Prologue

the beginning

                                 Prologue

“Second Floor, third room to the right.”

 

A lady hastily, ran up the steps to the local Amsbery Library in the dead of night. She growled as she tried turning the rusted knob of the door, only to find it locked.

 

“Hey! If anyone’s in there, you better open up before I bash your head in with a dictionary! Open up! Open up! Open up!” She snarled as she banged her leather-gloved fist at the glass panel repeatedly.

 

After a few more strikes, the glass shattered. The fragments cut through her gloves and pierced her flesh, drawing out tears of blood, but she only winced. She reached around the open panel and opened the door from the inside.

 

“Halt! Stop right there! Hands in the air!”

 

She bit her lip as she slowly put her hands in the air, her right still impaled with glass shards soaked in her own blood.

 

“Officer, I know how this looks, but if you’d give me a chance, I promise I can-”

 

“Please, you think I haven’t arrested teens like you before? They always come up with the same excuses. Although… I admit you’re the first to try and break into a library.” He muttered.

 

She heard the clink of handcuffs that were probably on his belt. Her heart thumped with every passing second, her eyes hastily looking around the darkness as if searching for something…

 

“I-I’m sorry.”

 

Faster than the officer could draw out his firearm, she drew out a switchblade hidden inside her coat. Using the hilt, she smashed it on the top of his skull with tremendous strength.

 

The cop’s eyes widened as the woman trembled and slowly started pacing backwards. A purple bruise formed and his eyes rolled inside his head. Stiff as a board, he collapsed on the bottom of the steps, his blood disappearing into the cracks in the pavement.

 

The lady opened the broken door and rushed inside, her heartbeat increasing rapidly. She flicked on the lights, revealing a man’s figure looking down at her from the third story balcony, his hands on the wooden railings.

 

He was handsome, that she couldn’t deny. Wavy raven-black hair, a tight muscle-shirt that showed his masculine figure. It was his eyes that told an entirely different story. They were dark-red; the color of blood.

 

“I’m impressed; I truly am.” His honey-like voice echoed through the halls and bookshelves. “You were the first of all to realize my gifts came with consequences. The others were all drunk in power, fame, happiness, love, that they just considered them bad luck…right until they ended up six feet under. Tell me, what gave it away?”

 

“Gifts? Gifts with consequences?! They’re nothing but curses! So many lives lost… because of you!” She pointed an accusing finger at the man.

 

“Me?” He faked shock. “I’m not the one who wished all her tormenters ‘disappeared.’ I’m not the one who wished she was powerful enough so nobody could hurt her ever again… I certainly didn’t knock out an innocent officer of the law.”

 

“…Say what you want. In just a few minutes, this will all be nothing but a bad dream. You’ll be locked up again. As I recall, you can’t touch it without being burned to a crisp.”

 

The man squinted until his eyes were nothing but slits. His grip on the wooden railing tightened until it snapped like a twig under the pressure.

 

“Not if I kill you first.” He hissed.

 

The man’s skin started bubbling like boiling water until he started growing in mass and length. He started growing black fur all over his body and bull horns began sprouting from the top of his skull. He teared off a piece of the railing and it transformed into a double-bladed axe that was taller than herself before her very eyes.

 

“F**k… first a freak with only one eye, now a 12-foot man-bull?!” She cursed as she drew out her last combat knife she had on her.

The minotaur gave a roar that sounded like a herd of a dozen bulls bellowing in unison. He ripped off a bookshelf from its bolts and hinges and threw it down at the lobby, right down at her.

 

“Oh, you’ve got to be-

 

She dived over a dirty couch that had its stuffing coming loose and ducked behind it as the bookshelf came crashing down. Books thick as her fists were raining down everywhere, breaking windows, shelves, furniture, and even set the book return machine stationed at the entrance ablaze. A piece of the bookshelf pierced the couch she was taking shelter in, a five-inch piece of plywood just a thumb away from her face.

 

Before the minotaur could throw another barrage at her, she ran up the carpeted stairs to the fantasy section as if her life depended on it. Which, it probably did.

 

She was faced with beanbag chairs of all colors littering the corridors of shelves filled with books about dragons, quests, knights, but none were what she was looking for.

 

She had already spent three minutes in the ‘T’ section, but no dice.

 

“Why are there so many goddamn books?!” She kept tossing books out the shelf one-by-one, until finally, she came across one that looked centuries old and had no author’s nor publisher’s name on it at the very top left edge.

 

“The Artifact Prisons.” She read aloud, dusting off the worn-down cover that seemed as if though it could fall off at any second.

 

Thump. Thump. Thump.

 

At first she thought the sound was coming from her adrenaline-filled heart, but then the manure-like stench hit her. It was coming from his footsteps. He had found the room.

 

She quickly scrolled through the table of contents until she found what she was looking for.

 

“The Stone of Desires, yes!” She pumped her fist in victory.

The toppling of the second bookshelf in front of her snapped her back to reality.

 

She quickly sat down and set the book down on her lap and began flipping rapidly. Her hands shook as with every flip of the page a bookshelf went crashing down like trees, his musky scent got thicker, his menacing shadow grew larger; he was coming closer and closer.

 

When she found the page she was looking for, she began skimming the texts with a bloody finger and whispered aloud.

 

The bookshelf in front of her toppled to the left and her finger was shaking so hard she needed to hold it steady with her other hand to make sure it didn’t went flying off the pages.

 

“The Stone of Desires… cannot be destroyed by regular means … a soul sealed within… never make a third… to revoke ownership of the stone, the current owner must place a drop of their blood on the stone while reciting ‘Malum, et abierunt!’

 

The lady let a shriek as his axe horizontally swung straight through the bookshelf she was hiding behind, taking a lock of her hair along.

 

She scooted backwards until she hit the back of a wall, where a poster of a midget with giant feet was hung.

 

“I win.” She grinned with a small laugh as the minotaur stepped in front of her and brought his axe over his head.

 

Before he could swing, she fished out a smooth rock that seemed to glow mesmerizingly in all sorts of pretty colors, just like an aurora.

 

“No!” The minotaur bellowed as he swung downwards.

 

She stabbed the minotaur on the knee, which made his swing off-balance. She rolled to the side and smeared some blood from her wounded hand onto the stone.

 

“Malum, et abrierunt!” She recited.

 

The stone then began to glow with a glare brighter than a thousand stars. The minotaur screamed with a voice like man as bits of his flesh began to fade away into oblivion. His arms and legs went first, so his limbless body collapsed to the pile of books and debris left in his murderous rampage.

 

“Your soul is safe… for now, at least. No one has escaped my wrath. I don’t intend for you to be the first.” The minotaur said as his blood-red eyes glared at her.

 

His axe clattered to the ground, which morphed back into a piece of the railing it was before. In mere moments, he was completely gone.

 

The stone’s glow subsided and the girl gave out a loud sigh. As if by magic, all the damage done by him were being repaired by itself. Bookshelf’s became bolted back to their original places. The destroyed beanbag chairs were being sewn with invisible string until they were good as new. All the thrown away books flew to their original spaces as if they had invisible wings. The piece of railing that was on the floor slithered out of the room like a snake, probably to fix the broken balcony.

 

As if she finally recognized the glass shards lodged into her hand, she pulled off her damaged glove. She then began plucking them out with her fingers. The ones too small to pinch or lodged to deep had to be scraped out with her knife.

 

She leaned against the wall, still tightly clutching the peculiar stone. She closed her eyes and her body posture went limp. She laid so still that one might’ve assumed she was dead.

 

The familiar sounds of sirens made one of her eyebrows twitch. She grinded her teeth as she grabbed a nearby stepping stool as leverage to rise back up. With the book and the stone still in her hands, she limped towards one of the meter-tall casement windows in the back side of the library and took a peek outside. The red-and-blue lights were still a block or two away.

 

She unlocked the panel and slid it to the side. Using the stepping stool from before along with the help of her tippy-toes, she managed to squeeze her body outside.

 

With the crackle of thin plastic, she fell into an open-lidded dumpster. She could feel tin cans, empty soda bottles, even a banana peel at her back through the plastic bags, but she couldn’t complain. Better than hitting the pavement front this height.

 

She was about to ditch the stone and book right there, but just as she was about to climb out the dumpster, she stopped.

 

“No way I’m letting this happen this to someone again. No one deserves this kind of fate. She opened the book and ripped a random page from it. She dabbed her left index finger on her bloody palm that still had some fresh blood that still didn’t dry up yet. She placed the torn paper on the book and began to write-

 

DON’T MAKE A THIRD

 

Even to her, she felt it was rather ambiguous, but with the cops on her tail and a finger and her own blood as her only writing utensils, her choices were rather limited. She wrapped the paper around the stone, completely covering it. She left the book and the wrapped-up stone in the dumpster, and leaped out.

 

She disappeared into the nearby alley, knocking down a trash can and scaring a couple of street cats that were fighting over a rotten fish.