I'm sorry, I tried three times to get myself into the story, but I couldn't.

I'm really not sure how this can be fixed.

Maybe if you added a proper introduction about the colored mages?

I felt the second part should have come before the first, and that the first be made into a flashback of sorts.

Hi! :D

Overall, I liked it. I feel sympathy for the protagonist and the tone/mood are both nicely conveyed.

Now specifically, I have a bone to pick with the first line of your story.

"First, there was the pounding on the door that shook the dust from the ceiling. The windows rattled as the lamps swayed. They were as quiet as they could be, hiding in the darkest corner, praying that they wouldn’t be found."

The abrupt shift in tense between the first and second sentence, while I'm not sure if it was intentional for stylistic reasons, is jarring and out of place.

I've also noticed that there's a lot of repetition involved in your work. Once again, I'm not sure if it's for stylistic reason (I'm fairly certain a good deal of it is), however, some of the repetition gets very annoying.

Example:"There was nothing else she could tell him, and she couldn’t say anything, even if she tried—her voice seemed to have left her."