The Ring Maker

I was twelve when it happened, or to be precise; when it happened to my brother, twins we were, are, I refuse to believe he is anything other than alive and well, or maybe not well cos he would have come back to me if he could,It's just one of those things I happen to know as a twin, maybe its why they call me naive. But I digress, Im sure your beginning to wonder exactly what so rudely deprived me of my brother and despite the fact that one of my gifts is a perfect memory it deserted me on the night I needed it most. Sometimes bits and pieces make it through the murk of my dreams, clear and bright as the moon, making me wonder how they eluded me before. There's flashes of a card game, he always managed to beat me at them and his strategy eludes me to this day, he was to good to cheat, a fact that I'm still proud of, and them come what I elaborately dubbed "the flashes", they're moments of darkness so absolute it was like the heartbeat of existence was faltering. And in the brief glimpses of light, in no particular order there are images, a freeze frame of several dark beings twining themselves around the branches of the little tree house we were playing in, like snakes slithering after their pray. After the next flash Im splayed out against the side of the tree, the only thing saving me from a 20 foot drop is a dagger stuck straight through the centre of my palm pinning my hand to the tree. There's something warm sliding it's way down my face, blood, not my own. I try not to dwell on that fact for to long, or the blood that had sprayed across the stiill neatly aranged cards. Those are all faint recollections from dreams I've been having, I didn't remember anything at all after the kidnapping, anything pertaining to it was somehow wiped from my mind, like magic. If not for the memory of my twin that everyone denied ever existed and the now white scare on both sides of my left hand I would have begun to doubt my sanity, but they couldn't get rid of my scar.