South of SomeWhere (-Editing-)

Prologue (Part 1)

Travesties are rarely ignored.

Most of the time they are exploited to make a splashy headline, or a snippet of gossip whispered behind someone's back. Journalists, risking life and limb, scavenge down the minutest of clues. And if someone dies, the majority of the population throws a big memorial service as if the bigger a fuss they make, the more it will be remembered.

However, the travesty that caused me to become dead to my world and threw me onto the RMS Quetta at exactly 9:17 p.m. was utterly wiped from everyone's memory but mine.

Travesties can't be ignored. So now it's up to me to make sure mine is remembered.

I've never been able to stomach war. Call me a softie or a whimp, but if someone turns on Kick Ass 2 and forces me to watch Chloe Grace Mortez gutting, disemboweling, and slicing her victims to shreds in hate filled vengeance, you probably should never think of walking home alone at night. Ever. again.

Some psychologists say that the worst moments in a child's life can overshadow any good events that happens to them. As adults, we more often forget the rush of excitement from our first vacation, and instead, replace it with the memory of a brother's betrayal. The excruciating pain, crippling tears, and wallowing sludge of depression fills up the bucket of our small child-like soul and pushes out the bright, clear, and beautiful. Why remember the good when there is so many unpleasant things to dwell on?

This is what happened to me effectively stopping my life's clock, erasing all memories in the past, and making what I remembered of my childhood to be nothing but fancy.

Except my travesty was a ball.

The day before the ball every thing was a hustle and a bustle. I was turning fourteen in a week and my father, the benevolent king, had decided to give me my coming out ball. I was ecstatic. All the new people, different cultures, and languages to experience were none the less thrilling to a naive thirteen year old. So naive I didn't notice my mother's tight smile as she put me to bed that night. All I could think about was the violin solo I was playing for the crowd of royalty.

I was one of the children blessed by the gods with long musician fingers, so when I was four, my Mum, the Queen, had immediately ordered the royal musician to our library, ordering him to bring any instruments he could find. There were scads and scads of them. Violas and clarinets fought the basses for supremacy, while the French horns clobbered the tubas. There were things that squeaked and things that moaned. Things that banged, and things that buzzed. And my mother was certain that I was going to pick and play at least one of them by the end of the afternoon. I stared at everything in amazement, and listened with rapt attention as the court musician gave examples of their sound and how they were played. Then, he played a trilling melody on a polished piece of tin.

"What's that?" I asked swinging my legs back and forth from my seat on Mama's hightop oak writing desk.

"A flute," he responded with a trill from the instrument, so sharp Mama screamed.

"Don't ever do that again!!" she shrieked. I loved it. As the high decibels rang in my ear, I relished in the clear cadence they possessed. My eardrums wanted to be assaulted again by the piercing noise, but they cried when he put the instrument in its case. He turned his back to me, and came boldly forward to the edge of the desk, a wooden instrument cradled carefully in his hands.

"What's that?" I asked for what was the hundredth time that day. Instead of placing it under his chin and bowing off a pretty melody, he handed it to me with a slight bow.

"For you my lady."

"Well at least that's settled," my mother said, and she left to attend to the dinner preparations.

I stared for a good long time at the wooden thing in my hands. What was it do with it? I wasn't given a choice, and so, for a moment , I loathed the instrument. In my youth, I was a petulant and stubborn child, a trait my mother hates, but I used to my full advantage. I preferred doing things on my own, and I was angry that my Mama had picked out an instrument for me. Frankly, I refused to play the damn thing. I didn't pick it up for a month. Then, my insatiable curiosity got the better of me and one day while Mama and Papa were out visiting a nearby village, I picked it up. I fitted it under my chin, and bowed a string. It sounded awful. Balancing it bow and violin in my left hand, I flipped through the elementary song book the court musician had left. I remembered what he had told me before he'd left.

"This is the E," he said motioning to the furthest string to the right. "And they get thicker as they go up. A,D, & G. Follow the string letters and put down each finger like so, see?"

I just stared as was my usual, and the man gave a self depreciating smile. "Try it some time?" I was silent. "Ah uhm," and after scratching the back of his neck he left.

That day for a whole hour I slaved over Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Not to say that toward the last fifteen minutes I was hating the song with a vengeance, but the way it felt, the sound up close to my ear, caressing my eardrums in the somewhat soothing sound, the way the string felt under my untrained fingertips was satisfying.

After that, I did it again.

And I never stopped.

When I had first brought up the idea to my father, he looked at me with his stern, kingly eyes and said,"Are you certain? If you do this there will be at least a thousand people looking at you, judging you. Not all people are kind Ayvee Lee. Do you want that?"

I paused. I'd never thought of this obstacle. I peered up at him from under my lashes, where I sat on his knee, and when our eyes connected I was startled by what I found there. He looked weary. And old. Older than his forty some years. And tired. Oh, so tired of the world, and as if he wished he could have a break. A break from the contant daily struggle of appeasing a realm which in the end would stab him in that back only to wish they had kept him around longer.

I nodded.