"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility and most people are frightened of responsibility,"

-Sigmund Freud.

Every night before I went to bed, my mother would tell me the same story.
You may be imagining a scenario where a loving woman gently tucks her young boy into bed, perhaps while he clings to his teddy bear.

Well, unfortunately, you have the wrong picture in your head.

Instead, from child to adult, I would sit in a chair made of wood, without the solace of pillows. The chair was placed in an empty, white room. In fact it was so white, it was blinding.

The room I could never leave.

There were no decorations and no comfortable beds. There was simply, me, my mother and the chair.

I'm going to tell you a story of twin boy and a twin girl. She would begin, The twins were a part of the Mercia family. As they grew up, the twins developed a strong bond. Some would joke and say they knew each other so well, that they could hear each other's thoughts.

I knew the story off by heart. In fact, even before she spoke, I could hear the words playing in my head.

Legend has it, when they were children, the twin brother was in training. The girl had been taken to a ceremony to announce her coming of age and she was unable to join her brother as she usually did.

Her brother was tackling his opponent when he fell backwards and snapped his arm. The girl, miles away, let out a piercing cry in the middle of her ceremony.

Thousands of people bore witness to the incident, and, at first, nobody understood why she had screamed. But when her brother came back with a broken arm, they all knew that she had felt it too.

Because they were a part of the Mercia family, it was a primitive time. The twins were taught to fight and kill.
There was one simple rule:
the only enemies was the Karnoi.
The one's whose eyes glowed.

I giggled.

I couldn't help myself. Usually, I could control it but not tonight. Mother gave me a piercing glare before she continued.

Each night, from the age of seven, they were taken on a hunt. At that time, the Karnoi truly did live as what they were thought to be. Outside in the bushes like animals they would stay and in return they were hunted like a buck by a lion.

The twins were legendary, coming home with at least three kills each night. They didn't need a conscience.  They believed without a doubt, that the species were simply worthless beasts, in the disguise of a human.

She looked up and stared at me for a long moment before averting her gaze and returning to her soliloquy.

But as the girl grew up, she began to notice things that she couldn't understand. Sometimes she would see a glint in her brother's eyes or she would pick up an object effortlessly and it would break.

She kept her discoveries to herself and the events only stirred up a greater hatred within her for the beasts. She began to focus every bit of her energy on exterminating their race and in the process she ignored her twin to eliminate distractions.

When I was a young boy, I had tried to tell my mother that I didn't want to hear this story. 

"It scares me," I admitted.

I had asked her if she could tell me another story, but she slapped me across the face.

Her nails had caught against my skin, and the incident left me with two large scratch marks. I bled on the floor of the perfectly white room that day.

The marks on my face never truly faded and neither did the stains on the ground. Sometimes I would stare at that one irregularity. That one imperfection, in her perfect room, that I had managed to create.

When she hit me, my reaction had been the same as it always was, to laugh. I think she understood that laugh as some form of rebellion, but instead it was a symptom of a panicked, young boy.

I never asked her a question again.

One night, as she lay in her bed, she heard a whisper of her brother's voice.

"Are you sleeping?"

The girl lifted her head and looked up, expecting to see her brother hiding in the shadow. He was nowhere to be seen.

"Shay?" she called his name.

"Why are you ignoring me, sister?"

Unable to find the source of the voice, she leapt out of her bed and ran to switch on the light. She checked under her mattress and in her closet but he was nowhere to be seen.

"Why are you ignoring me?" His voice echoed through her head.

The girl became frustrated and scurried out of her room, heading straight to her brother's. When she opened the door, she found Shay in his bed fast asleep.

I frowned.

Mother was getting to the part that I didn't like. I wished I could run away but instead I remained seated and tried to pay attention as best I could. That's what mother would want me to do.

The next day, the girl went hunting.
She avoided asking her brother if he had been awake that night. Her best conclusion was that he'd been terrorising her, although he seemed completely oblivious.

Not too far into the woods, they heard a rustle in the trees.

She glanced at her brother and he was already heading round back to close it in. This particular Karnoi had been easy to catch. It simply waited in the bushes while they trapped it. As they were about to pounce, it pointed at the girl and then at the boy before saying,

"You are one of us."

The girl froze while her brother killed the beast. She dropped to her knees, because unlike her brother, she knew it was true.

"Are you okay?" Shay asked her.

She stared down at the beast, lying limp on the floor.

"We are one of them," she whispered.

"Oh that. He was just probably trying to save his skin."

"We are one of them," she repeated.

"He was just screwing with us."

She shook her head. "Sometimes I hear your voice in my head, Shay. And I feel what you feel. Sometimes I see your eyes... and they look like the beasts'." 

Shay didn't say anything for a long time. Eventually he got down to his knees, so that he was eye level with his sister.

"I thought it was just my mind playing tricks." He said. "How could we be one of them? We are of royal blood. We kill them."

"I don't know," the girl said. "But I know it's true. I can feel it."

"Well then you know what we have to do. We do it tonight, but we tell no one."

His sister nodded. "We do it together."

I didn't want to listen.

I never did but for some reason when I tried to divert my thought I would eventually find my ears forcing me back to the words of my mother. Sometimes my thoughts would simply recite the story themselves.

I pressed my thumbnails into my hand to try and focus on the pain. I knew what was coming next and there was never any way of changing the morbid ending.

The girl and the boy went home that night. When their parents came to each of their rooms to tuck them in and praise them on their kills, the twins gave them their own powerful hug.

The girl was unable to let go until her mother forced her too. Their parents noticed that it was unusual but said nothing. Instead they kissed them on the head and turned off the lights.

When the house was silent and everyone was asleep, the children crept out of their beds and met in the hallway. They took each other's hand and went to their special spot in the woods that nobody knew about. They would usually go to that spot after a hunt because the nature would relax them.

Tonight the spot seemed different; more meaningful.

The girl stared at her brother, who took a gun and held it in his hands. They looked down on it in silence for several minutes.

"I'll go first." He said. "I love you."

"I love you too, Shay." The girl whispered.

The boy held the gun to his head and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

"Do you see, my boy?" She spoke to me for the first time. It was a good day. Sometimes she would go the entire story without actually noticing that I was there.

"If I tell anyone about you or let you leave this room, they will make me kill you and mother will no longer be in power. Is that what you want?"

I shook my head, instinctively.

She smiled. "Good. I'll be back same time tomorrow."

My mother walked over to the door and before she left, I finally built up the courage to do something that I had vowed never to do again.

I asked a question.

Lately, the question seemed to consume me with wonder and it seemed more powerful than any scar she could give me.

"What happened to the girl?" I asked.
"You always stop at that part and you never tell me about the girl."

I was surprised to see that she wasn't upset about my question. Maybe I had asked the right one for once.

She simply glanced back at me, with a grin on her face.

"She got what was coming to her."

                                                               Who is that little boy?
And what happened to the twin girl?
Only one way to find out...

I hope you enjoyed
my prologue and decide to carry on!