Prologue

Zelcul City, named after the founder of the City, Zelculic `de Ravelin. A massive city, built by steel and glass. The city was beaming with beauty, and shimmering with neon colors, full of rich and poor people of different statuses and backgrounds. Zelcul was once a peaceful forest in the 1600s but is now a modern technological city that runs on Elfwinds Enterprise, an oil manufacturing company, the same company my mother worked at, and the same company she resigned from.

I was confused at first on why she resigned and wanted to move away. The place was her pride and joy. She loved the city and Zelcul from the bottom of her heart. It was the same place where she made her money, the same place she meets my father, and the same place she gave birth to me. She never told me why she loved the city so much. It was just like any other city in the continent of Lleh, but I guess that's how it just was. My friends would call it nosy, due to the ragging at night, my neighbors would call it nonstandard, but my mom would call it…home.

I never knew why she loved it so much, it was just like any other city, loud, nosy, really tall buildings, and kinda smelly. It was even more confusing when she resigned at the Enterprise on the day of my 12th birthday, the job that she loved so much. That day was a day I would never forget. Not just because it was my birthday or the day my mother resigned. Yet the day she never came home from the store, to get cherries. The same day she was found dead across the street, with an unnatural hole in her stomach.

It was a starry appealing night, walking down the stairs of our apartment building approaching her. There was not a single car driving but plenty parked, with their glasses smashed and a few run-down. There were streetlamps guided across like a path, glitching and buzzing, as if it came out of a horror movie, and in the middle of the street there I was, me and the full moon, staring at her cold chilly dead body. A huge hole nearly putting a gap in her torso, the woman I saw 15 minutes ago going to the store to buy cherries, was now lifeless on the ground.

I didn't scream, I didn't cry, I just stared at her alongside the moon. I must've stood there for an hour or so, but it felt like a century, standing there watching her lifeless body.

That was the day I lost all hope for the city, I assumed I could understand her thoughts on how this city was special, but it was rather dark and twisted, more twisted than I'd even realized myself back then. It was that night that I became an orphan, that same night that my heart turned cold, that same night I lost the light in my eyes. That same night I learned that life was much shorter than I expected. The night my mother was murdered.

Well at that age I was only young, so I didn't understand why she had died. Why someone like a mother can just die so easily. But now I know, her death was the cause of a story, a turned chapter full of pages. The dark and evil of Zelcul city had a story behind it, an unnatural unbelievable story, the untold story my mother knew, but never told. That's the story I never understood as a 12-year-old girl, but it's the same story I will be telling now because it's my story.