Chapter 1
Prologue
Mal dreams and it’s only once.
She’s glad it’s only once.
Anymore than that will have the monster she’s kept at bay come crawling out if its murky depths where she once banished it too. Her mother had been proud in breaking her that day.
It’s in a world that glitters so brightly it hurts to blink, but when you actually get a chance to look closer you notice it’s not a trick of the light or something magical, it’s something more natural; a bane in the existence of the Isle.
It’s the sun.
When she pays even closer attention she notices she’s not alone. There are familiar faces staring at her with only a smile and hidden eyes. Eyes that are hidden by the sun’s glare so that she can’t make out who they are and she’s supposed to be wary because a face with no eyes is not a face you can trust.
But she doesn’t feel the need to run.
There is a girl. She can tell that much just from looking a little lower than the mouth in order to stray from the fact that there are people with no eyes smiling at her and watching her as she stands there bewildered.
The girl’s mouth is moving and Mal just noticed that it has been for awhile, saying something she can’t hear or doesn’t want to hear because it clears from a wash of noise to a mumble before she stopped focusing.
Mal feels her head nod.
The girl’s smile brightens.
Mal turns away and she jerks forward when her hand gets pulled.
The girl with the bright smile is holding her hand and dragging her towards people she doesn’t know with familiar faces she can’t fully see and it all becomes too much, too fast and she should have done this sooner, she should have done it sooner, it’s too much, too much, too much, too much…
The dream isn’t anything special, well, it isn’t supposed to be. But when she awakes with a heavy feeling in her chest and a desperate scream logged in her throat with a slick, wet feeling coating her forehead, she knows with a foreboding sense of the terror that this dream means more than she could ever imagine.
-
He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know why he sees this unfamiliar group of people surrounding him in a place he’s most familiar with.
He’s scared.
And it’s weird because being scared is not something he was taught to feel. He was taught to be brave and have courage. Fear didn’t fit into that equation.
And it’s weird because what he’s scared of is ... new people? He’s practically the picture boy for having an open mind and the ability to accept everyone, no matter their background, no matter the consequence. He accepts people so easily that it borderlines on crazy and insane, but he’s always been a little insane, a little daring as some people have told him.
It’s in his blood.
His grandfather was seen as insane, despite his brilliance because what is a genius without a little madness. He has a mother who threw herself in front of a beast to protect those she cared about, and she survived long enough to tell the horrifyingly, magical tale.
But these people don’t make him feel insane, well, at least not in the sense where he would be deemed an outcast like his grandfather. Actually, he feels accepted and that scares him because he accepts others, others don’t accept him.
But these people smiles glisten, although their eyes are dark and dreary as if they hide the most precious, darkest secrets of the world and it’s not the kind of secrets one wants to know. The secrets of the truth veiled by the beauty and light of Auradon.
These are real people. These people know what’s real and that scares him because what people know him as is…
Not real.