Truth

Chapter 1

Truth is an interesting subject. The truth can be modified in lies, edited to fit a person's cause, but it always stays the same. There is no way to change what the truth actually is. It never changes, no matter how much you wish it would. The truth can be forgiving, but it can also be harsh. The death of a family member, friend, or loved one can be a hard truth to handle. Foreclosure, debt, and unemployment can be difficult as well. But you can't change it. Truth is always present. No matter where you go, where you run, where you hide, you can never escape the truth. It's just not humanly possible. Luckily, for Zafera, truth is not a problem. Being half human, half demon has its advantages. She can manipulate time and reality, shaping her surroundings until they fit her needs or wants. She can make it rain juice, make it snow sugar, or make the sky purple. She can create entirely new universes, or destroy this one. She can end wars, and start the Armageddon. But with all this power, comes a price.

Being as small as she was, no one ever took her seriously. Her rages were disastrous, but her happiness's were pure bliss. And though she was only eleven years old, she lived in an enormous house, in almost the middle of nowhere, all by herself. She had killed her real mother and father when they had tried to punish her for drawing on the wall when she was only six years old. She hadn't understood what she had done at the time, but she wished the bodies would disappear, and so they did. In place of the parents she had lost, she created her dream parents, making them so that they agreed with whatever she said, never told her to do or not to do something, cooked her meals, gave her a bath, and cleaned the house. They would disappear every day for a few hours, the ones where they went to "work", and always came back just in time to make her lunch and dinner. Then they would play games and watch tv for a few hours before Zafera finally got tired and went to sleep. She slept when she felt like it, and woke up when it suited her. She had created a wonderful teacher that would make learning fun for her, and would giver her candy and sugar, let her interrupt whenever she felt like it, and would let her takes naps and play games if she was tired or bored. Though Zafera learned, she was socially inept. Due to almost never leaving the confines of her family's property, she had no friends aside from her imaginary ones. She didn't talk to people. Her imagined parents did the shopping and anything else that required leaving the house premises. Zafera simply just never left. There was nothing for her out there, she told herself. She didn't need anyone else. She had everything she needed. But inside, Zafera was lonely; lonelier than she could have imagined. Though she would never admit it out loud, she didn't really view her creations, her fake parents and teacher and friends, real people. The inner workings of her mind still viewed then as imitations. They didn't truly exist. Not to her, at least.

Chapter 2

To anyone else, Zafera's life may have looked like a dream. The ability to change whatever you wanted whenever you wanted; the ability to created anything you little heart desired. Who wouldn't want that? And that was exactly what Zafera was afraid of. If she were to interact with real people, they might discover what she could do; figure out what she really was. And she couldn't have that. She knew what would happen. People would try to use her for their own selfish needs. But there were other possibilities, too. She could be viewed as an outcast, thought of as a freak. She would be shunned by the kids who didn't understand what she was, or the glory of what she could do. Should she be discovered by any scientists, she would become an experiment, an anomoly, a scientific impossibility; something that shouldn't exist, but did. They would run many tests on her, ones that would hurt, ones that would tickle, ones that would burn or freeze. She would hate them, and she would kill them all. She knew there was a name for people who killed other people. They were called murderers. She didn't want to be a murderer. She had already killed her parents, and she never wanted to do it again. She had almost completely forgotten what she had done to them; she had put it out of her mind so completely that she never thought about it anymore. There was just her, her imaginary friends, her fake parents, and her imitation teacher. But no matter how hard she tried, she would always remember that she had imagined them; that they weren't real and they wouldn't replace her real parents, or the real friends she'd never have, or the real teacher that was out living her life in the real world, going to her job every day and educating the kids that could have been her friends, but never would be because she would never leave her house. At least, when she was nine, she told herself that.

But today was different; different from every day that Zafera had lived before then. She was going to leave the house. She had no reason not to, and no one to stop her. Yes, the outside world, the true reality, was immensely different from the world that Zafera had created for herself, but she saw no reason that she couldn't be able to survive a few hours or so outside of the confines of her house and back and front yards. There was a whole different world out there, and Zafera didn't plan on living the rest of her life in a delusion. She wanted to see what the world was like, visit the places she had read about and only dreamed about travelling to. She wanted to smell the fresh air, feel the breeze, see the ocean and the people as they walked from place to place. She wanted to see a real car, see the real sky, and the real clouds. She was growing tired of the small non-reality world that she had created for herself, and she knew that there was no way her imagination could replicate places she had never been to. She would have to see them for herself, which was exactly what she planned on doing. She was going to visit Paris and Rome and Greece, see the volcano in Pompeii, travel to every island in the chain that was Hawaii. She was going to go to New York, and see a play on Broadway. She wanted to see every last part of the world, and there was no one to stop her. She could change her appearance, create forged documents that would pass even the most advanced tests, and could do pretty much anything she wanted. There was nothing standing in her way anymore; except her fear.

Chapter 3

She stood, bags packed, staring at her front door, just inside her house. She wanted to leave; she wanted to see the world that she had only read and dreamed about. But she was afraid. She didn't know what to expect. She had altered her appearance so that she looked older, maybe in her mid to late twenties, but still in good shape, so there was no reason for anyone to be suspicious of her. The facade was flawless. She had looked over every inch of her new body, and found nothing out of place. She had even altered her eyes to she the experience of years that she had never lived. There was nothing left for her to do but to walk out her own front door and make her way towards the town. But she couldn't. She had lived her entire life locked inside the walls that she called a home. She had killed her own parents when she was six, so she didn't have them to tell her what the real world was like. She had no experience, no one to tell her what it was going to be like, what she could expect. She just had to suck it up, and push herself to leave for the first time in her eleven years of life and see the world she had lived just outside of.