--Eyrarbakki, Iceland--
Einar was raised in the family business of fishing. He lived with his parents in a beautiful, quaint, blue house on a hill that overlooked the sparkling cerulean sea. Einar and his father would spend their days out on the crystal sea, chatting as they waited for the fish to bite. As the sun set-sometimes a bit sooner-they would return to their modest house where his mother and twin sister would clean their catch for sale the following day.
It was a simple, quiet, and usually enjoyable life. It was a life Einar would come to barely remember.
"Einar!" his mother called. "Jóhanna! It's time for dinner!"
Einar looked in horror at his young twin. He pointed at her. "You're covered in mud!"
"What?" His sister, Jóhanna, looked down at herself.
Currently they sat at the bottom of the hill, their house looming over their shoulder. A storm had rolled through the night before, both children being awoken several times by loud thunder crashes. In the morning the pair hurried through their chores, wanting to get outside and enjoy the fresh summer's air. They had been playing in a mud puddle all afternoon, not fully comprehending the consequences of their actions.
Immediately Jóhanna began to cry.
"Don't cry," Einar said, rolling his eyes.
Jóhanna grew frantic. She tried removing the mud from her clothes, but it did little more than press the mud deeper into the fabric.
"Einar! Jóhanna!" their mother called again at the top of the hill. "Where are you?"
Jóhanna shouted in frustration, flinging mud at her brother. "This is all your fault!"
"My fault?" Einar spat, eyes widening.
Jóhanna flung more mud at her brother. "Yes! This was your idea-"
Einar hastily got to his feet, slipping. Regaining his balance he clenched his hands into small fists, glaring at his sister. "You went along with it! It's not like you said you didn't want to!"
Jóhanna got to her feet then, too, and shoved her brother squarely in the chest. Einar shoved her back. Before long, the pair were back in the mud, wrestling each other and pulling at each other's hair.
"I'm going to tell your father," their mother's voice called, slicing through their argument like a knife. The pair froze. With that threat from their mother they scrambled up, Jóhanna giving her brother a final shove.
As slowly as humanly possible they clambered up the hill. Looking back on it, Einar knew this hill was probably small. As a child, however, it seemed like a veritable mountain. When they finally crested the hill, their mother audibly gasped. The pair came to stand just below the first porch step, not looking their mother in the eye.
"Your clothes!" she all but shrieked. "Your shoes! Oh, and your hair! Look at your hair!"
Jóhanna glared at Einar. He didn't pay attention, face burning in shame.
"Oh, never mind," the matron of the house tisked. "Just come in, come in. Father is waiting, and you know how displeased he is if dinner is late."
The two skulked into the house. Slipping off their muddy shoes, they left them outside. The pair slowly made it to the bathroom, pausing only once to peek at their father.
The large man sat at the table. His face was obscured by the newspaper he was reading. The twins took this as a blessing and rushed past, shutting the sliding door behind them as quietly as humanly possible.
Wordlessly they cleaned themselves, exchanging glares every so often. The sink quickly turned a disgusting gray-brown. This too would be something they would get in trouble for (as would the heap of dirty clothes they were going to leave piled in the corner). Without exchanging words they silently agreed that these additional infractions wouldn't be worth making dinner delayed any longer than it already had been.
The pair slunk out. Their mother busied herself silently, bringing the bowls of food to the table. Without a word, the children took their seats.
"You're late," came the low, authoritative statement from their father. He didn't move the paper from his face.
"We're sorry father," they spoke in unison. They didn't mean to speak in that way, but it always seemed to happen.
Finally the man folded his paper, putting it down beside himself on the table. His twins didn't move, staring down at their plates that were being filled with food.
Suppressing a chuckle, he spoke firmly. "So; how are my children?"
Instead of answering, the children merely began picking at their supper.
"What's this I hear about you being covered in mud?"
Both their faces felt like flames, and they guiltily glanced at one another, yet still they didn't speak.
"Well," their mother prodded after a moment. "Answer your father."
With that, the twin's heads snapped up, and they began speaking all at once and over each other.
"It was all Jóhanna's idea-"
"Einar was the one who wanted to go digging in the mud-"
"She flung mud in my hair-"
"I reminded him that it rained last night, and we would get dirty-"
Einar's head snapped right to gawk at his sister. "You snot nosed, little suck up of a loser-"
Jóhanna raised her fist, eyes wide and looking at her brother wildly.
"Enough!" their father boomed. The pair froze, Jóhanna's fist still in the air.
"Your father did not ask you to start blaming each other," their mother said softly, looking down at her noodles, twirling them in her utensils.
"No dessert for either of you. Two weeks."
"Two weeks!" they cried in unison.
Now their father was actually angry. He slammed his fist on the table. "Enough!"
The pair jumped. Tears immediately sprung to his daughter's eyes.
"I can make it three weeks if you'd like! You should be thankful to have dessert at all-"
Einar would never know the end of that sentence. Just then, the front door burst open. Einar watched in horror as masked men dressed all in black rushed in. His head whipped around at the sudden cacophony of things breaking. Glass shattered and rained down on their food as the windows situated behind them were being broken into. Within moments, the table was surrounded.
Jóhanna clung to her brother, gawking at the people that surrounded them. Einar realized they weren't all men-there were women in the swath, too. They all held weapons, most different from one another. Einar had never seen so many weapons before-knives, guns, swords, clubs, batons, bos.
"Stop!" their father said desperately. "I knew this day would come but-please. Please, just-spare my family. Please. Take me-"
One of the assassins standing directly behind the twin's mother beheaded her with a sword.
Chaos broke out. Einar froze, unable to take his stunned eyes off his mother's head that had landed on the table and was currently bleeding all over it. His sister besides him fainted, toppling over. Meanwhile his father jumped up, removing weapons of his own that Einar never even knew his father possessed.
Einar watched in abhorrence as his father stood his ground. For the rest of his life, Einar would feel guilty for not doing something, anything, to help defend his father. Instead he watched as his father was cut and stabbed, kicked and punched. He was thrown at one point and then finally shot in the chest, just to the side of his shoulder. Staggering and releasing a final bellow, his father lunged at the attackers. He was shot a final time in the head. He collapsed, glassy eyes staring up directly into Einar's face.
It was then Einar finally did something. He screamed.
Besides him, his sister was murdered by the same assassin that had beheaded his mother. Jóhanna had screamed, awoken from her faint. In horrific pain from being run through, she reached out to her brother. Beyond repulsed he began to hyperventilate, scurrying away from her backwards on his hands and feet. He watched as the woman-yes, it was a woman-stabbed his sister over and over.
It was only when his sister stopped making noises, her whimpers and gurgles being replaced by disgusting squelching sounds as her body was used almost like a pin cushion, did he realize he was the only one left. He wrapped his arms around his legs, shoving his face against his drawn-up knees, not knowing what else to do.
Please, he prayed silently to anyone or anything that would listen. I don't want to die. I'll do anything-anything, I promise! Please! Please, someone save me!
Anything? a voice replied silently, a voice that was decidedly not his own. It was a voice lacking sanity, decency; sinister and frightening.
Something in Einar's head shifted. It felt as though something had wriggled into the very folds of his brain. With a startling realization, he felt it wasn't something in his head-it was someone.
Flip the table over you, the voice spoke to him urgently. Now!
Einar scurried forward. Using all of this strength he toppled the table over, his mothers head and food spilling everywhere, and he cowered behind it. To his horror someone started attacking him. Bullets shot through the wood, showering him in splinters and sawdust.
Covering his ears he screamed, curling into a small ball. After a few moments he realized the shooting had stopped. Bewildered, he looked around himself. Not a single shot had hit him. He hadn't even been so much as grazed.
"He's still alive," a voice said in an Australian accent. Einar didn't know what he had said, not speaking any sort of English.
Get up right now, the voice in his head commanded.
Einar jumped up. The woman with the sword was coming at him. Reflexively he side-stepped. Without thinking, he reached out, grabbed the woman's wrist, and kicked her in the shin as hard as he could. She yelped and dropped her sword in sheer surprise.
Get the sword!
Einar grabbed it. It was heavy, and he was only nine years old. He could barely lift it.
Everyone in the room froze. Someone snickered. Someone else laughed. Before long, everyone in the room was laughing. Though he could only pick out a few Icelandic words here and there, he knew everyone was making fun of him.
KILL THEM.
Screaming, Einar ran the woman through. Her eyes bulged. For a moment her mouth flapped open and closed. The room went utterly silent. She let out a long, high-pitched moan, and then began to fall over. Einar grunted, almost falling over with her.
Get the sword out!
The child stumbled, yanking on the weapon. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally he got it out. He brandished it, waving it around as others slowly approached him.
"Forget it," someone said in Mandarin, yet another language Einar didn't comprehend. "They've started the place on fire upstairs. He'll go down with the building."
Einar didn't understand at first why everyone began rushing outside. Through his shock from everything that had just occurred, he abruptly realized part of the ceiling was flaming and caving in, and the room had filled with smoke and embers. Coughing and retching, Einar stumbled out of his burning home, dragging his sword behind him.
Einar stumbled down the hill his sister and he had been playing on not fifteen minutes ago. He tripped, falling into the mud sideways. Weakly he propped himself up. He could just barely see the flames eating his house over the hill. A long tendril of black smoke was already making its way high into the perfect summer's sky.
Retching a final time in the mud, Einar fell into the sweetness of unconsciousness.