4 : Prophecies and Legends

As soon as he was gone, everybody went back to their respective houses in a daze, without a word to each other. It didn't feel feel like the usual Peterkin Street at all. Rather, it felt as if they were exiting a funeral site. Ashley followed her family in. When the door closed, she immediately started attacking her father with questions - "Was he really the prince? Then why had he come instead of the king? What was his name? Why was he looking so stony? Why was everybody so scared?"

Her parents looked at her tiredly. Finally, her mother said, "We did not catch anything, Ashley! However, if your questions are about the prince, then read up the prophecy and the short legend about the king. We know nothing more than what those say. And you are grown up enough to understand them on your own."

Then she picked Cara up to take her to her room. Ashley's father departed too, to change. He had to leave for work soon. But she still stood there, mulling over what her mother had said. Curiosity was literally eating her! She had to find answers to the questions on her mind! Or she would die? Yes, she probably would.

So now her job was to know every single detail in the legend that she apparently seemed to have been missing out so long.

But the problem was...how? She did not have any book about it!

And then she remembered...maybe she did have! Ashley climbed up the stairs in a rush until she reached their dusty little attic. She had only been there once before and the spectacular thing about it was the infinite number of books that it held. Maybe she could find at least one book in that warm attic about the legend! She made her way towards the selves, avoiding the large boxes and caskets. All these stuffs used to belong to her grandparents and their parents...in other words, ancestor stuff.

The first time she'd seen them, though she never admitted it even to herself, she had been quite spooked. Who the heck kept huge human-sized boxes in dark, creepy attics? Maybe they even contained mangled body parts?! Though their was no reek of rotten flesh as far as she could sense. But then her mother had told her about their ancestors. They had an old family line, and each generation left to their next generations all those family heirlooms. Her mother showed her the most treasured heirloom, that had been gifted to her great grandmother by her adventurer husband when he returned from his last adventure to a lost island - a red diamond. Now, it cost over $1 million per carat, but they would never sell the one and only reminder of their great adventurer ancestor, who had died fighting for his country in war. He had died, before he could even be informed that he had won an honorary medal.

Ashley glanced at the smallest box, where the stone safely lay. No one had touched it in over half a century. She had never seen him of course, but from what she had heard, he had been a great person. Then she remembered what she was actually there for. She went to the rows of shelves, trailing her hand over the hardcovers, trying to find any title that might have been relevant to the legend about the King and Harkenland.

Her spirits were slowly coming down. She had not found a single book related to the topic! Maybe there wasn't any...

Suddenly though, she came across a small notebook whose binding area was too thin to have the title written on it. Pulling it out, she discovered..."The Past And Future Of Harkenland" written on the cover. It was a tiny, old book, torn in area with a few pages coming out, but that pathetic excuse of a book was enough to make my spirits fly!

Shaky with excitement, she turned over the fragile cover to see the first page.

"In times of light and dark

When the sun meets the moon

When the North wind blows away the larks

When the mortals unite too soon

There will be born the suns midnight

There will be born in engulfing darkness

Turning away the lights from sight

Coming near the storm in lightness

A child from and of the sin...

That was the prophecy that started it all..."

Ashley tried to make out any sense of the prophecy, other than a few separate lines whose meanings she had managed to understand. And though she thought she understood what the 'mortals united' meant, she would rather act that she did not understand. But putting it all together, she could not decipher what message it was actually trying to convey! To her, it could have been written in Hispanic or Latin or french, without making any difference! Not to mention that she was really bad at figuring out meanings of poems and this prophecy was just like a poem! Ashley huffed in annoyance. Anyway, trying to forget about the bogus first page, she moved on...

"The old Sybil Teresa's prophecy, made in the dark corners of her alley-house, proved to be true. In the dark last day of the last month of the old year was born "the child from and of the sin". The dark prince turned the once sunny heavens into raging hell, the bright sky into dark clouds and the sunshine into thunder. 'The immortal prince,' as quoted by the Sybil, 'she live in this human world forever and always until he finds his way back to the place where he came from...and nobody knows where he came from.' His mortal mother had died giving birth to this demon-child, and his father was killed by his own hands. His world was turned to ice and snow...

Years passed. Then one day, his path crossed fire's.

Fire destroyed the snow. His ice-cold heart was melted over his own threshold. His body crackled on fire until is was gone into the world of nothingness. The immortal became mortal as it met fire, and was destroyed for good. And again was proved the truth of the statement -

Good always wins over evil..."

Ashley turned over the remaining pages - they were blank. The story...if it could be called a story...seemed so short and well, more like a vague anecdote than a well-known legend. Well, nothing could be done about that.

She shut the book. Though it had seemed a useless little thing, it did help her gain deeper insight into the legend. Now she knew...nobody was sure who the dark prince actually was. So evidently, there was doubt. It was either the king or the prince, as they were the only people alive in Harkenland who was - or were at a point of time - a prince. Both of their mother's were dead. The king's father was dead, too. The king himself was alive...but who know for how long? He could be killed anytime or simply die...

So as long as both of them were alive, nobody could say for sure who the prophecy was really about...

And the Sybil certainly seemed to have gotten essential points wrong too, as far as she could say. Harkenland was covered in snow for ever, but it was not a dark world..

Yet.