Hi! This is my new story, obviously, so I hope you like it. And to all my followers reading my other stories, I'm sorry for starting another story. I just couldn't help myself. I really like this idea. I will continue Begin Again and Intertwined, though. I promise.
This is just the prologue, so it's not real exciting, but there's a ton of foreshadowing in it. I hope it gets you hooked.
Disclaimer: I don't own PJO, just this plot.
Prologue
Third Person's POV
It was the perfect hiding spot. A small log cabin in the middle of the woods, almost a two weeks walk away from the kingdom, a place where no one would go. Three rooms: a bedroom, living room, and a kitchen. A perfect spot to hide away. A perfect spot to hide a princess.
The palace guards had been searching for the princess for a month. The king and queen had almost given up hope of ever finding her, but they never once told the guards to stop. Everyone in the palace was weary and tired, and, as the search continued, so were the kingdom's citizens.
But all of that changed the day one of the many groups of guards searching for the kidnapped princess discovered the cabin.
The door was locked, of course, but that wasn't a problem. The kingdom's top guards knew how to break down a door. The door came down with a heavy thud and a cloud of sawdust. The guards came in one by one, hands on their sword hilts, ready to pull them and take down whatever crazy person had taken their kingdom's jewel on sight.
The room before them was nothing but average, maybe a bit less. It seemed like a place a peasant would live. Wooden furniture sat around the dim room, looking like it had been put together by a teenage boy. The chair wobbled and creaked when a one of the guards touched it. "Definitely a boy," he murmured.
"Spread out," their young, golden-haired captain ordered. "Search everywhere. If you find anything even remotely related to princess, notify me immediately."
The guards went in twos to search the three rooms. The group in the main room pounded on the wood floor, searching for a trap door or hidden compartment that might have any clue to where the princess was. The furniture was torn to bits and pushed aside in the search. The group in the kitchen had about the same amount of luck. They searched through mounds of trash and endured the stink of moldy food to discover nothing but the fact that someone had been there recently.
The two people in the bedroom – a male and female guard – stomped around on the ground like they had in the living room, but they were rewarded with the sound of a hollow area next to the window. The two guards looked at each other and grinned. It might not be where the princess was hidden, but it might be a clue to lead them to where she was.
And they were right. After prying away the wooden floor – which seemed to have been installed better than the rest of the floor – they were met with the soft gold fabric of the princess's many gowns and a brown sack lying on top of it. The female guard picked it up and emptied it out into her gloved hand. Only one thing was in it and when it hit her hand, the girl gasped and dropped it to the ground.
It was a shining, jewel-encrusted tiara.
The male guard called for their captain while his partner slowly picked up the crown. She wondered what this meant. She should have been happy, she supposed, to have found the princess's clothes and crown, but it just filled her with dread. How were they supposed to find her with only a dress and tiara? Unless...unless she was still in the house.
"There has to be another room," she told the captain. "This must be the place she's staying. There must be an attic or-or a basement."
The captain nodded and ordered the rest of the group to start looking for an entrance to a basement. They filed outside and searched through a forest of grass for forever, it seemed. One of the guards, a young male called Mercutio, was thinking of the whereabouts of the princess while he searched. How was she being treated? What state was she in? Was she near death? Was she being treated well, despite being captive? Was she slowly going insane? Before he knew it, his sword, which he was using to cut away the three-foot-tall grass, hit something firm that reverberated through the sword and up his sword arm.
"Hey!" he yelled. "Hey, I think I found it!"
He worked more forcefully now, chopping away the weeds and grass and brushing off dirt. Two wooden trapdoors lay on the ground, locked with a shining silver lock. Mercutio studied it, coming to the conclusion that the princess must be hidden there since the lock seemed brand new.
The other guards joined him and, in less than two minutes, the doors had been smashed in, the lock forgotten about. The six soldiers bolted down the small staircase, their feet sounding like hail and heavy rain on the roof.
The basement was dank, dark and dusty, and smelled of urine and vomit. It was near impossible to see into it at first, compared to the sunlight from above, but the guards' eyes adjusted. Mercutio went to the wall and used a match to light a torch, illuminating the room with hungry light. The guards looked around with curious eyes and slowly, one by one, their mouths dropped open in surprised and horrified gasps.
Lying on the ground, her ragged and torn clothes covered in blood, was their missing princess. And she appeared to be dead.
Their captain smiled. Perfect.
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Um, I also leave a verse at the end of all my chapters. So I'll leave you with one that everyone knows but I like anyways.
"For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believe in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16