Unraveling Eden ✔ [ONC 2021]

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

As my eyes opened, the atmosphere above me looked like it was spinning. The moon and stars circled me as the witch's song echoed in my ears. For a moment it felt like I was in a daze, no recollection of the world I had once known, not even my name. There was nothing to worry about, no one else but me living on the face of the earth. A tingling in my arms brought me back down to earth and I felt the cool grass under my fingertips. The little beads of dew against my skin.

Suddenly, I was jolted back to reality as my lungs screamed for air. A much-needed breath inflated my lungs as pain radiated throughout me. The memory of being thrown through the air and ripped away from Ethan resurfaced. Ethan.

My eyes searched for him, turning my neck from left to right. "Ethan?" I called out, but my voice came out as a mere squeak. Slowly, I rolled onto my side, feeling a stabbing in my lower back. Searching the grass, I saw him. He laid ten feet away from me, his eyes closed and body sprawled out on the grass. "Ethan!" Digging my elbows into the dirt, I dragged myself along the grass and felt the wet soak through my jacket and touch my skin. Every movement made my body ache. I wanted nothing more than to lie down and curl up into a ball, but the voice inside my head, the paranoid side of me, worried that he was dead.

When I reached him, I leaned down and placed my ear against his chest. The rhythmic thumping made me sigh in relief and I shook him gently.

"Ethan," I repeated and this time his eyes fluttered open. He gasped for air and frantically looked around before his eyes landed on me. Propping himself up, he wrapped an arm around me and hugged me tightly. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, I think so..." he muttered, still regaining his bearings. "Are you?"

"Yeah," I nodded against his chest.

"What just happened?"

I shook my head as I stared out at the forest. "I don't know."

Suddenly, he winced and laid his head into his hand. "Ow, my head." Though the pain seemed to quickly disappear and he was left with clarity. "I remember... The witch, put a spell on us so our love would last forever. But she said something weird..."

"Beware the hands of fate," we muttered in unison.

"You remember too," Ethan deducted. "This is crazy. All these years we've been like a moth to a flame, but it's never worked out. We've never got a happy ending."

"It seems weird, doesn't it? We were guaranteed eternity together. I remember she said that she was bound by the limits of mortality. Why didn't it ever work out? Did something go wrong?" I couldn't figure it out. My mind wasn't used to thinking about magic, yet the look on Ethan's face said that he was better at thinking outside of the box than I was. His jaw hung open. "What is it?"

"Beware the hands of fate... What if it was literal? We aren't supposed to be here, we were supposed to have died thousands of years ago. So what if fate is a being? Someone trying to wipe us out of existence because we were never supposed to exist in the first place? It could be why we've never had our happy ending. We always die. It could even be why you're sick..." he worked through his thoughts out loud as his hands cupped his cheeks.

"It just sounds..."

"Crazy, I know," he finished for me. "But what if it's true? What if no amounts of modern medicine can save you because magic is what's doing this to you?"

"I don't know, Ethan." Just thinking about it made my head hurt. I lowered myself until my forehead was resting against Ethan's shoulder. He stroked my back.