Dawn - The Burning Night

Chapter 1

Acacia Point of View

What you know is a drop and what you don't know is an ocean.

I've always heard this quote and quite agree to it; only now I think that ocean is a very small reference to what was happening around me.

When my parents named me Acacia Dawn Winters, they wanted me to be honorable and a ray of light to people around me.

Typical, I know. But hey, I love my name despite of any meaning they attach to it.

Honorable –

Ray of Light –

Only now did I understand what a joke it was.

The moment my consciousness has started to slowly fill back into my dark parts of my brain, the past one year on the abandoned spooky island played like a dream.

A nightmare!

Everything that happened to me hit me hard again and again as the awareness of my surroundings was getting clearer.

One by one, every moment was like a hammer on nail hitting inside my mind, causing me pain yet numbing me from inside. And when the dream of life's reality came to climax, I gasped out loudly and opened my eyes like a shot of bullet.

My baby!

My son!

I don't know when I started to cry but when my eyes were shot open, I could already taste salt on my lips. Slowly, my surrounded came clearer to me and the ache in my body told me about its presence.

Trailing my eyes around, I knew I was being too hopeful for all the hell of past months to be a nightmare. What I'm seeing now is no different than what I have in all these months here.

I was lying on the soft bed in the room that I have occupied in an year of my stay in the castle.

There were a few changes in the décor, the room was blinding neat and smells mildly good. I, myself, was in neat clothes and the same bed that was previously drenched in child birth blood is now all clean and new.

Immediately my eyes landed on a crib that was situated a step away from the bed and a small sigh escaped my mouth.

Gritting my teeth, my silently bore the pain and exhaustion of childbirth and sat up with great difficulty. I don't know for how long I was asleep but now that I'm all awake, I can no longer feel the coldness of being alone.

The air has warmth of being surrounded by many.

There was buzzing of footsteps moving outside my room. There was laughter, loud chatting, hollering and hooting; I can feel sitting in the middle of a lively town.

"Why is it so damn loud here suddenly?" I wondered out. Before preparing to stand up, I drank some water from the glass on the nightstand. Only when I was not limply tired did I slowly attempted to stand up.

It took me a few minutes, yes but once I stood and no longer felt that painful, my legs carried me towards the window from where the buzz of several people can be heard.

Holding the windowsill tightly, I sighed heavily and leaned against the sill and looked out. The eyeball were almost out of my sockets when I saw the scene before me.

The once wild jungle was now occupied by houses and people. The once small island now looks like it has stretched to several hundred miles which now looks like not a mere small town but a huge city.

"How long was I asleep?" I thought when I could see a market place far away from the hill. Although pretty far, with the help of midday sun, I could see hundreds of people, old and young, rich and poor, going around buying and selling things.