Marian's Story ~ When It Rains Red SnowFlakes (Part 1))

Prologue

The mercenaries, hundreds and thousands of them, gathered around the County of Trevor, restless and eager. They had all been hired by the neighboring kingdom to take down the outlying settlements of the City, and with a huge reward of gold and precious stones in sight, everyone was raring to go. The previous three skirmishes had proved to be grand success, with hardly any resistance, and they had robbed, killed, and slaughtered like gods in their own right. As the battle horn sounded, a strange nasal sound that slowly spread through the plain, the warriors hastily gathered up their blood-stained spears, the polished lancers, the kicked, rusty swords,  and charged straight, atop their horses, without hesitation, into the heart of the village.

And never ever came back out again......

14 years down that road of Insanity......

Marian had always lived in Trevor ever since she was born, and there she led an eternally happy and care-free life, free from the stresses of daily life, having great friends who played and laughed along, with her, family who cared and looked after everything for her, and never had to worry about a single thing in life. It was a wonderful memory, and it ought to stay that way, forever, until on her 17th birthday, she woke up to find everyone gone, disappeared without a trace, vanished in the abyss of time.

She briefly remembered the clock tower in the city center chiming, a hollow resonation of her heart, and she rushed out, heart thudding, onto the empty pavement outside. There was no one, and the entire city was covered in a translucent crystalline layer of bright crimson, refracting the brilliant white of the sunlight into a thousand rainbows. It was prettier than anything she had every imagined, but in her mind then all she could think was the need to find someone. It doesn't matter who it was, be it a complete stranger, or the hawker who plied his wares every morning, or even the beggar with only two rotten, crooked teeth. Yet even as she ran desperately  through the city, past countless roads and buildings, there was not a single soul in sight. And in the sparkling, spotless city of Trevor, the girl who was eternally joyful, wept for the first time in her life.

She cried, a sheer high pitched scream in the eerily silent city, and as she tasted a strange, foreign metallic taste on her tongue, she looked through the tears to see her hands covered with a sticky film of blood. And as she quiet wept away more and more tears in between sniffles, her plams got more and more bloody, until she looked up, and through the reflection of the crystals, saw, in a daze, the bloody tear smudges on her pale pallid cheeks. Like a zombie awakened from the clutches of death, she thought.

And as she sat there, unmoving like a broken puppet,  her thoughts began to flow in a more rational direction. She needed to find her parents, her kin, for surely they would not leave her to waste there.  No doubt  they must have left some form of clue in house. Indeed, why had she been so foolish to run headlong out into open? Then she had been gripped into a desperate sort of frenzy, propelled through the city by an unknown force, without any inkling of why she was doing it, just the idea and knowledge that she had to run, as fast and as long as she could, without a destination in mind, until her body gave way and she collapsed onto the smooth, marble-paved road, to slowly wither away under the clear azure sky.

Memories

Marian walked gingerly on the sizzling, sun-baked pavement, unsteady on her feet. It was noon-time and she had already walked non-stop for hours. The task seemed easy at first - find that pretty little cottage where she had lived in for the past 17 years. But the more she searched, the more she realized to her dismay that the once familiar city was a foreign entity to her. The red crystallite had encased each and every inch of the surfaces of the buildings, of random sections of the roads and walkways, forming highs archways and low bridges, until she was entrapped in the maze of a city. She no longer recognized landmarks; street lamps and doorways nothing but a blur as she stumbled on, putting one bleeding foot before the other. Her pace had dwindled far from when she had started, yet she continued on resolutely, looking, searching, peering even as her eyes hurt with fatigue  for just some sort of recognizable feature. Even as she stumbled and fell flat onto the streets, she recalled with a faint smile about how just yesterday her cute younger brother had given her a bouquet of hand-picked flowers in anticipation of her birthday, a handful of sweet-smelling daisies. The memory was like an oasis in a desert, and so she laid there, under the scorching sun, reminiscing, until with a start, she remembered that she never had a younger brother.

Wait, she did have a younger brother. She definitely did. He was half her height and had dimples when he smiled. His childish jokes always brought laughter to the family as everyone indulged in the humor. He had healed an injured sparrow that he had picked off the streets. He was ten younger. She had loved him the first time she laid her sight on him as  he slept soundly in his crib. Their mother would always sing him to sleep every night. Except her mother died giving birth to her. No she was killed off  in a monstrous fire that killed everyone she knew. She had attended the funeral with her elder brother and father. She was alone when she buried everyone's bodies and piled dark ash into the hole. She was invited to her sister's wedding. She had killed their baby before it was even born. She was alone. She had friends. She went to a school. She didn't know how her school looked like. She couldn't remember their appearances, their names, their differences, their individualities. It was all blurred, the mesh of faces and voices, each overriding the other, clamoring for attention, reaching out to her vulnerable soul. She lived. They existed.

In her mind.