Imagine being in your last year of high school. Maybe you haven’t even had your first job yet. Depending on your parents, you may or may not know much about taking care of a home. You probably can cook something, but maybe only out of a box. It’s not a bad life and maybe you are really competent, an excellent cook, been working since you were twelve, paper route with Mom or Dad driving you around, and can balance a checkbook better than either of your parents. Either way, you aren’t quite an adult and you are looking forward to what adulthood brings.
Then something happens. A portal appears in front of you, above you, under you. Maybe you open a door and can see nothing beyond, but can’t seem to do anything but go through. Or you wake up one morning and not only is this not your bed or your room, you are pretty sure it’s not even your planet.
To say something weird had happened would be an understatement.
You stand before a group of people. Maybe they are the poor, barely making it by, maybe they are the rich, even royalty begging for you to save them.
You. How on earth do they think you are supposed to do that?
But then you aren’t on earth any more are you.
In this prompt from Writing.Prompts.Re a teenage girl is taken to a magical world. Everything about her life must be flipped on its side.
Eventually she learns to move on. She stops the dragon that may or may not actually be causing problems and becomes the queen. Maybe those two things are connected. Maybe they aren’t. It isn’t until then that she gets married, so presumably she doesn’t marry the king or heir to the throne to get her title. It’s her title. She has kids and lives her life, presumably ruling the people, but maybe after a time she passes on the title to someone else so she can relax. Maybe there is another hero that comes and she gives the job to them.
In the back of her mind, she probably still wonders what happened to the people she loved back on earth. Are her parents still alive? What are her friends doing? Did they miss her when she disappeared?
And then in the most bizarre turn of events, she gets her answers.
No, they didn’t miss her.
She dies, maybe of old age, maybe of a threat that has returned and she doesn’t have the strength any more to stop it. Either way she dies and that’s supposed to be the end of it, but she opens her eyes and she’s at school, her old school. She’d forgotten the exact look a long time ago, but seeing it, she knows this is it.
It’s as if everything she had lived through was a dream, as if she’d just fallen asleep at her desk or during lunch and dreamt the whole thing. Disappointed or maybe relieved, she has to decide how she will accept that and wonders if this, too, is a dream.
Then, the sun reflects off something on her hand and she looks down only to see her wedding ring still there on her finger. What happens next?