Andulein Heights
an excerpt

“Only the hot-blooded shall inherit the earth!”
- The first line of Alnarien: Warrior of Marquee! Book One.

Chapter One-

You might not be the kind of person who wants to hear about this, but, as they say, it’s best to start at the beginning.
It all started with a dream. It was one of those dreams that you have over and over, and usually they mean something, kind of like how your stomach rumbling means that you’re hungry. This particular dream was a special dream, a lucky dream almost, despite the fact that’s it’s kind of a nightmare, except not really because a lot of it actually happened. It’s a lot less confusing than it sounds, really.
You’d probably want to know what the dream is about, I guess.
Well, it took place several years a go, when I was, about, eight, I guess. I’m always seeing myself in this dream, and I always look the same; I was wearing the school uniform and looking absolutely adorable in it, with the knee-long skirt and the buckled shoes and the wide shirt-collars that’s always covering the nametag saying, “Emila Masorie” in scribbly letters.
I was resting in the middle of a plain, with green grass and the wind gently blowing it this way and that. In reality, the grass was much browner, but for some reason it’s always very clearly green here. I was lying on my back, staring into the sky with a serene look on my face. I was doing nothing more than watching a biplane fly around in the air. It was a very red biplane, and very pretty; it kept flying this way and that, minding its own business, performing loops and spins and fancy aerial tricks, and in the dream I was always following it with my eyes, which were wide with the sort of admiration you get from seeing someone doing something incredible. It went further and further into the horizon, very slowly, although I think it was a lot quicker in real life. Maybe it was to stretch the dream or something, kind of like how presenters always make up bad jokes on the spot to keep the radio programs going.
But dreams have to end some time, and it always ends in the exact same way. All of a sudden, a shadow would fly over me, and my eyes- filled with the innocence of youth, you could say- widened up in something like fear as another biplane flew past. In the dream it was black; it might have actually been blue or green in real life, although I don’t think I could ever know for certain. But in the dream, it was black, and from its double propellers came a blaze of bullets, coming one after another. They should have been accompanied by loud rattling noises, I guess, but in the dream everything was silent. So I watched as the silent bullets hit the red biplane, watched as it silently tips and tailspins and falls to the ground until, finally, with the silence making it feel longer than it should, the biplane crashed into the ground with a brilliant flash of fire.

The dream always ends with me looking at myself, looking slightly shocked for a second before standing up and walking home because I suddenly remembered that I had math homework to do, and for some reason this sudden show of indifference always shocks me enough to throw me out of bed and into consciousness.

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This morning I woke up, with my head knocking against some hard and cold. It took me a second to realize that I, once again, fell out of bed. One of my legs was propped up against the side of the bed, and the covers were hanging off the edge, waiting for the leg that it wrapped itself around to do something. The leg decided to join the rest of its body and dropped to the ground. With a small grumble that I barely heard myself, I stood up, pulling myself out of the covers and placing my head on my forehead. I felt dizzy, and I figured that I must have had the dream. I decided to do the most logical thing in situations where I can’t think properly, and that was to start talking to myself.
“Hello, hello, good morning, good morning,” I said, rubbing my eyes and looking around. Everything looked bleary until my eyes decided to focus and look around at the room. It wasn’t a messy room, but that’s because there weren’t that many things in it to make it messy; there was a shelve at one side of the room that took up a whole wall and supported a clock, a plain picture frame (complete with picture, of course), and other things with a forgotten significance that I kept just because I never bothered to throw them away, like a gear. I’m still not sure how it got there. On the other side of the room there’s what must be the thirteenth thinnest closet in the world, with the ninety-fourth smallest mirror hanging from the inside of one of its doors. In front of me there were two doors; one leading to the corridor, and the other leading to the bathroom, half-open. On the floor there’s a red carpet of some kind to make the room somewhat bearable to look at. I glanced back at the clock and saw the time. It had stopped at four o’clock, and wasn’t ticking.
I frowned at it, wondering if it really was four o’clock, or if time had frozen. I peered out of the window, which was right over my bed and meant that I had to scramble over it to see. The sun shone quite happily, and people were walking around in the streets below, minding their own business. I looked left and right and wondered if it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I called one of the people below.
“Hey, mister!” I yelled. One man, who wore a top hat for some inexplicable reason, turned his head up with a prudish expression on his face, as though someone had just interrupted his conversation.
“Yes?” he yelled back.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Why, it’s nine in the morning,” he replied, sounding thoroughly confused.
“Nine in the morning?” I repeated. Crap, I remember thinking, crap, crap, crap. “Are you sure?”
”I saw a clock earlier, so yes,” he said. I couldn’t say anything more because he decided to walk off, mumbling to him self. I guess he’d say something about young children being young children.
Unfortunately, it was nine o’clock, which meant that I was half an hour late. It also meant that my clock was broken. I didn’t bother thinking about that; I rushed to the closet and took out a pile of clothes out of random. There wasn't much choice in clothing, so anything I grabbed worked. Then I ran to the bathroom, put my head under cold running water, and then changed without bothering to dry my hair. I kept track of my clothes as I took off my night-robe and put on my shirt, which was as white as a mouse in a sewer. Then the pants, then the denim overalls, and finally I put on a matching hat, the kind that you see with newspaper boys at the side of the street, except I made it look good. I had to take it off, however, because I forgot to pull back my hair into a ponytail. There wasn’t much of it, and when I finally managed it the ponytail simply jutted out the back of my head, but it was important that it was pulled back, especially because of my job, which wasn’t as much as a job as it was an apprenticeship. The problem with the apprenticeship was that it was for being a mechanic, and the one word that mechanics have never taken into account is ‘cleanliness’. Anyone looking at my shirt and overalls could tell that I don’t really care about it all that much, but with my hair it’s different; it’s blonde, and I can’t change it, and if something like oil got on it then it simply becomes a pain when I have to clean it, otherwise I’d be walking around with patches of black and brown on my head and that’s just not the best thing ever.
So I ran out of the bathroom, ran out of the bedroom, and almost killed myself when I ran down the stairs. That didn’t matter, though. What did matter was that I had to get to the repair shop before Derrin realizes how late I was. I rushed to the downstairs kitchen, took out some bread from the cupboard, took out some butter from the fridge, slapped a thin block of butter on some messily sliced bread and devoured it as I threw open the front door and made my way to the shop, hoping hoping hoping hoping that I was not too late.