Prologue

I can hear someone screaming my name, its high pitched and desperate, a woman’s perhaps? I venture deeper into the empty field, the grass brushing against my knees. The barbed wire fence vanished in the darkness, just like everything else did. In the distance I can see flashes of light and my name is yelled louder and louder. Jason! Jason! Jason! The flashes of light coming from the left side turn to silver and the flashes coming from the right turn into ember. I flinch. Something about that colour makes me want to curl in a ball and hide.

I’m running now, mostly because my name is no longer being yelled and I feel as if I am being pulled towards the bottom of the hill. The grass tangles around my feet and I stumble for a moment before catching my footing again. It is darker this side of the field, and the stars that dotted the sky in glitter could not be seen, the moon had also disappeared. In the back of my mind I can see a woman with golden hair and eyes that were the colour of the stars and the sun put together. She’s kneeling on the damp grass and a figure hovers over her, it’s wearing a black cloak and that’s all I can see of him, his arms out stretched towards the sky and ember rays of light coming from the palms of his hands.
When I reach the hill I realise that I hadn’t been imagining a thing. A woman with golden hair was kneeling on the damp ground helplessly, the grass covering half of her body and her head bent towards the ground, as if she was studying the textures of the grass and dirt. I hid between the grass which had felt as sticky as honey, the earth was mucky and it sunk beneath my weight.

All I could do was watch, I watch the sky churn and rumble until a tornado like cylinder appeared and touched the ground. The grass started to whip and pull towards the tornado, when I looked at the sky next it was a ray of colours, green, orange, purple, gold, silver, ember, there were too many colours to count.

“Do you see what happens when you do not listen to me?” a deep and dark voice came from within the cloak. “You did this; it is your own fault your children will die tonight.”