By now a year has passed, my hawk was still alive and had fled when the attack on Niklaus and Mae's home happened. One of our village leaders saw it and has been sending messages to us. It turns out that the attack had been a take over. I am so glad even our village leaders know us and our parents enough to know that those people are not us, or we would truly be in danger of completely losing our people. 

    They informed us that there are now people pretending to be not only my parents and my brother and I, but Niklaus and Mae and their parents as well. They say some of our people have started aging even faster than before, and some are aging slowly. They said it's like some of us are immune to whatever has been done to us. It seems that this is what they must have done to all the worlds we read about, they spread whatever this is and took over while it ran its course. Some worlds must not have had anyone who was immune to this thing they spread to kill people, that's the only explanation for why some worlds would now be empty. They must think that those are not worth the effort to use or something.

    Why else would they take over worlds they infected if they didn't want them for some reason, could their world be dying? Why didn't I think of that before. Oh my god! That must be it. Their world is dying and they must not realize that they could heal it themselves and they resorted to this, or have they always been evil? did they think killing another worlds people and taking it over was the answer? Why didn't they just merge their people into other worlds? are they just a dominant race of people? are they even people or are they something else? 

    I know shifters exist, that's one of the worlds connected to ours. A world full of people who can turn into all kinds of animals. they don't even have to be real animals, at least that's what the books say. Then there is a world of people with animal features. like ears and tails and what not. Maybe these people from the Dark World are like the shifters, but they can shift into other people. So many thoughts had entered my mind about these people. I feel like this has all become too much for us to handle. Instead of one four people there are now at the least eight, the village leaders don't know if anyone else in the houses have been replaced as we have.

    I have started to believe that the night I was attacked was meant for me to be killed and replaced by someone, I have to be honest. I doubted myself a bit about my brother being my brother, because he said nothing about being attacked that night too, but then I realized that these people probably assumed that a couple of "kids" would be easy to take out, or maybe they didn't think that I would have any training in fighting like my brother so they went after me first and my brother wasn't attacked because I had killed them.

    I guess that's something else I could tell you about while we're at this point. In our world not just male Royals are trained in war, but females are as well. Both men and women go to war in our world, not that there have been many wars concerning our country, but we have aided nearby countries that are allies to us. I'm not sure I really want to go through everything anymore, but I will definitely share the important bits still, I just don't really feel like going over all the small stuff and training anymore, so I'll cover some of that stuff here and other blurbs of thought.

    So basically we trained in the woods for another three months before moving onto the next town. While in the towns we did go to libraries and searched the libraries for any books concerning the Dark World, we did find some, but not any that gave us any info that we didn't already have. We did buy notebooks and pencils so we could copy down anything we thought might be somewhat important for what we needed. We didn't get a chance to do anything like this with the books back at the castle so we had to hope we could find all the books that were there, here as well. But I had a feeling that some of them were books only the Royal families should have, and since the east and west never actually have Royals living there, there were no castles on those sides, hence our them being built, though there is no need for them any more really.

One does have to wonder if our parents sent copies of those books to be put into our libraries after they were complete. Why didn't I think of that before. We should definitely head to one of the locations for our houses…….but wait, what if they found out about them. I need to ask the village leaders and see if they know. Guess we will be staying here in this town a while longer.

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     So my hawk finally came back and the village leaders said that the libraries in the towns where our homes are being built do indeed have the copies of the books our parents had. Both sets sent copies of the books they had to both locations, so we wouldn't need to go to both places just to read the books from both houses. The only thing this meant was that we would need to go back to our country. The village leaders said that it should be safe as long as we hide our identity until we get to the village our home will reside in. Thankfully these people didn't do much research on who they were taking over or none of this would even be possible.

    Oh you must be wondering how we know we are still talking to the real village leaders, right? that's simple at the end of each correspondence from us we as a few questions that only they would know, basically anything from what they had for breakfast (trust me that one is reliable cause they always eat the same thing every day for breakfast) to something about themselves or their village.You're probably now wondering how that helps at all since they could be replaced between letters, well one is we don't send through mail, my hawk does all the delivering and it doesn't really take her that long to go back and forth, two maybe three days, and she seems to know when someone is not who they should be so if she came back with our letter then we would know that every single village leader had been taken over.