Page 75 of The Heir

“Mary–” my mind was reeling.

“Perhaps that was too much too soon.”

That is an understatement.

“You are also from Terra?” I turned and looked at her. I knew the answer; of course, she was, but I needed her to say it. I could not get over the shock of it all.

She nodded. “Yes, dearest. I am also Terran.”

“What’s it like there? Is it how mom described it in the fairytales?”

“Unfortunately, those tales are very old, and as time passed, an evil and a darkness corrupted Terra. So I never saw Terra at its best, only when it was falling apart again. Your mother lovedthe old tales about when humans defeated curses with true love and when magical beings and humans began to live in harmony, hundreds of years after The Great War.”

“The Great War, it was real?”

Mom’s tales spoke about the war, about a man–a traitor king who wanted great power and destroyed the world while trying to get it. An Ancient had trapped him inside one of the cold mountains of Haleston–where he was said to be imprisoned forever.

“King Falcon?” I asked, remembering his name from the stories. As a child, his story frightened me. But mom had explained that we needed to know the difficult parts of the past so we do not repeat them in the future.

“May he rot in the mountain,” Mary whispered with a nod. “The traitor. We thought he had been defeated, but sometimes death brings a new life–an unnatural, horrible one.”

“What?”

“There is much to say, but sorry, let me focus,” she said, sitting down on the bed beside me, her hair still wet and dripping down her back onto her shirt. I tried to focus on that instead of everything surging inside me.

“How did you all, I mean, what happened to make you all come here? Mom, dad, and you?”

“Terra has, for hundreds of years, been as I said,changed.” She held a hand to her forehead; then she continued,“The darkness there that covers the land is not a physical darkness. It is a creeping darkness within many Terran souls. We believed in the law of the Ancients, you know, from your mother’s stories?”

I nodded. My mother had read to me from her fairytale book each night when I was younger. She then gave the book to me, and I read it, myself, over and over. I knew the stories and the lore of Terra like I knew the back of my hand.

“The Ancients are the ones who have helped us all live in peace for so many generations,” she continued. “However, those years of peace and strong melodies faded. When the Ancients foretold of dark and troubled times, no one realized just how dark things would become–darker, in many ways, than even during the Great War because no one could see it with their eyes until things were almost completely destroyed. The darkness was like a thief in the night.” She shook her head. “Anyway, your father’s brother, Tarick, was not a good man. He wanted the throne for himself; your father was next in line to be King.”

“Wait? My father was a prince? A prince of Terra?” I looked at the ground. I knew many of the names of Terra’s kingdoms. Many of them were so incredible, and as a child, I dreamed of venturing to them myself.

“Yes, he was.”

“Of what kingdom, Mary?” I said, looking up desperately. Mother had more tales from one kingdom, more than from all the others, one kingdom that I had a gut feeling was where my father was from. But it was not a kingdom I would have chosen to be a descendant of.

“I think you know Emma–”

“No. Please, not Haleston,” I said, standing up. Haleston was where the traitor, King Falcon, came from. It was the kingdom that started the Great War, killing thousands of humans and magical beings.

“It is a different kingdom now, but,yes, the traitor king is from there, but there is still goodness in those mountains and within the frozen lands.” Mary said, pulling on my arm to look at her.

“I am related to the traitor?” I said softly.

“You are related to your father, who was a good man and who loved you,” Mary said softly.

I sat back down on the bed.

“Where was mom from? Where are you from?”

“Sorra, and we are not royals. We were told that our family came from another kingdom long ago, which is why we do not look like a typical Sorran. They have beautifully tanned skin and black hair,” she said with a soft smile.

Sorra was a desert kingdom, and it was not cursed. At least half of me was from a worthy kingdom.That is something, I told myself.

“So, your father’s brother; Tarick,killedhis father, your grandfather, and then he put your father into the dungeons within the mountain to spend the rest of eternity, to rot there, just as had King Falcon. Your father believed in the Ancients, too, you see, yet Tarick became corrupted by the darkness. Your father did not agree with what his brother was doing, but somehow, bless the Creator, your father made it here, to this Earth realm.”

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