the seventeenth century. No one believed that Parris had known what he was talking about (sometimes he hadn’t), but that was what they wanted to believe when they looked back on the happenings in Salem in 1692. No one wanted to believe that the “frisky” camel that was cavorting around Edinburgh in January 1659 was that peculiar, but it was. Sadly, it is unlikely that the damage that has been done, forgotten or otherwise, will ever be repaired. This is partly because of both group’s precious pride and partly because the wizards have other vendettas to settle, and these were vendettas that run just as deep.

*****

A.N. - I apologize about it being kind of short, but I promise that the chaps will get insanely long later on. I hope that you Scots liked the Edinburgh camel reference (that's classic). This title is cliche (I know), but I was having writer's block when I came up with it.

I did a little revising, changed some of the tenses, and edited a few of the sentences. I will tell more about Parris later in the story. That's about all I can say on that matter.

I hope that I didn't lose anyone in the references. I also hope that someone, ANYONE, will post about this story. I'm so unloved.