Children of Fate

It was dawn. The sky was dashed with varying shades of orange, purple, and pink. The morning's sun bathed everything in a soft, warm light, and the ocean was, for once, calm and peaceful. Off a small, deserted beach there was a cluster of large, smooth rocks, often used by tourists as a tanning spot. The foamy water lapped up against the rocks quietly.

The peace, however, was only to last for a few moments. Seconds after the sun began to rise a skinny figure burst out of the water, limbs akimbo and wild hair all over its face. The figure beat its way over to the smooth rocks where it dragged itself onto the nearest one. It lay there for quite some time, halfway out of the water, and if there had been any spectators they would have found that this 'it' was actually a young girl.

Not long after the girl pulled her whole body onto the rock she was joined by another figure, equally skinny, but male. She barely acknowledged him, such was her exhaustion. Soon another girl joined the duo, and after that a strange, anxious attentiveness overcame them all.

Tired as they all seemed, they stared intently at the water, as if something--or someone, perhaps--was absent. They had not long to wait for, just as the colors of early morning were beginning to fade, bubbles began to rise to the smooth surface of the water. The first girl sat up rapidly, all fatigue forgotten, and her green eyes were narrowed in concentration.

The second girl spoke then. Her voice carried across the water and to the shore, but there was no one to hear except her companions.

"She made it."

Sure enough, a fourth girl's head appeared a moment later. Like the first girl, when she first surfaced, she flailed wildly in the water. The boy reached out and grabbed her arm, and she became calm then as he pulled her to the rock. The newest girl chose her own rock, though, and she laid on its smooth surface. A dagger was clutched in one hand, and the tip of the blade was bent clear sideways.

And then the girl began to laugh. She lifted her right hand, the hand with the dagger in it, so that she might study the weapon, and then she laughed even harder.

She was alive, and she was free!

***

The four children waited until noon, and then they all swam to shore. They found a nice strip of grass not far from the beach that was shaded by several trees, and there they all fell asleep as one huddled group. When they awoke it was night, but someone had started a fire.

"Sugar," the boy, Adrian, breathed.

"I'm here," a female voice, much too mature to belong to one of the girls, said. A small spite-like figure was silhouetted in the firelight, and Adrian sunk back down into the soft grass when he saw that.

"You knew all along, didn't you, Ana?"

Ana, who had, since waking up, moved herself away from her three friends, nodded. "If I had told you no one would have come along," she murmured. Her tone was apologetic, but no one was fooled into thinking that she was truly sorry for her actions. "Monsieur Frisk gave me the potion. He said it was something he had been tampering with a sort of liquidized gillyweed. He's been trying it out on himself, and it's made to be activated the second water enters your mouth, or something like that. He also gave me this dagger, also, and said I was to jimmy the lock with it."

Ana's cousin, the first girl to immerge from the water, and who had long since recovered from her casket-fright, hunched her shoulders angrily. "And what if they had charmed the lock to stay shut?"

Ana took the dagger out from the cloth she had wrapped around it. She studied the gleaming blade for a moment, and her friends too were impressed by its magnificence. The hilt was made of ivory, and it had been polished until it gleamed in the firelight. Three stones had been set into the ivory--two bright green stones and a deep blue stone in between--and the very tip of the hilt had been dipped into gold so that it formed and small handle. From the ivory hilt protruded a six inch blade of steel. The tip of the dagger was bent clear sideways, and that tiny feature ruined the dagger's splendor.

"He said it's magic like, or something," Ana muttered, trying hard to hide the disappointment in her voice. "He said that it would serve me for this purpose, and others in the future, but only in times of need."

"That sounds familiar," Sugar murmured. No one had noticed her creep up to join their small circle, but now she had perched on the tip of the dagger. Her dark hair had been swept up into a bun, and, for once, she looked very scholarly and sage. "If I didn't know better than I'd say that Monsieur Frisk was a member of the Light."

Amber-Lyn lost it again. "For Merlin's sake! For the past six months you two have been talking about this and that and the other thing! You talk all about this weird sounding stuff, stuff that relates to our parents, but you never tell me anything!"

Liza nodded. "I never heard the end of your parents'--all of our parents'--story."

"And I haven't even begun to hear the beginning." Adrian's arms were crossed over his chest. He had leaned up against a rock, and he looked expectant. What surprised Ana most of all was that they were all looking at her, and not at Sugar.

"You want me to tell it?" Ana asked. She looked at Sugar. "But you tell it so well!"

Sugar smiled softly. She was still balancing on the blade of Ana's dagger. "But it is your mother's story, and someday it will become yours. Who better to tell it than the one who knows it best?" When she saw Ana's worried looked she leapt off the blade. "Tell them, Ana. I'll try and mend the blade while you do so."

Ana finally resigned and moved so that they were sitting around the campfire. For a moment she looked up at the sky and thought back to that September day when this had all began. She wondered if, at that time moment, her mother was staring up at the sky. She wondered countless other things as well, all of them to do with the future and none of them to do with the past or the present. After all, she saw enough of what had all ready been done and what was happening in her dreams. She saw things she could not change, but she would do what she could to create change.

That was a vow she made to herself and to herself alone.

Then, after doing all that, she back looked down at her audience. And smiled. "Everyone ready? Good." She paused once more, and then launched into her mother's tale, the tale that would one day become hers.

"Eleven years ago there was a young woman named Kaitlyn Lowell..."

~~*FIN*~~

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Hope is a waking dream."

-Aristotle