“Once upon a time, there were sisters three. Not true sisters, but a trio of fair maidens, all from different lands and meets, who had come upon each other and become closer than mere ties of friendship could gain them. A princess, a knight and a witch, all pure of heart and sterling of mind, had an unshakable bond and under their care, the land prospered. The princess ruled wisely, the knight attended to the threats to the land and the witch used her gifts to ensure that what threats the knight could not handle, would be dealt with, swiftly and surely. The three were of such a mind, it was said, that it almost seemed as if they were one soul in three bodies. And as the three held the lifeblood of the land in their hands, the people of the realm felt that nothing could tear the trinity asunder.

“Thus, it was only natural that something would. Some said it was the prince of the neighboring land that had come to court the princess that had done them in. Some said it was another cavalier, questing from afar, who had won the heart of the lady knight that had done so. A few even whispered that it was jealousy, that the witch, the fairest of them all, was being spurned because of her eldritch powers, while the other two were more approachable. In the end, it mattered little anyway, as the result was the same: sister waged war against sister who waged war against sister. Finger pointing became blows became the mustering of armies.

“In time, the bountiful land became a barren, blood-poisoned abattoir, filled with vermin-infested corpses and ruins as far as the eye could see. The smiles fell from the lips of the people, the stars in their eyes dying into nothing more than mere embers of coals losing their last motes of fire. The three, finally realizing what they had done, stopped their effort, but it was in vain: not only could they not find the trust and bonds they once shared to do what must be done for the sake of the peoples of the land, the very populace itself found they could no longer hold faith in the trinity that had once been an unshakeable lodestone for them.

“The witch, heartbroken and saddened, spirited herself away to lands unknown. Of the fate of the knight, no one knew, save that they found the remains of her own true love and the grisly conditions of his earthly vessel turned his burial mound into a place of which many spoke in hushed terms for generations afterwards. As of the princess and her own betrothed, he turned away from her and eventually wed another kingskin of a distant land, forever forgetting his so-termed ‘precious heart.’

“And as for the princess herself? They say she sits on her throne, aging and alone, bereft of her sisters and her love, ruling over the blighted horizons, unable to let go of the past and at the same time, unable to aid the few people left in her care.”

=+=

Penelope clicked the off button on her phone, banishing the morose fairytale from its screen. Okay, enough of that, she decided; the current collection of stories she’d been reading had been so close to her life that she wondered if they were prophecy – or worse, messages from a far gone once-friend.

It would be just my luck if it were both, she mused grimly.

Looking up from her phone, she noticed that her class was still working on their tests, though that was soon to come to a close as well, as the lunch bell was going to ring shortly. “Okay, time’s up,” she said as she looked at her students with the authority of someone who had been teaching at Samuel Hallenbeck High School for five years now; having been a student here herself years ago, it felt like she’d never left. As she heard the cacophony of groans from the students, she said with a grin, “Oh, c’mon, it couldn’t have been that hard. Back when I was your age, we didn’t even have computers to do our tests on – we actually had to fill them out by hand.”

“Easy for you to say; you’re the princess,” she heard one of them say in the back and was about to challenge whoever said that when the bell suddenly rang. Within what felt like nanoseconds, the students rushed out towards their afternoon break. Penelope sighed and brushed strawberry blonde hairs out of her eyes; once again, as it always seemed to do, the news got out. It always did, somehow – for her, it was an unavoidable thing, no different than taxes or life itself.

“So, newest students found out about it?” a voice said sympathetically. She looked up to see her friend, June, the algebra teacher here and like Penelope herself, a former Hallenbeck alumnus having come back to teach the next generation.

“I’m probably the only high school chemistry teacher in Colorado with her own Wikipedia entry,” Penelope groaned. “Thank God at least it’s not a full dedicated page on me, or I’d really be in trouble.”

“Yeah, that would suck, wouldn’t it, Your Highness?” June teased. “Or is it Your Grace?”

“Neither, actually; the ranks aren’t enforceable here in the US and are just titles of convenience. I’m not in the direct line, so it’s meaningless in the end,” Penelope replied matter-of-factly. “That’s okay, anyway; my asshole of a father just handed them to me because it made him look good.”

“Hey, if I were a princess, I’d milk that for all it was worth.”

“Yeah, but I’m just about as much of a princess as Princess Leia in Star Wars. At least her life was more exciting,” Penelope pointed out. After all, she really was a princess…although in name only. Her father, who she had only met twice in her life, was the ruling prince of Carladès, a tiny European principality barely bigger than Rhode Island. She had been the result of an affair between her father and her mother while they’d been at college in California, and her father had vehemently protested paternity until a DNA test when Penelope was eleven had proved otherwise. She had then been whisked off to Carladès, met her father and his family, named as a princess, given a trust fund that would kick in when she turned twenty-five and then went back to her life in Mesa Verde, Colorado. She’d met her father again a couple of years later when the Carladian government was trying to push for a US base in their country, and his visit that time was more of a press junket, with paparazzi included, rather than a father spending time with his daughter. Since then, she hadn’t had contact with him and so Penelope Martinez, “Princess of Carladès and Countess of Liguria” was just another person in the crowd. And truth be told, she preferred that.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Well in any case, I figured that since lunch just started, we could go hit that new burger place on Appleton Drive,” June said. “I’ll buy if you fly.”

“Yeah, sure, though I don’t have my ‘royal carriage’ with me; my husband needed my car, so I have his truck today if you can stand that,” she responded. “Let me make sure that the tests were all submitted to the server and then we can go.”

It was at that point that her phone chimed, and she whipped it out of its holster with the practiced accuracy of someone perpetually glued to it like a lifeline. “Heya hon,” she said, a smile coming to her lips. “What’s up?”

The voice of James Kraft came over the line; like her, her husband was a former student here, but in his case, he’d joined the police department after they’d returned to Mesa Verde from their college years. “Just called ‘cause I couldn’t go the whole day without listening to your voice, you know,” he told her.

“You are such a ham,” she laughed. “What’s the real reason?”

“Just spoke to Sarge and I’m not needed this weekend, so we’re still good to go if you are.”

“Let’s see: you, me, dinner, dancing, and a three-day weekend out of town with lots of fooling around? Sounds like a plan,” she laughed. “I’m just glad you were able to get the whole weekend off.”

“Yeah, well, color me surprised as well,” he told her. “Fortunately, it’s a slow enough day here at work, so they didn’t have much of a problem with me taking off for a few. Besides, it gives the rookies something to do.”

The grin on her face began wide. “Well, hope you’re strong enough to deal with a weekend with me, Officer, because I’m going to make sure you go back to work completely tired on Tuesday.”

She could practically see the grin on his face. “Just as long as nothing happ—”

BOOM

The world turned into a blender and all she could hear was the ringing of her ears for a few seconds. She found she’d been tossed to the floor like some ragdoll, while June had been slammed against a nearby wall. The tinnitus affecting her stopped, soon replaced by an endless clamor of car alarms and glass shattering, a fugue of chaos unfolding around them all. Searching around, she found her phone, and though the screen had been heavily cracked in whatever just happened, it was still on and serviceable.

Picking it up, she asked, “Hon, you still there?”

“What was that?” she could hear him shout, though she wasn’t sure if it was to her or someone else in his background.

“Was that an earthquake?” she asked him, getting back to her feet just as she saw June picking herself up as well.

“Not in this part of the country,” he told her just as a symphony of sirens began wailing in the background as the Civil Defense System went live, reminding her that while earthquakes were unheard of, tornadoes were not. “I’ve gotta get off the phone – something’s going on,” he told her.

“I love you,” was all she said.

“Same same, Pengo – stay safe.” She didn’t waste his time and instead hung up immediately; whatever it was, it sounded like it was serious business. That same feeling got more intense as she noticed the quick dimming of the sunlight outside – definitely a sign of an incoming tornado.

Penelope immediately moved to her friend’s side, helping her up. “We’d better get the kids to the shelter,” she said, and June nodded weakly in response, still clutching her head in agony as a rivulet of blood made its way down her face. Once they were there, they could get June a bandage, and anything else needed, but right now the priority was to worry about her students, not anything else. James would probably be okay, but it most certainly meant their weekend plans had just been flushed down the drain.

That feeling of dread intensified as she heard a scream and the shout of “Look!”, drawing her eyes to the window. In the distance was the skyline of Mesa Verde, and while not as famous as other skyscraper-dotted horizons as New York or Los Angeles or even Denver, it still had a few buildings of its own to contribute to urban atmospheres, and amongst that was the Cloudstack, the 65-floor building that towered over the rest of the buildings downtown. Between that and a few other buildings that passed the minimum 20-floor height of what was considered a skyscraper, Mesa Verde typically held its own amongst the mid-size cities in the US when it came to its cityscape.

At least…until now. Now, smoke began to fill the location where it was as the huge building began to collapse to the ground, followed shortly by a pillar of light the same color, oddly, as a tennis ball, rising from where it had been. Soon after, the other major buildings fell in the same way, all burned into so much nothingness by huge shafts of energy from nowhere.

Penelope’s mind raced with quick recollections: the Cloudstack alone was designed for 10,000 or so occupants – and that meant that now there were thousands of those same people, likely now dead or seriously injured, a few of whom she even knew. Others, such as the First Bank of Colorado Building or the Yamaguchi America Tower, also held thousands of souls in their structure, all of them now consigned to the unthinkable.

Her mouth opened to scream, but she immediately bit it off – she had to be strong for her students, even if they were only a handful of years younger than her.

And then that’s when it happened.

Without warning, the sky turned as black as a phone screen, the sun suddenly blotted out of the sky by a garish purple blob that appeared to be a huge bruise on the very atmosphere itself. The inside then turned a blood red, as if it had become a seething, burning wound, and then a second after that, inky, unnatural shapes boiled out of that maw: unnatural, inhuman creatures, all tentacles and teeth – things that looked like nothing they’d seen before except in Lovecraftian nightmares.

Things clearly not of this world and things that, Penelope was fairly sure, weren’t friendly.