Spoiler again!!!

This is just a short part in one of my stories that I (strangely) was really proud of. It's from one of the stories that's all connected to most everything else I write.


Atara had enjoyed dinner, seeing all the little children, learning their names, but something felt strange. It hadn’t even been a full day since the fire, and she was suddenly acting like she had stepped into a paradise. She felt comforted, but that comfort was shrouded with guilt. It was almost as if she was glad her parents were dead. The thought sickened her. Soon she hadn’t been able to spoon another portion of her stew into her mouth, and then she’d excused herself early. Now she sat here, on the bed of her new and unfamiliar bedroom, feeling strange, awkward, guilty; she thought that she would become diseased because of it. And then something came to her mind that seemed to punch her in the stomach, stick a lump in her throat, give her a headache—no, a heartache.
Lord Verdisis and Lady Maiream were her parents, and they were dead.
Atara’s home was gone.
Nothing could bring anything back.
And she couldn’t do anything about any of it.
Atara put her hand over her aching heart and began to hyperventilate. Her breathing felt hard and slow, but she knew it was coming fast, terrifyingly fast. She was paying so much attention to her alarming breathing that she couldn’t feel the large, burning tears that spilled, cascaded down her cheeks until she had fallen onto her pillow and begun sobbing loudly, as if she would cry her heart out through her throat and die with tears never dry on her face. She wanted to die; it didn’t seem so scary and final anymore. It felt so appropriate! She didn’t even think of how Jaren would feel if she did die. All that was happening to her now was her tears, not even simply tears but more a waterfall made out of sorrow, stinging on her cheeks, and the pillow that was becoming ever wetter. Atara didn’t even know her own voice when it let out a pitiful, wrenching wail, and how it moaned of its own accord. She began hiccoughing and gasping for breath in a strange, distressed manner.
This—this horror, this nightmare was consuming her; Atara was falling into a pit of despair. It was as if she looked down upon herself, inside a dark, wet hole, looking thin, pale, sullen, gaunt, and even aged. The vision showed her writhing and thrashing around dangerously in pain. Atara didn’t know herself; she just wanted to forget it, forget everything, and maybe even forget what had happened and who she was.
Suddenly the vision simply went away, and everything became dark. Atara felt exhausted and lost, and then her thoughts and feelings became mixed in a pot of nothing.
She slept soundly and heavily all night.
Atara didn’t leave her bed when she woke in the morning, neither did she leave it at noon. She ate nothing and fell asleep crying again. That night she had a dream, or at least something she had seen during the night.
She was walking through a hall that was very simple and plain, the floor, walls, and ceiling made of wood, small sconces lit with drooping, mostly melted candles. She smelled something that must have been old, maybe even dead, and she looked for a room it must have been coming from. Then she realized, there were no doors lined along the corridor, only the sconces that held the melting candles, which she noticed, were red. A whisper seemed to tap her shoulder, and say, “Atara, we love you,” and it echoed through the hallway. The voice repeated the same words, and this time Atara could tell that it was a woman’s voice speaking. All the candles then flared for a sudden second, before returning to their normal sizes. Atara stared at them, for they each began dripping wax, and as it dropped onto the floor, she had expected it to hiss and smolder, but it did not. As the woman’s voice repeated the same loving words, it began to sound familiar. Atara put her hand under one of the candles and let the wax drip into her hand. To her surprise, it did not burn. Lifting her hand to see the wax in the candlelight, she suddenly screamed. It wasn’t wax. It was blood.
“Atara, we love you,” her mother whispered.