big dream ent ©

EPISODE ONE

CAMELLIA AKANA.

There's blood.

Warm, vicious, metallic, it's a silvery feeling clinging to the creases of my skin, a distinct sharpness that causes my heart to pulse wildly. I panic, trying to escape. It's then I notice the bodies.

Seven of them. As it is every night, when this same scene replays over and over again in my head. As it was the first night, when this scene was a reality in front of me.

I stumble back. Like me, their clothing and skin are stained with velvet red, as if some hazy, insanical paint had splattered over us all. But their eyes are cold, void of emotion, hollow. Their eyes are dead.

They are dead.

I wake up screaming.

It takes a moment for me to realize where I am—safe in my bedroom, blending in with all the other farms in the Kingdom of Courage, playing the role of the elder sister in the ever so normal Akana family of three. No matter how common my nightmares, there are days where it is unbearably realistic, unbearably painful. It's those days I wake up at ungodly times, head downstairs, and fumble around until I can feel at least somewhat normal again.

It's one of those days. This week has constantly been those days.

I blindly find my favorite pair of slippers (fluffy green dragon-design ones with wings that flap when I step on the heels) and stumble downstairs. My adopted mother, Leilani, is sitting at the corkscrew dining table, a map of the Seven Kingdoms opened and spread across the flat surface, a pot of tea and a matching teacup pushed aside in abandon as she stabs little pins into marked areas on the monochrome surface. She notices me. She sighs. She knows.

I say nothing as I slip onto one of the seats, watching my mother work. There are tiny stains where I assume my adopted younger sister, Takara, had had her way with it, though Leilani doesn't seem to mind. She hardly notices them, brushing aside a bread crumb from what I assume was her breakfast mindlessly. I'm not quite sure exactly what each marker means—Leilani doesn't like to explain things to me or Takara often—but it's not too difficult to take a guess.

There are pins stabbed in each of the Kingdoms of Courage, Beauty, Heat, Prosperity, Warriors, and Contemporary—the Kingdoms where each caretaker has hidden their Renegades for the past six years, just like Leilani has hidden Takara and me away. And then in the very center, the only colored area on the map, there's a single pin pressed into the Empire of Etira.

The only Renegade still in the Empire we escaped from six years ago.

There's a solemnity hanging over Leilani's head as she gazes down at her work. She doesn't say anything, so I don't either, content with the silence. For once, we seem to have a rare, calm, sad quiet that lets us just breathe—