Chapter 1
I woke up with my head hurting like it was being pounded by Mjolnir. As I rubbed the side of my temples, I realized something heavy was bubbling up to the surface.
The heaviness I felt in my chest blossomed into a stabbing pain all over. I knew my heart was beating fast. Too fast as a reaction to the disturbing dream that plagued my sleep.
In that dream, and many dreams before, or any other variation of those disturbing dreams, I would find myself in different places. Distant and ancient. The kind of dreams that made me feel like I never belonged to this reality.
The worlds I visited in my dreams sometimes appeared old, yet modern and sophisticated.
Sometimes, I witnessed wars.
Sometimes, I visited different timelines. But there were two that terrified me the most.
Probably because I was always a chicken at heart, and seeing doctors cutting up their patient’s chests was enough to make my feet turn to jelly.
I remembered clearly, as my eyes began to roam the ceiling above me…I had been having a pleasant dream until I abruptly left it.It felt more like I had unlocked a door that wasn’t there before, and when I was thereat that cold place again where the walls were translucent blue. And inside one of those walls, a frail, tall man was imprisoned against his will.
And I knew he did nothing wrong. We never had a conversation, but deep down in my bones, I could feel that he was naïve and honest. That he too was someone important in their history.
That frail,tall man was in pain all the time, but he was numbed.They had forcefully sedated him with substances that kept him tied to the prison, that made him unable to speak or even think.
But that wasn’t the worst part yet.
There was another man, just as tall, just as palewith innocent eyes and a calm way of talking and persuading. He wouldn’t hesitate to poke a hot, sharp rod all the way through the prisoner’s chest, only to take it out again and repeat.
And no matter how painful it was, he couldn’t tell the other man to stop.He couldn’t cry either, but I knew he was hurting tremendously by the vibrations that came out from his body when the other man tortured him.Sometimes, he let him cry soundlessly and would collect his sparkly tears inside long, cylindrical containers. There were countless of them.
There was another dream too, where the second manwith a pair of deep sapphire eyeswould bring something that looked like a surgical clamp and pull hardened tissues from beneath the man’s skin.
I screamed. And no matter how loud I screamed, I wasn’t able to stop the other man from hurting him, poking him, taking chunky bits out of his shoulders, cutting his arm off with a chainsaw-like machine or anything he wanted to do. I could only pull myself out of that dream, back to my body, and see lights showering me.
How I hated that. Because that was how my days started.
Anyway, my name is Arabelle. Google says “Arabelle” means yielding to prayeryet I’m the one farthest from conversing with the Supreme Being.
I don’t know who named me that, but that’s my name. A common name for an ordinary girl who lived an everyday life.I suspect it was the staff at the orphanage who made the decision.
Why couldn’t they have just named me Katie? Or Maggie?It’s not that I hate the name. But “Arabelle” sounds divine and cosmic.
And I am not.
Then came Shane Kingsleigh, his wife, and their sonswho were looking for a little girl to call their own, since Carmen Kingsleigh couldn’t bear another child due to certain complications.
They welcomed me as their own, and I learned how to smile from that moment. To be happy. I forgot about the questions that played over and over in my head. Questions like who my parents were or how I ended up at the orphanage.
I lived a perfectly ordinary life until the terrible disaster struck us.
I was pretty much stuck in my own worldbut that changed when he saved me. I never knew I was part of a plan. A plan designed by a very powerful entity. One that involved me becoming something impossible.
Crazy. Unbelievable. Extraordinary.
But this isn’t my story.
I had believed the world we lived in was made only for humans but I was wrong. The stories about monsters and creatures passed down through generations weren’t just myths, folk tales, Wattpad novels, or nonsense.
I was wrong about so many things.
About faith. About gods and goddesses. About the universe itself.
This is his story.
But I’ll take the honor of telling you how this journey changed meand everyone around us.
This is a story about love, bravery, and adventure but first, let’s go to the beginning.
