The Voice

“Rey, this is the fifth time I’ve had to pick, you up at the principal’s office this week. What’s wrong with you?” my mother demanded, turning to look at me as she drove.

I stared right back at her. “Mom, I swear that I didn’t –”

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered. “And you didn’t give that kid a black eye either – neither did you shove that kid into the ditch.” She gave the steering wheel a vicious twist and turned the car into our driveway. Pulling the key from the ignition, she grabbed up her purse and popped the door open. “Get out, go to your room, and do your homework until dinner. No phone calls or computer.”

Flinching as she slammed the door closed angrily, I grabbed up my backpack and headed inside. I really didn’t give the kid a black eye – one of the many bullies at my school did, and he blamed it on me. And later, I shoved him into the ditch. Because he deserved it. And just today, he came up to me and tried to trip me on the way to lunch – instead, he missed and ended up falling flat onto his face, breaking his own nose in the process. And of course, I was blamed. For shoving him.

Kicking the door shut, I dropped my black bag onto my bed and dropped into my chair in front of the table. It had been two years since I’d moved from Washington State to the middle of nowhere Arizona and I still didn’t fit in. I wanted to be home again. I wanted to be Rey Richards, the popular kid, instead of Rey Richards, the kid who gets picked on all the time.

With a sigh, I pulled my homework out of my bag and started to write in it, listening to some music at the same time. Don’t worry, the kid deserved it. And not every good deed goes unpunished, a silky voice purred in my head.

This was the evil voice inside my head that I sometimes listened to. I called it the Phoenix. It was silly really, naming something inside of me. It was all in my head. How do you know I’m not?

Go away, I thought back.

I felt a not-so-friendly smile, and the voice disappeared.

I worked in silence for a while, enjoying it with my music while it lasted. Phoenix sometimes returned at random times and I wanted to be able to do my homework in peace until then.

Then my pen stopped on top of a problem. I couldn’t answer it. It just wouldn’t come to me. Take your time, it’ll come to you, the Phoenix said inside my mind. I sighed.

Why don’t you leave me alone?

There was a laugh. How can I, Rey? I’m part of you, aren’t I? If you want me to leave, you might as well kill yourself – as long as you live, I live. That’s how it goes, it cackled back at me.

Are you a real person? I wondered.

There was a curious smile that I felt in its voice. Do you think I am?

No, because it would be impossible.

Nothing’s impossible.

My hands curled into fists. What is it with you and proverbs? You’re not a sage or monk or whatever they’re called so stop it with the proverbs and just leave me the hell alone! I screamed at him. Without thinking, I turned and slammed my fists into cement wall beside my desk.

Gasping with pain that exploded out from my wrists, I turned and collapsed onto the ground, falling out of the chair, cradling my aching hands to my chest. Then I listened. For a while, everything was silent except for the music that hummed pleasantly in my ears, but then I felt elated – the Phoenix was gone. For now.

“Rey, dinner,” my mother’s curt voice called up the stairs.

“Coming,” I called back.

Shaking out my hands, I opened the door and dashed down the stairs.

The Crystalline Tear

There is a legend among our people that every one thousand years, the heavens would align and the Crystalline Tear will drop from the heavens itself and drop into our world below. It is said that this tear is the very substance of life itself. When it falls into our world, all madness, anger, hate, and evil vanishes, leaving behind a pure land, as once before, when time first began.

But the Tear lands in places where no one will find it, to use it as evil, and none can see it, except for one special child of pure soul, pure heart, and pure vision, who will find it and use it for good.

It is said that this child of heaven, sent down during the years before the Tear, in order to grow, and accustom itself to the customs of the land, will find this Tear every time it drops. Only this child can see this Tear because of its pure vision, can feel the Tear because of its pure heart, and can use it for good because of its pure soul….

-------

“Tawson!” a faraway voice snapped.

The child whose name it belonged to snapped awake on the desk out of her stupor of half-sleep, half-daydream. Blinking bleary eyes that changed color in the light of the sun, the girl raised her golden head from the desk.

“Sweetie, please pay attention to the text and sleep later,” the same voice said again, this time a little softer.
Rubbing her eyes, fifteen year old Linda Tawson nodded and sat up. Recently, dreams and visions had been plaguing her mind, taking a good night’s sleep from her every night. And there was nothing she could do about it except let the visions come and sleep whenever she could – even if it was in the middle of her classes.

The class then continued, letting Linda, or Lin, as everyone called her, think about her newest vision. It was quite unlike the other ones – bright and pure, filled with happiness and hope.

Magical Murders

“Dang it!” a frustrated shout echoed off the bedroom walls belonging to a young man named Aaron Hastings. There was a bang as something was hit very hard with a piece of twisted plastic.
“Aaron?” a voice called from downstairs.

Footsteps on the landing told Aaron that someone was coming to his door. With a sigh of surrender, Aaron let his head come down, banging into the keys of his laptop with a plastic-muffled crunch. His bedroom door opened and his guardian, Pat Keys, was revealed standing there, eyeing the messy bedroom for a moment before she picked her way through the rubbish and clothes strewn over the carpet.

Pat Keys reached out and touched Aaron on the shoulder. “Aaron, what’s the matter, honey?” she asked the teen gently.

“Computer’s having seizures,” he mumbled back.

Pat Keys sighed. “Well, you’ve been working at it and banging at it for a while so I don’t see why it should have seizures,” she told the back of Aaron’s sandy-brown hair. “Why don’t you come down to have some cake? It’s fresh – just out of the oven.”

There was no response.

“Either that or clean up your room,” she added.

Immediately, Aaron made an effort to get up and head downstairs.

Pat held the door open and let Aaron past her before she glanced back into his bedroom once more with a look of doubt at the clothes and junk strewn across the room, hanging off the backs of chairs, on the bed, and out of the closet and the drawers. She glanced at the mangled plastic machine that had been the focus of Aaron’s frustration for the past several days and with a sigh, she closed the door behind her.

But when she turned to follow Aaron down the stairs, she realized that he hadn’t even moved for the stairs – in fact, he was staring out the window as several police cruisers screamed into the neighborhood and slid to a stop on his street, right in front of his house. The only thing that gave the two occupants of 422 23rd Way some relief was that the police weren’t stopping at their house – they were stopping on 467, just across the street.
And Aaron had seen what had drawn them to the quiet neighborhood before the cruisers had come and blocked his view.

A pale white figured lay deathly still on the grass in front of 467 23rd Way.


Together, Pat and Aaron grabbed their jackets, stuffed whatever shoes were at the door onto their feet and hurried out the door to see what was going on. The neighbors had the same thoughts as well and Aaron watched as he walked as neighbors that he’d known for years all turned out to see what all the ruckus was.

Aaron and Pat were the first to reach the scene, allowing them to see clearly what had happened. Almost immediately, Pat turned away, a hand to her mouth, her face almost as pale as the corpse that lay on the crisp frost-dusted lawn. Aaron watched as police talked to the owners of the house, kept people at bay, and kept the press that had arrived soon after away.

Suddenly, a microphone was jabbed under his chin and he was spun around to face the gleaming shiny glass eyes of the cameras of the media, all crowding around him, clamoring for news. “Tell me, young man, do you live here?” a woman in the front asked. He glanced down and saw that she was the one who had jabbed the microphone at him.

“Er, no, I live across the –”

“What’s your name?”

“Aaron, I –”

“Did you hear anything last night or the night before? Any gunshots? Suspicious sounds? Anything to hint at all that there was going to be a murder on your street?” the woman asked, her voice intense. Her dark eyes dared him to answer, to leave, to do anything. Aaron was uncomfortable – he had never had so much attention on himself before and now, it was overwhelming. And where was Pat?

“No, I –”

“Where were you the night before? What happened? Did you see anything?”

“I was home, but –”

“Okay, that’s enough, pack it up guys, get out of here,” a quiet voice commanded. Grumbling, the press eventually trickled away to find another victim for their interview. Aaron turned to find himself face-to-face with a man he’d never met before. His green eyes watched Aaron with a curious interest. Black hair was pulled back into a rough ponytail behind his head. The stranger wore a long black jacket.

“Thanks,” Aaron mumbled, swiping away a strand of loose hair away from his face.

The man smiled, raised two fingers in acknowledgement, and then seemed to vanish into thin air. Aaron blinked for a moment, but then decided it must have been the play of the winter sun in his eyes that made him imagine it and went to find Pat.

Desolation

I looked around the streets and trembled with sorrow. A whirl of leaves blew by in front of me as I started up the empty streets of my hometown. The wind, my only companion, tugged at my clothes and hair, urging me down the street. My body trembled as I strode down the desolate street, feeling lonelier than I have ever before. I touched everything I passed, feeling the coldness of the smooth wood of the fence, the cold bark of the trees, the wooden roughness of sign posts. Stopping beside the boarded-up window of an abandoned store, I felt the tears gathering in my eyes and with a heavy sigh, I let myself collapse onto the sidewalk and –

I fell out of my seat with a startled thump at the reality of the vision, my eyes opening. “You all right?” a voice asked me.

Blinking in the bright light, I was slowly aware of a rattling movement around me. Then my vision cleared and Jem, my best and only friend, appeared in my vision, his beautiful blue eyes anxious.

Under his worried gaze, I pulled myself back onto the hard bench of the stagecoach and straightened my skirts. "Aye," I sighed and leaned against the window again. Bandits had come through my hometown a few weeks ago and they had caused so much terror in the town, that it ended up chasing everyone away. They had killed people - massacred them more like - among them, my own parents. After they left, they left behind a ghost town - a town completely reduced in its former glory. And they had also left me behind.

Welcome

Welcome to The Raven Stories.

...ok before I go all formal and everything, I would just like to say, welcome! Welcome, welcome, to my blog. I'm a teen novelist and though I'm not well known, I just want to share my stories with all of you. I've got hundreds of them on my computer, and none of them have anywhere to go.

And most of them are incomplete too.

SO. I'll be posting my just-started, incomplete stories here and let you all read them. I've already finished one novel, by the way, and I'm proud of it, even though it still needs a lot of work.

Feel free to suggest anything you think the story should turn into - usually I don't like having people do this because it ruins my line of thinking but in this case, type away - I need your guys' opinions on this stuff.

About the name...I needed a name to call the collection of stories I had here so I picked out something that would sound cool (to me) and not too common either...and came up with "The Raven Stories". After all, stories do take flight....

ANYWAYS. The formal part.

I have every right to own these stories because each one of them are mine and I solemnly swear that I will not be posting any stories that aren't mine on here unless their creators ask me to. If that is the case, then their names will be set next to the title in the post, to show that the story does not belong to me. If you don't see a name, know that it is my original story. Please do not steal any stories on this blog - it's an illegal crime and you can actually be sued for stealing.

Comments or questions? Just post it.

Feel free to post on any story - all comments (anonymous or not) are appreciated.

Yay! Formal part - finished.

Ok, here's how I organize this thing.

I will post a new story (maybe more) up every week - if it's an update from a previous story, there will be a * next to it and in the post, I will provide a link to the previous update so that you can see what has changed (or maybe I'll just post the new portion as an add-on and provide the link to the previous sections...I still haven't decided).

I will try to check this blog as often as possible and as often as my time allows me so if you've posted any questions, I'll answer them all as best as possible in a new post when I post my new stories every week.

Thanks for visiting. ^^