There comes a time in everybody's life when the world as you know it changes. This happened to me not so long ago. When my life changed, it changed....with a vengeance.
You see, I am now the queen of Sardohnia, a land I had never heard of in my life. Well, not until the year my brother Kyle died.
It was early spring. I had turned 16 a few months before. My father and I had just returned from my brother's funeral when I decided to go to the pond in the back of our ranch. I, and my horse Sunny, go there often. That day I had a strange feeling that something was going to happen. What I didn't know.
When i finally got to the pond, the feeling was still with me, but all I wanted to do was to sit under my favorite oak tree and think. All I thought about was my brother and how we used to play together by this pond. Every summer we would swim here and every winter we'd ice skate across it when it would be thick enough. Kyle and I used to fish from this spot. That's what we were doing the day before he was ran down. The accident happened two weeks before, but to father and me, it felt like an eternity. Without my brother Kyle, I had thought, nothing would be the same around here. I cannot begin to tell you just how true that was.
While I was thinking about all of this, someone came up behind me. I was startled from my thoughts by the rustling movement behind me. At first I thought it was Sunny or one of the other horsed that my father owns coming for a drink of water. Whenever I would be here by the pond, I would give them some sugar cubes. So I started to get up and dig in my pockets for them when a voice, a young woman's voice, behind me.
"Please. Don't turn around. I need to know your name," she said. Whoever she was, she had a soft sweet voice that didn't evoke fear in me. Who was this person behind me. She wanted to know my name, why, I wouldn't know. I was going to find out one or another. I figured I would give her my nickname, Rana, instead of my real...