The Promise of the Dawn

Prologue

People often ask me how I became a Quisling. The truth is, I never really had an option.

 I grew up amidst a war, and my family consisted of three girls and three boys, not including our parents. My brothers were drafted to fight in the war, along with my father, and the fighting ended up consuming each of them.

My father was taken by disease within the first thirty days of the war. My oldest brother was shot with an arrow four days later. An infection in his wound spread quickly and a few hours later, his heart stopped.

This left my two youngest brothers to fend for themselves, but nine days later, my second eldest brother was captured, tortured, and killed by our enemies, and my youngest brother? They say he was killed by the grief of having to watch his own brother die in front of him. I know the real reason. 

Suicide.

Exactly forty-four days into the war, half of my family had been picked off, leaving me and my two youngest sisters at the mercy of our mother.

She had been a responsible parent up until our father and brothers died, but after their deaths, her mental health started deteriorating. She chose to focus more on the grief she felt for those she'd lost instead of focusing on those that she had left.

But my sisters and I had other things to worry about besides vying for our mother's attention. Without our father as our source of income, and the deteriorating economy due to the war zones destroying crops, we could barely afford to put food on the table, and often times there wouldn't be anything on it at all.

We tried to convince our mother to get a job in order to support us, but she refused to leave the house because she had convinced herself she had nothing left to live for, after already losing half her family.

Because of our mother's unwillingness to leave the house, we were kicked out of our house only one week after we received the news that the war had taken our father and all our brothers. We couldn't afford rent, and we were forced to live on the streets, begging for anything the strangers that walked by us had the heart to give.

In order to escape the misery of the streets, I would sneak out of the village every night while my family slept and walk over to the forest that separated the village from the areas in which all the Nobles lived. 

One night, I stumbled across an old, abandoned cottage located within a large open field and settled right next to the forest. I wasted no time in running back to the village to tell my mother and sisters of my discovery. Anything was better than the streets, so the following morning, we went back to the cottage, this time staying there for the night.

Over the next couple of weeks, we fixed up the cottage, removing vines, sweeping floors, and patching up broken bricks until the cottage was transformed from an abandoned one, to a slightly more livable one.

My mother's mental health was quickly restored after coming to the cottage. She even taught me how to hold a bow and arrow so we could hunt for our own food. But, as her mental health improved, her physical health began slowly deteriorating instead. She suddenly contracted a sickness unknown to me and my sisters.

Unable to afford proper medicine and treatment, we began researching homemade remedies and made them for her, but the remedies did not prevail. A few days after her first symptoms, our mother died, leaving me as the sole provider for me and my sisters.

At the ages of eighteen, sixteen, and fourteen, my sisters and I were left to fend for ourselves.