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This is where (hopefully) we can write this story between raine and i.. still in progress though.
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Somewhere east of Eden
Daevron- Posts : 5
Join date : 2011-01-05
Daevron- Posts : 5
Join date : 2011-01-05
The storm raged outside, bringing with it only a taste of the war and chaos outside that, to many, was a herald of the end of days. The storm raged against the coastline, causing the waves to strike the coast with such force that portions of the cliff side crashed into the sea, giving anyone watching the opinion that the ocean was in fact eating the land it surrounded. A short distance away however, a large stone castle loomed over the scene. To an outsider, those inside must surely be clutching to one another, terror creeping into their hearts like a poison that there could be no possible cure for, but the storm seemed almost like nothing to those inside who, quite frankly, had other concerns
Like the inhuman screaming that was echoing from the depths of the castle.
Like the inhuman screaming that was echoing from the depths of the castle.
Raine- Admin
- Posts : 15
Join date : 2011-01-05
Age : 38
She resisted the urge to move, as she had been resisting for years, but couldn't keep the pain from wrenching an inhuman howl from the back of her throat. Another hot needle beneath her skin, questing crimson gold that pulsed through her veins. Her body was covered in track marks, bare arms and legs spindly and pale sticks extending from the ends of scraps of cloth that had served as her clothing for as far back as she could remember.
"Watch those readouts. If she codes, we'll be next. You know how much "stock" Miss.Van'Degaurde places in our miserable lives. About the only thing that warms her reptilian blood is the warm sound of gold coins shaking around in her over-large coin purse. She'd as soon slit our throats as look at us if anything was to happen to her precious "supply" of Callipso, and we both know it."
His partner grunted in reply, adjusting the slow drip from the IV bag a few feet above her head. Always above her head, but so far away, out of reach for her bond arms and legs. The IV kept her alive, as it had for the better part of seven years. But what kind of life was this. She listened carefully, eyes still shut as though unconscious as the lab rats called doctors finished their final check on her stats, collected their final vial and left the room.
Her eyes snapped open, crimson orbs surveying the room around her. A brief respite of loneliness as they waited for her body to recharge. To refill with another supply of their precious Callipso.
Callipso. The most potent hallucinogen known to mankind. A lucrative business in this world of wars. Every day outside the castle walls, the war waged. She didn't know when or why the war begin, only that it had been going on long before she was born, and would probably rage for many, many years after her death. When bodies pile around you, all one can do is try to escape the horrors of their reality. Alcohol had ceased production decades before, and the bombs had left the earth far to sterile for most other grown drugs. The only thing still in any kind of quantity was Callipso. And Callipso was her.
Doctors had discovered it twenty or so years ago. An odd human mutation that caused a particular gland in the brain to produce a chemical known as Caplipsaline. A chemical which, when ingested, caused an intense hallucinogenic effect. A perfect escape. A living human drug.
Focus. She had to focus. For the past seven years, she had lived her entire life on that board. Strapped down and fed through tubes while men in white masks stole her life from her. She had been struggling that entire time to free herself from the straps that bound her, digging at her wrist restraints little by little until today. Today she actually felt as if she might be able to snap the final bonds, releasing herself from this prison at last. She cast another hot gaze around the room, reassuring herself that none of the doctors remained. It had been seven years since she had walked, it wasn't as if she could fight her way out of the room if it came to that. And god only knows what type of restraints they would put her in once they realized that these had failed. No. She had to be quick and careful. This was the only chance she was ever going to get. Flipping her double-jointed wrist over in its strap, she pulled against the loosening restraint, revealing the soft cotton interior of the brace which was struggling against its last few strings to stay intact. Footsteps suddenly thudded in the hall and her heart skipped a beat. It was now or never and she was damned sure she would rather die then remain her, a lifeless shell of a human being, for another seven years. Struggling with all the limited might her atrophied muscles could produce, she pulled at the strap, delighted to hear the satisfying sound of tearing fabric as her right hand finally pulled free. Quickly, she reached across, undoing the strap on her other wrist and then leaning down to untie her legs. Her hands were shaking and her heart raced as the sound of the footsteps grew louder, accompanied by the male voices she had grown to recognize and despise. Her breath came in small nervous gasps as she finally managed to swing her legs free and over the side of the board. For a brief second she managed to stand before crumpling to the floor, her weakened leg muscles unable to hold her upright. Desperation pulsed through her mind as she rubbed her tingling legs, willing herself to be able to stand. But her time was running out, already the hidden door leading into the room was swinging open, the two doctors walking through it distracted by some anomaly on the charts in their hands. Acting on pure instinct, she grabbed the legs of her IV stand and jerked it to the floor, the resulting crash echoing through the room louder then anything she had ever heard before.
"What the Hell!" One of the men started, looking up from the clipboard with shock to see the empty board before him. He started forward, his fellow right behind him as she managed to slid the IV bag into her hand and launch it, with her limited strength, into the machines that had until only seconds ago, kept her alive. The resulting explosion was shocking, even to her. The bag exploded as it hit the machine, dosing the delicate electronic device in a deluge of water and chemicals. Seeping into every opening, smoke began to pour from its circuits, alarms blasting through the room. The result was chaotic. The doctors were falling over themselves, unsure of what was going on as the room began to fill with smoke, triggering the smoke alarms and sending a cascade of ice water into the room. Taking advantage of the momentary chaos, she began to slowly crawl across the floor, desperate to reach the doorway before the doctors were able to make sense of the situation....or before help arrived. Fortunately for her, years of intravenous feeding had left her barely skin and bones. While her muscles were weal and atrophied, they also had very little weight to pull, and she was literally crawling for her life. She managed to slid her thin frame to the doorway just as the men reached the machine and managed to quiet the screaming alarms. Her legs had began to warm under her touch, muscles reviving in the short stretch she had crawled. She didn't think they would get her far, but at least she managed to stand, leaning heavily against the wall just outside of the room.
"Find her! FIND HER!" The scream came, and then she was running. She didn't know how, but she was running down narrow passages and hallways she had never known existed until that very moment. A hundred footsteps pounded behind her, maybe a thousand. She had no way of knowing how many pursuers were truly after her unless she stumbled, and her rapidly failing body was threatening to do just that. She tore her way through another hidden doorway, launching herself into the largely inhabited part of the castle, tearing her unruly white hair out of the way of her eyes. Heart pounding in her chest, she skidding around a corner blindly and collided with something soft and warm. Tumbling to the floor, her muscles unable to keep her standing any longer despite even the incredible amounts of adrenaline coursing through her body.
'Please......please, not again....' she thought as her strength faded, the room around her growing distorted as her vision blurred.
"....pl....ssse..."she choked out, her voice and language broken after so many years of solitude. "He.....lp...me..." Her voice faded as her strength finally gave out and she collapsed completely, unconscious on the floor, the loud voices of her pursuers close at hand.
Raine- Admin
- Posts : 15
Join date : 2011-01-05
Age : 38
((Found some of this on an old disk from god only knows when, would you believe it? Don't have Chapter One any more, but at least this will give us a good re-jumping off point. I left up the new version/post I have written here in case we wanted to add it/rework it.))
Chapter Two:
She blinked her pale, gray eyes open, casting her sight around the small room as a fisherman would cast his line. Her sight was restricted however, by her position. She lay upon her back, flat against a long white board. Her body was strapped to it, a hundred times over, restricting even the most minimal of movement. They would take no chances that she would escape.
A uniformed man came toward from the room’s only doorway. That door led out into the hallway and was always left open. Sometimes she wondered if they did it just to torture her.
“Let me g…go.” She whispered hoarsely, stumbling over her words as though the language was unfamiliar. Or as if her throat had given up on the letters before they exited her mouth. He ignored her, as they always did, stepping close to her but not registering her existence. He checked the readouts on the machines behind her board and she smiled as she heard him utter a word of disgust. It meant that they hadn’t figured it out. That they still needed her. She sighed loudly, staring up at the IV bag through which she lived. A dull itching birthed on the inside of her left elbow where three needles pierced her skin, connecting her to the machines. It was an ache she had felt before and she ignored it.
She shifted slightly to the right as the man turned toward her, the oppressive smell of bleach on his sterilized lab coat making her gag. Her choking fell on deaf ears as he drew a syringe full of blood from her arm. His eyes shimmered greedily, lost in the crimson liquid that flowed from her veins. It made her wonder when they would get too greedy and take too much. Then she would be free, free from all of this. This that had been her life for the past seven years. The fate of a young Okinra-Star.
There were four moons to begin with but somewhere in time one was lost. A large asteroid had threatened the small sentient planet, a thousand years before her time, and only its collision with the bulbous, red fourth moon heeded the impending disaster. Shaken loose from its orbital path, it spiraled through space until it was drawn in by the red sun and consumed. Now, there were only three.
Shuti, the main moon that rose to a peak every ten days, was the biggest by far and glowed a brilliant blue that illuminated the sky. Ras was the second largest, rising to a peak every twenty-two days. It was a perfect clone to the lost fourth, though smaller in stature, and was stationed just to the left of Shuti. Epée, a name of the old language meaning ‘nightmare’ of all things, was a small green orb that hung just to the right and south of the other two. It was the most infrequent of the three moons, rising to a peak only once every sixty-four days. It was the one for which she was named. The one that had cursed her forever, for she was Okinra-Star.
Her country was poor, dying. Starving to the point of ingesting itself for salvation. The war had crushed BlueGarden, destroying its government, its military, its economy, and its people. It had escaped complete defeat but was defeated nonetheless. Its population was war-weary and downtrodden, with nowhere to turn. Nowhere to go except down, succumbing to their weaknesses and drowning in earth. Power was the only thing that mattered now. Those in power were placed there by the drugs that everyone coveted. Drugs. Some escape from the barren wasteland that encompassed what so many had called home. All this she knew from the tiny snippets of memory that she retained from when she was young. From before she came to the orphanage. From before they realized that she was Okinra-Star, the most potent and coveted hallucinogen in existence.
Okinra-Star was what the doctors had labeled it when it had first appeared a hundred years ago. It was a gland in her brain that secreted a hormone into her bloodstream, turning her life fluid into an ingestible hallucinogen. A gland that, when struck by the ultra-violet light from the third moon, Epée, went into overdrive, secreting so much of this hormone that it overwhelmed her system, flooding her body and sending her violent convulsions until her heart stopped. When the government had realized what the gland produced, they banned it. No, they did more then that. They began testing its effects on the local children. Hundreds of them died. When people starting questioning the disappearances, they dismissed the drugs existence. They insisted instead the Okinra-Star was a disease that drove those born with it made. That it made them into monsters, child killers. That was what Okinra-Star was. That, and an eleven year-old girl, strapped to a board in a hidden room in the basement of an orphanage. A girl with silver hair, gray eyes, and pale skin. A girl named Ava, which in the new language, meant ‘nightmare’. A girl who longed for nothing more then to die so that she could stop killing others.
The man had left, unaware that her mind had slipped away and his presence disappeared, her mind snapped back to awareness. She was going to get out. She had to, though she knew that freedom meant death. Her body was too weak from her years of imprisonment. Adrenaline would only get her so far. She did not fear death; she welcomed it, as she would anything that freed her from this prison. Anything that kept the doctors and professors from figuring out what the gland was. If they figured out the components of the hormone it secreted, they could produce it in mass quantities, killing hundreds with the drug that her body had provided.
She rolled slightly to the right, revealing what she had hidden from the inattentive physician earlier. Over the last seven years they had never removed her from the board for fear of her escaping. They had never loosened her straps, and never replaced them either. For the last seven years she had been struggling with them, pulling at them when she was alone and coherent enough to. And after seven years they were finally at the breaking point. She pulled at the strap holding down her right wrist, pulling her arm over to cross her chest. A surge of adrenaline coursed through her body as the sound of tearing leather reached her ears and a spike shot up on one of the machines. Immediately, alarms began to sound and footsteps echoed down the hallway toward her. Frantically she struggled to tear loose the strap on her left wrist, leaving those straps to dangle as she tore away at the rest of the straps imprisoning her body. She slid off the board onto the floor as the doorway suddenly filled with anxious looking men in lab coats. They looked around aimlessly, many staring at the empty board before them. She tore the needles loose from her arm and let them dangle. As a new set of alarms began to screech, she gathered the hands of the straps that hung from her wrists. Reaching up, she toppled the board, sending the few men that had ventured too close flying. The IV stand fell, its metal bars striking against one another, as she had known they would, lighting a spark that ignited the fallen board. The water-filled IV bag burst as it hit the fast-spreading flames, dousing them like an absurd water balloon, flooding the room with low-rolling smoke. She crawled through the smoke, moving through the pulsating room toward the doorway that was always open, using the straps still attached to her as whips against anyone that reached for her. As she darted through the open doorway she felt a warm rush of relief that her plan had worked, and a cold pang of pain as the adrenaline in her faded. She moved down the hallway as quickly as her weak body would allow, casting her sight around wildly. As she progressed, she chewed at the leather binding her wrists, releasing them finally from the last connections to that awful room. She the straps hit the floor with a tiny plop just as a shout echoed from behind her. Blind with terror, she began to run, not sure later how her body was able to. Blind with terror, she rounded a corner and ran headlong into John. The impact sent them both tumbling head over heels. She was on her feet in an instant, fear shining through her eyes. She reached a hand down, pulling John to his feet, (a feat that she could not repeat for months later), and clung to him desperately.
“Help me! Please, there’s no time to explain! They’re coming, please! You have to hide me!” she begged breathlessly, glancing over her shoulder as footsteps raced towards them. “Please!” she cried in a whisper. “Don’t let them find me!”
Chapter Three
John stared at her for the briefest of seconds before nodding his head. “Right.” He said. “Follow me. Quickly!” He grabbed her arm, pulling her after him as he raced down the dark and deserted hallways. He backtracked them towards the pounding footsteps and grimaced as he felt her nails dig into his hand with fear. He turned then, racing down another hallway, looking around as he ran. He didn’t look back, knowing that even if they hadn’t been seen, their footsteps were echoing wildly, leading whoever was following straight to them.
He knew this girl somehow. He couldn’t exactly say how because she certainly wasn’t one of the orphanage children. He knew her nonetheless, seeing her had triggered a vague memory of a little girl screaming and the soft voice of an older one telling him to “Leave it John. You can’t help that one.’
The memory threatened to distract him, so he shook it off as they ran up a narrow, winding set of stairs that led to the second floor. A huge, floor to ceiling, picture occupied the middle of the wall along the main hallway. The picture, an ancient oil painting of the house’s original owner, an aging spinster named Calimadra Figora, housed a hidden room. John had discovered it by accident and as far as he knew, no one else knew of its existence. He had used it often when he was younger, usually to hide from the older ones when they were hunting little ones to torture, and it was only place he could think of to house the little fugitive.
They fairly flew up the stairs and as John stumbled across the landing he threw a glance behind him. The girl he was literally dragging along was unsteady, wavering back and forth. Her face was pale and drawn and she was pulling in painful breaths in deep, whooping gasps. He skidded to a stop and she fell to the floor, raising her head to stare weakly up at him.
Was she really free or was this all simply an illusion dangled before her exhausted mind? Was it another fake, like the open door? Something to throw her off balance and leave her begging for what she could never have? She could almost hear their sadistic laughter and it drove her to tears. She was so tired, she wanted only to sleep, sleep a thousand years and wake up as anything but Okinra-Star. But that boy was hovering just above her, pulling at her, trying to get her to move. Whispering that they would be seen, captured. He didn’t understand. She had never planned beyond the escape from that prison. She had expected to die. She wanted to die.
John gave up on persuasion, bending down to lift her into his arms. He shifted her weight, or lack thereof. She was lighter then even the small five-year olds. He held her tight against him as he ran down the hall and she did not struggle. As they neared the huge painting, John reached out a hand, groping blindly along the canvas. One of the top buttons on Calimadra’s petticoat extended just slightly from the picture and it was this button that he pushed. There was a quiet click as the painting swung toward him, revealing a small messy room. A pile of books lay in one corner, while blankets lay in the other.
He flew inside the room, setting the girl down on the blankets, racing back to pull the door closed. The painting swung back into place as footsteps and shouts pounded up to it and stopped, replaced by a rapid panting. He left the painting open just a crack and peered out of it curiously. There was a small group of men, maybe ten in total, all dressed in pressed lab coats standing just before the picture. They were all bent double at the waist, gasping for breath and sending furious whispers to the others.
“How could you let her escape?” the man closest to the painting cried to the others. He was a relatively young man with curly brown hair that fell in wisps over his blue eyes. Those eyes were as blue as steel and equally as cold.
“We didn’t LET her escape!” a blond man in his mid-thirties answered defensively. John glanced back at the girl who had managed to crawl beneath a few of the blankets, and now lay apparently asleep, an arm and a leg still bare beneath the comforters. The arm that was visible was heavily bruised and scarred with what looked like bee stings, a few of which appeared to have just stopped bleeding.
“Would someone care to explain why I have been awoken in the middle of the night to the news that my Okinra-Star has escaped?” Ms Cullen’s cold voice cut through the air, throbbing with a barely suppressed rage. John’s blood froze in his veins and he acted on instinct, like a wounded animal backed into a corner by a crazed predator, diving toward the painting and pulling it closed.
Silence hung thick in the air before Blue Eye’s voice raised, starting to stammer some sort of explanation. A few footsteps echoed and a hushed hiss split the air. Blue Eye’s words were cut off by a sudden cry of pain. An odd gurgling sound issued from his throat, followed by an unmistakable thud.
John’s eyes were wide; he didn’t need to see to know what had just happened. Ms Cullen had just murdered the man with the curly brown hair.
“She’s crazy…all of the doctors…. are afraid of her.” The girl’s voice whispered from the darkness. He was terrified, eyes wide, mouth gaping. He felt sure that at any moment, the portrait would swing open and Ms Cullen’s head would poke through, her eyes widened and an extraordinarily evil grin splitting her face. Not that she knew about the hidden room. No one did, but she would find them nonetheless. John’s mind whispered. She would throw her head in the air and SNIFF them out, like the devil’s own hound abandoning the gate to hell to find them. Then she would laugh as she killed them. No orphan had ever hide from her for long. One could hide from Tortio and not be found, run from a Sister and not get caught, lie to older one’s and get away with it, and still never escape Ms Cullen. Some kids were caught by her…and were never seen again.
John choose not to respond to the girl, his terror so great that he thought he would puke if he opened his mouth. He leaned close back toward the painting, pressing one ear against the door but silence had again prevailed.
“Listen to me.” Ms Cullen’s voice was calmer now, though a hint of rage still flowed within it. “If you don’t find the girl by morning, you won’t have to wait until the caravan arrives. I’ll kill you myself.” Her voice rose slightly on the last word, once more sending chills down John’s spine. “Tortio!” she called out a flurry of footsteps moved toward the door and then, accompanied by the sound of Ms Cullen’s heavy gait, stuttered down the hall quickly. A relieved sigh released the tension of the moment like deflating a balloon.
“I don’t think I can take much more of this shit. She’s cracking and I really don’t want to be around when she explodes. The Caravan doesn’t pay me enough.” The blonde man’s voice echoed nervously.
“You’ll want to be quiet about that.” An unfamiliar voice cautioned calmly.
“Why? Who’s gonna hear me? Little Miss Figora here?” The blonde’s voice rose slightly, taking on an edge of panic.
“Listen, I HAVE a plan, but its not going to work if you go to pieces on me! I need you to relax. I need you to be calm.” The other voice spoke again, its stoicism shattered by a note of anger.
“Fine.” The blonde scoffed. “What can I do?” Their voices trailed off as they walked away, but John was no longer listening. He sat back against the wall of the small room, his gaze cast on the mysterious fugitive curled up in a pile of blankets. She was watching him with the same pleading look that had lit her face as she begged for his help. The look of utter despair trapped there pierced his heart as surely as a bullet.
“Please. You can’t let them get me.” She whispered. John felt a wrench as said bullet ripped through his pounding organ as tears spilled down her cheeks. “I can’t go back there. I’ll die before I go back there!” her whisper was fierce with sorrow. John stood, walking over to her and taking her hand in his.
“I swear to you, I won’t let them find you.” He whispered in response. She nodded to him, eyes flooding with foreign gratitude before dropping heavily, overcome by exhaustion that ravaged her weak body. John sat back with a sigh, laying her hand on the blanket. His mind was raging, replaying the night’s events vividly, his imagination more than willing to produce pictures for what he hadn’t actually seen.
Ms Cullen, a look of ugly fury on her face, pulled a pocketknife from her night coat, plunging it into the neck of the Blue Eyed man. His eyes widen with shock and he struggles to wrench the knife free from his throat. Blood flies through the air, staining the tops of Ms Cullen’s shoes and the neckline of Blue Eyes immaculate lab coat. His eyes glaze over in horror as he falls forward into a pool of crimson that rapidly expands beneath him…
“Enough, okay? Enough!” he whispered fiercely, his cheeks wet with tears. Desperate to move his mind beyond those dark thoughts, he focused once more of the girl. He noticed, almost instantly, that although most other people seemed peaceful in sleep, she appeared troubled and lost. Her brow was creased with worry lines unbecoming of her age; an age that he could not even began to guess. Her emaciated form seemed lost in her loose nightgown, and her strangely cherubic features made her seem not a day over seven. The lines creasing her face and the despair that had filled her eyes, however, revealed an ancient soul trapped beneath the layers of bruised skin. Those gray eyes haunted him but it was her silver hair that raised a memory in his mind, like a toy submerged beneath the water of a bath popping to the surface as a playful hand released it. A memory of the orphanage just a few short years after he had been brought to it.
The Caravan had been there then, as they always were in fall. The Caravan, as far as John could knew, was a group of free traders that constantly traveled the three countries yet owed no allegiance to any of them. Mautun, the country south of BlueGarden, had been defeated in the war that had raged between the Three and BlueGarden and it had nearly destroyed one another. Eden was the country that lay to west of BlueGarden. It had remained aloof during the war and so was left nearly untouched. It seemed to many in the war torn countries, to be a heaven to escape to, but it lay across an ocean and thousands had died trying to reach it. But the Caravan traveled there as well, purchasing goods and reselling them. They were a fiercely independent people and had refused to participate the war, but they were also the only group that scoured the burned countrysides, rescuing thousands of war orphans. Almost all of the children they rescued from BlueGarden had been brought to the orphanage as John had, and a few were still trickling in even after the war had ended.
This girl was one of the last to arrive at the orphanage. The war had been winding down, all sides speaking words of peace rather than continued death. She was brought in strangely, the Caravan bypassing the front door, which was the easiest access to the estate, opting instead to use the back door entrance. This entrance necessitated a two-mile tromp through the lower fields that the orphanage used to grow grain and corn.
John and the other younger children had been working in the fields that day, carrying baskets back and forth from the fields where the older kids picked the crops by hand, to the orphanages storage bins. The younger children might have had the more basic job but their position was, and still is, terrible. The older ones, being embittered, angry, and confused by the world that was robbed from them by war, would use every ounce of their power and strength to torment the little ones. As the younger children carried full baskets past the, the older ones would trip them, sending them and their load sprawling. Then the unfortunate child would have to go about the task of refilling the basket, holding up the line, and usually getting beaten if Tortio or Ms Cullen’s caught them.
It had been a relatively quiet day; given the older one’s capacity for cruelness, and at first John had not even realized that someone new had arrived. He was heading toward the orphanage with a full basket of corn perched precariously on his head. Two Caravan men were standing in the field not far from him, one of whom had a little girl in his arms. A little girl with silver hair and gray eyes. Ms Cullen’s was forcing her way through the fields and the lines of workers to reach them, a fiercely happy expression on her face. It was a look that would not be out of place on a wealthy vicars face, or plastered on the face of the insane. It turned John’s stomach. They talked quietly for a moment, out of John’s earshot, before Ms Cullen’s turned to the girl. She pulled a small pocketknife from her day coat,(no doubt the same one that she had used to silence Blue Eyes), and jammed it into the girl’s arm. The girl started to scream and she withdrew the knife, licking the blade tentatively. A look of utter rapture came across her face, a look that sickened him even more then the other had. A heavy hand touched his shoulder and he looked up to see one of the older boys standing just behind him.
“Leave it John. You can’t help that one.” The boy said quietly, a look of sad understanding on his face. A moment later he shoved John hard, spilling him and his basket. John scrambled to recover his fallen corn and when he stood again, the Caravan men and the girl were gone.
John started, the memory fading in his mind, fading but not vanishing. No, probably never to vanish again. And that memory forced the surfacing of another, one from not ten minutes ago.
“She’s an Okinra-Star?” his voice was a chilling copy of Ms Cullen’s as he flew backwards, retreating to a far corner of the small room. Images floated into his mind of the stories that older ones had whispered when he was little. Stories of the Okinra-Star, people who seemed normal but went mad at midnight and stole through the villages capturing and devouring children. He had written them off as legend, but now find he could not, sitting so close to one. The very thought chilled his every bone and left him sleepless, huddled against the far wall, staring at the still form of the girl.
Chapter Four
Black. Everything was black as she stared at the charred remains of her house. It reminded her, briefly, of a charcoal drawing that she had once seen somewhere.
“Mommy? Daddy?” her tiny four-year old voice wasn’t even loud enough to echo through the gutted room. She ran a blackened hand through her silver hair, leaving streaks of black in its wake. Her pale face was sooty where she had dug her grimy fists into her eyes to dam her tears.
“We don’t want you!” whispers seemed to scream at her.
“B…But why!” she sobbed, dissolving once more into tears.
“okinra”
“okinra”
“Okinra-Star!”
She awoke with a start, reaching a shaking hand up to wipe away the tears that had gathered in her eyes. She looked out from her nest of blankets, her gaze falling on John’s huddled form. Exhaustion had finally forced him into a fitful sleep barely an hour earlier. Her eyes moved past him and she was alarmed to see sunlight peeking through tiny cracks in the door. She forced herself to her knees, biting her lip to keep from screaming, and crawled slowly across the hardwood floor.
“Hey.” She whispered, shaking him. “Hey boy. Wake up!” Her voice pulled him back from his nightmares. When he opened his sleep-filled eyes, confusion flooding him and all of the night’s events were momentarily forgotten.
“Where am I?” he questioned loudly and Ava fell forward, clapping a hand over his mouth.
“You should leave. They’ll be looking for you.” She whispered. He pulled away from her grasp, her gray eyes surfacing his lost memories. Terror flooded his face once more as he remember ‘what’, exactly, she was.
“You…you’re Okinra-Star!” he croaked, backing away as much as the cramped space would allow. Ava felt his fear and it pierced through her like ice, forming tears in the corners of her eyes.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” She whispered. “I’m not a monster! Those stories, they aren’t true! I used to think that I was evil.” Tears pelted down from her eyes. “But I’m not! I’m not!” she cried quietly. She started to crawl towards him and slipped on the tear-wetted floor, falling forward and hitting her head. Blood rose quickly to the wound and she touched it gingerly, staring idly at her crimson-tipped fingers. She leaned forward suddenly, pressing her bloody fingers to his lips. “This is what the Okinra-Star truly is.” She whispered.
John pulled back from her touch, but curiosity overcame him, his tongue darting out to lick his crimson-stained lips. Utter disgust swept across his face as he looked down at her. He could only stare at her, lifting his sleeve and rubbing furiously at his red-tinted lips.
“Why…would you…. do that?” his words were stuttered between the furious rubbing of cloth on skin.
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