I was scared the first time I died. I wasn’t sure if I would come back again. I didn’t know what the rules were.

My sister and I were still new to the world. I was only 24 and starting to realize that it was pointless to keep counting my years, especially seeing I’d never look older than 16.

We’d been alone for a long time at this point. Once in awhile we would come along a village or some nomad tribe, like we had once been, but it was always in passing.

The day I died for the first time my sister and I came to the outskirts of a village and we were met with hostility. It was the first time anyone had ever been hostile to me. Loz’s evil had finally started to take a hold on us humans.

And the humans in this village didn’t take kindly to strangers.

They approached my sister first; because she looked older she looked like she was in charge. Of course my sister didn’t say a word to her, she didn’t even notice that they were there.

That must have made them angry because suddenly they were attacking us with clubs.

The impact of releasing Loz from his prison hit me at about the same time their clubs did. From that point on the world was never the same again.

Well when I woke up in the small wooden cage they had locked me in, I wasn’t terribly happy.

I tried reasoning with them, in my own way.

“I’LL FIGHT EVERY ONE OF YOU COWARDS!!!”

They just couldn’t see the logic in my words.

“If you don’t shut up we’re going to hang you by your tongue.”

“OH, GO AHEAD! IT’S SOMETHING A COWARD LIKE YOU WOULD DO!!!”

Guard number one turned to guard number two. “Why won’t she shut up?”

Two shrugged, his attention elsewhere. “Why won’t she speak?”

Both of them looked at my sister, leaning against the wall of her own small cage, her head hanging low. She was completely still. I had grown used to her behaviour over the past eight years, but this always unsettled people seeing her for the first time.

Sometimes I would catch myself watching her and I would remember the way her eyes used to light up when she smiled. Then her hollow eyes would stare back into mine and I had to remember that this was a different world.

“Poor little Star-Eyes lost her tongue a few years back,” I let my voice drop into a dark whisper. “Some men came at us as she reacted, slicing open their stomachs with her knife, ripping their jugulars out with her bare hands… As she was strangling one of them, his hand tried to push her face away. She tried to bite his fingers and he managed to grab her tongue, ripped it clean out. So she ripped his jaw off and smashed his skull open.”

They looked over at my older sister with looks of shock and disgust.

“That happened?”

I laughed. “No, are you kidding? I’ve never seen her fight in my entire life!” I leaned back against the wall, a big smile on my face. “Her tongue’s just fine… Besides, she would never kill anyone.”

“Think you’re funny? You’re not funny you filthy Ham-al.”

“Filthy what? Ham-al?”

“We know you’re a Ham-al. What were you doing near here, trying to spy on us?”

“Hm… So you think I’m a spy?”

“We know you’re spies, trying to find weak points in our defense,” as the first man yelled at me the other walked over to my sister, looking her over. Maybe trying to see if she had a tongue or not.

“Oh bother… what an awkward misunderstanding,”I muttered under my breath.

“Don’t even try to make up lies now, you’ve already been found guilty.”

“Found guilty? When was I even tried?”

“When you were brought here. This evening your lives will be ended and offered up to the Goddess for her aid in defeating the Ham-al.”

My sister and I hadn’t traveled very far by this point in our lives; the Goddess they were talking about was the same Goddess I was thinking about, the same Goddess whom I had met once.

“Defeat the Ham-al in what?”

“In the fray.”

There was no word for war back then, because we didn’t know what war was, still, I knew what they meant. This was the first time I had ever heard the concept of two tribes fighting each other to the death.

Loz had corrupted men’s hearts so much that they were now killing each other. The idea nauseated me.

“You’re not serious…”

“Oh I’m very serious, you’ll be dead by tonight.”

“This is insanity! You can’t just kill people! It’s not right!”

“We decide what is right in our land!”

“HEY!” I yelled at the second man, he had just tossed a rock at my sister; it hit her shoulder and fell to the ground. The two remained motionless. “Don’t you dare throw a rock at my sister!”

“Or what?” The first man asked.

“There’s something really wrong with this one,” the second man muttered, leaning down to stare in her eyes.

“Or I’ll-” Threats were never my strong point, especially since when I grew up the only threats we gave out were to animals we were hunting. “I’ll tie you up by your feet and gut you!”

These people were no better than the animals my father and brother used to hunt. I didn’t feel bad about yelling at them, though the thought of hurting another human felt rather alien in my mind.

Before Loz was let loose, such a thought never existed between men. We did feel hate and jealousy towards others, but it was only a whisper of what exists now, of what existed while I was trapped in that cage, trying to find a way out of our predicament.

I didn’t want to die and the notion that I was immortal hadn’t quite sunk in at this point.

“You’re gonna do that while you’re stuck in that cage?”

“No! I’m going to do that once I get out of this cage and steal your knife!”

“Ha,” he waved me away with his hand and turned to his friend laughing. “Hear that, she says she’s going to escape.”

But his friend was still distracted by my sister. “There is something seriously wrong with this girl…”

Night came so quickly, too quickly.

I spent so much time screaming and ranting that I didn’t even notice the sun begin to lower to the horizon and the sky begin to darken.

I didn’t notice until I heard the drums being played in the centre of the village and saw torches being lit. They were getting ready for a ceremony that had once only been used on animals.

Sacrifice.

My knuckles went white as I gripped onto the wooden bars. I tried calling out to my sister, but all that came out was a whisper. “Star-Eyes, if you’re ever going to snap out of this, now is the time.”

The door to my cage opened and hands came in, grabbing at my arms and hair, pulling me away from the only place I felt safe. I screamed and held on a long as possible, but they pried me out of there with little trouble.

I didn’t know how to fight or how to save myself. I didn’t know how to get out of this situation.

As they dragged me to the centre of their village, where a great bonfire was being lit, I caught sight of my sister, quietly behind ushered to her death. I was so angry. Didn’t she understand what was going on? Why couldn’t she just snap out of her daze? Why couldn’t she try and fight back?

Why couldn’t she try and save me?

“LET ME GO!!! THIS ISN’T RIGHT!!! IT ISN’T RIGHT!!!”

I felt something heavy hit the back of my head and then something flat hit my face. It took me a moment to realize that it was the ground.

I lifted my head, blood running down the back of my head, my eyes swimming before the firelight. I found my sister, standing idling by, her eyes looking in my direction, but not at me. They never looked at anything anymore. She was empty. She was dead.

My tears rolled down my cheeks, burning my skin. I think I begged for mercy, I think I tried to fight, the fear had gripped me so much that those moments were just a rush of shapes and then I felt my hair being pulled back, my neck exposed.

10 years before something like this would have never happened, but I had changed that. I had changed the world. We had changed the world.

We had destroyed the world.

The knife cut fast and deep. I could feel liquid running down my throat before I realized that my neck had been slit and I was choking on my own blood. They let go of my hair and my head impacted with the dirt again.

The last thing I saw before I died were my sister’s eyes looking at me, actually looking at me. I wanted to reach out to her, wanted to say her name, but I could do nothing.

As my eyes went black I saw my sister turn and saw her hand reaching for a guard’s knife.

I can’t tell you what it’s like to be dead, not because it’s forbidden or anything, but I just really don’t know.

I’ve heard many accounts of out of body experiences and such, but my sister and I can never experience something like that, because our souls cannot leave our bodies. We are trapped within these cursed vessels. When we die we feel a pain so excruciating that no other living being has ever survived it and we fall into blackness as thick as ink.

In some ways, it’s like being in a deep sleep, but when you come awake again you are met with the terrible pain.

That first time I died, once I opened my eyes again and saw the sun, I didn’t care how much pain I was in. I was alive! I would have started dancing if I could have moved my legs.

My hands could move and I slowly led them up to my neck. The wound was wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth, tied so tightly that I could barely breathe. It didn’t take long to figure out who had tied it. I turned my head as much as it would allow and saw my sister.

She saw beside me, legs crossed, head bowed, hair covering her face. Her hands rested on her knees, her fingers hanging down to the earth, blood dripping off of them.

My smile died on my face when I saw her blood soaked hands and her blood soaked clothing and her blood soaked hair and her blood soaked face. She was covered head to toe in it and she didn’t even care, she just kept on staring into the dirt, looking at the blood soaked earth.

I struggled to push myself up and forced myself to look at the village surrounding us.

Not a single human was left living there, not a single building left standing. Corpses littered the ground, burnt and bloodied. They had all been killed and their homes burned to the ground.

I don’t know what happened that night, still to this day my older sister has never made it quite clear what happened, but she killed them all. Man, woman, child, all. Whatever darkness kept her alive came to life that day and slaughtered a village.

She had watched me die and she killed them for it.

I grabbed onto my sister’s shoulders, my tears flowing more freely now than when I thought I was going to die. I held her close, trying to block away everything before me.

The world had changed.

We had changed it.

Now we had to live with it.

(This is the first of many short stories I wrote as part of a novel about these two immortal sisters (I like to call them Osis and Isis, though those aren’t their real names). The novel is told through the eyes of the younger sister (Isis) and is set in the present day, but every few chapters is a little flashback i.e. a short story about her past. I posted the sequel to this novel not too long ago, it’s called The Immortal in Heort Hall, it’s told through Osis’s eyes and it was given such a good response I thought I’d post you something ‘written’ by the little sister. If you like this, I may post more. This little ditty is important because it’s the first time good ol’ Star-Eyes (or rather, Arne-Llya, as it would be translated into their own language, also not Osis’s real name) kills anyone and it’s the first time Isis realizes exactly what their life is going to be like for the rest of eternity. Oh what joy…)