**_Holly Greyhead (Maiden Name: Holloway)_**

Rayburn sits in my lap, the tiny toddler chewing on a peice of my sleeve sleepily. I stroke his hair as I stare out into the window. My eyes are met with the mute twinkling of stars and the never-ending darkness of the night sky. The breeze is cool, refreshing against the tight fit I have to wear in front of the powerful aristocrats of this city.

“Ma?...

“Guard this with your life, understand?”

I swear I uttered those words.

The warning.

Because you held the gun…

And I know that you know,

It was loaded.

The clip not missing a single bullet…

The warning laid across my shirt,

My chest,

My heart…

Yet still you unloaded it.

Slowly,

And then all at once.

Shot STRAIGHT through me…

No mercy.

Every bullet knicking away a piece of my soul…

That I be...

Ailee rushed down the steps, her bare feet skidding on the well-worn stone. "Father, troopers -"

"I know." Her father moved about the shop with purpose - turning this switch off, covering that console with a thick canvas. As though he were simply closing up for the night, though his tense shoulders betrayed him.

"What do we do?" Ailee's teeth chattered as she spoke; she pressed her tongue agains...

Y’kara stared down at the small blue, thick, rose emblem held between her fingers. A small frown adorning her puzzled face as she fumbled with the emblem. Her finger drug over a split in the metal, an old wound which was inflicted long before the emblem had come to her possession.

Her mind shifted back to earlier that morning. A sentence which seemed to have flipped her world upside down.

“Gua...

The woman who’d introduced herself as Elizabeth Sewell—Scholar and Explorer of all things forgotten—gestured to the wooden chair in the corner of her tiny office, and I took it.

A rugby-sized object sat on her desk. Draped over it was a crisp, white covering, obscuring any of its details.

“What can you tell me about this?”

The cloth seemed to fall in slow motion, cascading from the object like ...

They knew it was to happen for a very long, long time. But who wants to think of that—-the end of the world. The sun had become sullen and swollen, an ugly crimson giant in the sky. The days for more than a century had only risen in a blood red light. The nights were so cold, the children thought the twinkle of the stars was the shiver of light. The Earth herself—-funny how after so many millenni...

I don’t give my heart to just anyone

I gave it to someone before

And it was broke

I wish they would have guarded it with their life

But the didn’t

Now I’m giving it you

Will you guard it with your life.

I don’t think i can deal with a broken heart again

Please just guard it with your life

Please

Please

Please.

If you don’t I don’t think

I can give it to someone else

So please

Please

Please guard...

It’s a Friday night and Ned and I have all the candy and sodas my mom would let us take up. Plus a few fun size bags of chips I snuck up while hacking up a lung. A beautiful piece of acting if I do say so myself. We are over halfway through our campaign of The Mystic Galaxies.

Ned has been the game master since the time we could read. I’ve never had the knack for creating stories that he has bu...

“Guard this with your life, you understand?”

Blake presses the tiny black booklet into my fingers. His hands are bloody, his fingers trembling.

“Why are you giving me this?”

“I... I can’t risk it,” he shouts, glancing around the smoke-filled room. The alarms are blaring, beeping, screaming. “Head deeper into the bunker. Stay close to Avita. Stay alive. And remember what I told you.”

“You’re l...

The Flame Master walked out into the snow. The snow seemed heavy out in the outer wooded area. His apprentice followed obediently. He shrouded deeper into his cloak to shield against the blistering cold winds. Thankfully, the cover of the dense trees kept direct snow to fall on them.

“Ambrose.” The Master stood in a mountain stance. “Summon the flame.”

The apprentice, who was barely an adult rai...