The Twilight of a Lost World

Bright Hope opened a cheered smile while looking in a mirror. For a time she thought her pale appearance was strange or odd, but she soon learned that there are people of all kinds in the world, and she wasn't a unique case where the skin matched the color of the hair.

Even so, she stopped a moment to see herself and how much she had grown in the past years. She wasn't a child anymore, she was a woman. A normal girl, yet she knew that behind her golden eyes there were a myriad of secrets, secrets that came with her mysterious powers.

The issue she had was with her looks. The fact that her skin and hair were both of a light gray color, a color that was almost white, made her feel odd whenever she was near her friends.

She sighed. So many things happened in her life that she couldn't help but look around her room, a place decorated with mementos of everything she loved, and everything she would need to leave behind.

A shelf with many toys and some portraits of her and her friends from school, below it was her bed filled to the max with many stuffed animals, mostly dogs and wolves. On the western wall there was her computer and by its side, hanging prideful in the wall, a tomahawk axe she earned in the Buffalo reservation. It's edge was ready for battle, something she would give it sooner than later.

She sighed again. Looking with a sad smile to the suitcase where all her essential things were. It was time to close it, and it was painful, yet she knew it was a necessary step.

Even so, as if waiting for something to happen, she walked slowly to it, but after the third step she hit something with her feet. When she checked, her eyes widened. It was her old diary, the one she had been writing ever since she was four.

So many memories inside, she couldn't contain herself, she took the diary and jumped on the bed amidst the stuffed toys and with the biggest smile she could muster, she dived into the pages.

January, 17th of 1998

Um... you know, it is a little strange to write things here, but mommy told me to do it, so I will try.

So... Nice to meet you, Mr diary, my name is Bright Hope, but you can call me Brighty, and I am four. My mommy told me to write here because "I'm too smart for my age and should practice writing". Not that I understood much.

You see, it's strange because mommy knows that I really like to write stuff, but I prefer drawing. Drawing stars and smiling wolves. The wolves are so cool!

If I could, I would love to be a wolf and howl at the moon every night. It would be SO MUCH FUN!

I would run through the forest, barking and howling and making friends with everyone, with the bulls, the birds, the trees... but not the penguins. They are evil.

...

Anyway, I believe she told me to write because I told her about my friend, Mister Voice. You know, he is really nice... Even if I really don't know if it is a he... Anyway, he is so cool!

He always answers any question I have, no matter how strange it is, like where's the cookie jar, where mommy hides my toys or why the sky is blue. The only problem is that I feel a little sleep later.

But when I told mommy about Mister Voice, she paled and asked me who he was, and I told her "He's my friend, and he's always with me"; so she took me to the church of sol to talk with a priest.

IT WAS SO BORING!

The priest even yelled at me because I tried to put a top hat in one of his helpers, I don't understand. Why was he so mad? His helper was sad and needed to smile, so I was helping him!

No one is sad wearing a hat!

NO ONE!

So... mommy talked to him for a time, and he asked me if Mister Voice wanted something from me, and because I didn't know, I asked him, and he said "NO".

After this, he said I was free to go and made a prayer over my head. It was strange, and it was really BORING.

By the way, mommy's belly is growing, is she getting fat?

A tender smiled cropped in Brighty's face when the memories of that day reappeared in her mind. It was funny how the priest and her mother believed she was possessed by some kind of demon. Her father tried for days without end to convince her that she had only an imaginary friend and nothing more, something common for the age.

Of course, he was wrong, "Mr. Voice" was... something else entirely, it wasn't a demon, it was something completely different. He was, and still is, is a tool, nothing less nor more, something she can use to gain knowledge about things she couldn't possibly know. Of course, when she was a kid, she didn't know it, and thought that the mechanic voice that answered her question was a friend, when in fact it was a "magical construct of knowledge", a tool that had no will or personality and could only answer questions, nothing more.

That was the reason that she stopped calling it "Mister Voice", it was no mister, it was a construct. Then she gave it another name to match it, Rez, because it could only respond to her questions.

So, with that in mind, she flipped to a random page.

August 10th, 1998

Why are we here?
Daddy told us that he was going to work here, and we would need to move to this, town BUT I DON'T LIKE IT!

There's only dirty here! And everyone is sad, and everything is dry.

Poor horses... There is nothing green for them to eat...
WAIT!
THEY HAVE HORSES!
I LOVE HORSES! WOLVES ARE BETTER BUT YOU CAN RIDE HORSES!
I CAN LEARN TO RIDE HORSES!
THIS PLACE IS SO COOL!
I WANT TO BE A SHERIFF AND RIDE MY WHITE HORSE INTO THE NIGHT TO FIGHT BAD GUYS!
I WOULD GO LIKE, PEW! PEW!
BEWARE BAD GUYS, IT'S ME, SHERIFF, BRIGHT HOPE!

Oh, I almost forgot, I have a little brother now.
He is SO CUTE.
He is bald and gray, I just can't understand why he is always frowning and HE IS A BABY!

Hope frowned a little, it did not matter how many things have changed in those years, not all her dreams came true.

Yes, she still wanted to be a sheriff, so much so that she would take the exam to enter the guard's corporation next year in the nearest town, but she never managed to learn how to ride a horse.

That was her biggest dream and her biggest failure.

The truth was even worse because she was, in fact, terrified by those equines, and no matter how tame the creature looked, every time she was near one of those animals she felt some sort of primal fear that she couldn't control.

In her mind, horses were evil. Not on the same level as penguins, but evil nonetheless (Even if the Rez denied those claims).

After thinking about the accursed horses, Brighty's mind drifted to the place she hated so much when she was little; Appleloosa. In her mind she found it funny how her opinion of the place changed with the year and how, with the help of her father, she started interacting with the people on the Buffalo's reservation.

'A bunch of fantastic and stubborn people' Bright though, as she remembered how hard it was for her and her family to receive the permission to work inside the Buffalo's tribe lands. Her father, a forest ranger, knew how to talk with the leader of the community and her mother, a teacher, helped with the tribe's education.

With time their relationship became so tight that her entire family moved to live inside the reservation, Brighty was even doing middle school with the natives.

And as the memory rolled on her mind, she recalled how her mother reacted to her adopting the native's culture. Of course, it was not something that happened from day to night, it was slow but sure.

First she learned about their way of life, about the harmony with the mother earth and father sky; then she, in secret, abandoned the faith in the "church of sol" and embraced the "faith of the light", a faith that no native had preached to her but that resonated with her heart.

And finally, to her mother's chagrin, she started training with the older guys and gals to be a tribe's hunter. It was not something she did to confront her mother, in fact, this training was something his dad supported. In his words,"A small girl like you needs to know how to defend herself", and she totally agreed.

My brother, on the other hand, was always in a bad mood. He never complained to me about it, but she knew how he disliked any type of violence; even so, she found it really entertaining seeing how Gray, the biggest, strongest and meanest looking of all the was such a pacifist. And the fact that he didn't know how to control his strength when sparring with others made everything even funnier. This seemed to warp his perception of things, making him feel as if he had a obligation to help those weaker than him, and giving him a sense of responsibility and responsibility. Of course, if she spoke anything about it to him, he would deny and would only grunt. But this was the way of her 'little' brother.

'The reservation... there was my true home' she thought, her eyes glancing to the axe hanging on the wall, her heart warm with memories.'I learned everything there, from basic math to how to swing an axe and survive a storm...'

Her eyes returned to the diary's pages, a nostalgic pain aching in her chest, she wished she could go back to that time. To a time when everything was easy.

She pondered a little about her feeling and started flipping her diary's pages, looking for some entry from the time she was living on the reservation. She found it and laughed out loud at its content.

December 2nd, 2004

WHY DID IT HAVE TO HAPPEN TO ME?

MY DAD KNEW I WAS GETTING MYSELF READY TO TAKE ON THE HUNTER'S TEST, TO BE A REAL MEMBER OF THE TRIBE, BUT NOOOO, HE NEEDED TO COME AND 'MAKE FRIENDS' WITH SOME STRANGE FOLKS FROM THAT TOWN AT EAST, AND HE 'NEEDED' TO MAKE A COMPROMISE TO VISIT THEM IN HEARTH WARMING EVE.

I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE YOUNGEST GIRLS TO EVER BEAT THE TEST, BUT NOOOOOOO; WE NEEDED TO VISIT THIS 'PIE FAMILY'.

NOW IT WILL TAKE A YEAR FOR ME TO TAKE ANOTHER TEXT, AND I AM CERTAIN THAT LITTLE FEATHER WILL PASS THE ONE THIS YEAR. BUT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ME!

I MAY NOT BE THE BEST ARCHER, BUT I CAN SWING AN AXE BETTER THAN ANYONE, AND, BY GOD, SHE CAN'T EVEN LIFT THE SHIELD!

...

No, I must be happy for her. She's my friend, and friends must be there for one another. It is like mom always says: "Nothing happens by chance".

Maybe it is not the time for me to take the hunter's text, maybe I'm not ready... And maybe those Pie folks are a good family to pass heart-warming with.

But I will not lose time, the codex told me I should learn a little about magic in the meantime, maybe it can be useful in the text next year.

'Little Feather... sometimes I ask myself if I would do well at the test or if we would perform the same way' Brighty frowned, remembering how delicate her friend was and how she had failed the test and how she almost fell from a cliff.

Now, with the power of hindsight, Brighty could see that she was being unreasonable and very much prideful. The test was something that even older hunters struggled with and consisted of hunting a predator and taking its fang as a trophy, which meant the task was really dangerous. To make it worse, when her mother learned about what had happened to Little Feather, she prohibited her and Gray from taking the hunter's test.

She remembered that when she learned this news, it almost broke her. It took her father and the leader of the tribe to speak to her to take her out of her depressive trance. Her father helped her accept that not everything happens the way we want it to happen, but what hit her the hardest was the leader of the tribe, Chief Sandhorn’s word and action, something she recalls vivid even to this day.

Brighty was lying in her bed inside her family's hut, a small but cozy wooden structure at the border of the tribe's village; her eyes were swollen from her tears, and her heart broken from her mother's words.

She had no goal nor will, and only wanted to be there, in that dark room lying on her bed. When she was going to just let her own existence continue without purpose, she heard a strong knock at the door.

At first, she didn't know it was. Her father and her mother were working at the time; and if she wasn't wrong, gray was trying again to spar with some unlucky kid. But then the knock was heard again, this time stronger and with a deep voice following it.

"Bright Hope, open the door."

It was not a question, but an affirmation of someone wise and old, and Brighty could only comply. Slowly, she walked to the door and opened it, being instantly confronted by the grandiose visage of chief Sandhorn. Her eyes widened when the enormous old man entered her room with severe eyes and with a strong presence. After some steps inside, he sat on the ground.

It was strange, as soon as the wise man entered the place, the room seemed warmer, calmer and the oppressive dark feeling was lifted in the blink of an eye. Besides that, Chief Sandhorn was wearing his ceremonial garments, including the feathery crest on his head.

"Bright Hope" Chief Sandhorn spoke again, his voice making Brighty shiver."You cannot take the Hunter's test, and so you can't become one of us..."

For a moment, tears started forming in Brighty's eyes, but it stopped when the Chief took his axe, a beautiful ornamented item, and put it on the ground in front of him.

"Even so, you are a follower of the Light, and this means you already ARE one of us." The Chief signaled to the girl to sit in front of him."The test is a way for us to honor the light, to show that we can protect our family and our tribe. Your life will inevitably take you away from here, but we will always be connected by the light that lives inside each one of us."

Brighty slowly took the axe while contemplating the Chief words, and she looked back at the old man. She felt a hint of pride coming from him.

"You trained with us, you lived with us, you are one of us. But this doesn't mean our path is the same. You should learn and adapt, never forget who you are or where you came from. Keep training, and maybe one day, when you can choose your own path, you can take the test by yourself". Sandhorn smiled gently to the girl and said:"You don't need any judge, because the Light is the real judge of our actions."

Tears flooded Brighty's eyes, she was proud. She would train, she would be the best, she would protect everyone she loved, and, when time comes, she would take the test by herself with the light as her witness. That was a promise.

Brighty smiled as the memory faded away, it has been so long since she met the old Chief, she really missed his guidance and wisdom. Maybe, after she did her "mission" she could travel to the reservation and show him her accomplishments.

And it was as her father always told, "Nothing happens by chance".

Anyway, it was because of her family's decision to meet the Pie family, she was able to meet a bunch of wonderful people. Not only that, but it became a tradition of sorts in her family to celebrate hearth's warming with them.

Of course, she was mad with her parents the first time she traveled to the "rock farm", in the middle of the hills south of the town of Hollow Rock; but after meeting the family, she felt relief.

There are all simple and kind, if not a little eccentric people. The patriarch of the house was named Igneous, and he was the one who befriended my father and invited us to spend the holiday, and the matriarch, Miss Cloudy Quartz, was the one in charge of the preparation.

Who would believe that a woman as serious as her would have a warmer side?

Anyway, beyond the two heads of the family, they had four daughters, and all of them worked at "harvesting" the minerals from the "rock farm" – a place that was full to the brim with rare types of rocks, especially one named rainbow quartz – and tending the small garden they had at the back of the property. Brighty didn't understand much of the reason, but Mister Igneous didn't like to deal with people outside his circle of friends, and it was almost a miracle he had befriended her father.

That being said, she forged a wonderful relationship with the Pie's sisters, in special the two oldest, Maud and Limestone; her brother on the other hand befriended rather quickly with the youngest of the bunch, a girl named Marble because of the similarity between their personalities, and he also developed a phobia of pink... because the last of the sister's, Pikamena, who had the same age as Gray and loved to follow him around asking him to party with her. She had too much energy, but Brighty was happy that she got stuck with her brother and not her.

He even nicknamed her the "Pink menace".

In fact, the two families were so close that Brighty and her brother Gray would be taking care of their house for the next two weeks, and while there Brighty would look to matriculate Gary in one of the schools in Hollow Rock, seeing that her mother stopped teaching at the reservation and Gray wanted to leave to another school.

It would only be the two, Brighty and Gray. He would study in the second year of high schools while she would train to become a policewoman.

Brighty smiled again and jumped from her bed, some stuffed toys fell to the ground as she happily squeaked in happiness with a almost devilish idea. She quickly ran to the bedroom's door and locked it, and with the same speed she took her axe from the wall and put it in the middle of the suitcase, and then cover it with some random clothes.

She would have to go, but why not take her own Hunter's test, having the light as her witness?

She was ready, and it would be REALLY fun.