The Ashes Of River

❥ 00| prologue

THERE IS A VILLAIN in every love story.

Including mine; especially in mine. The villain that wanted to tear apart every good thing in my life. The villain that wanted to instil fear in every atom of my body. The villain that wanted to turn everything they set eyes upon, everything they touched, into literal ashes. Watching the ground beneath burn with sick satisfaction.

It was why everyone was warned to stay away from the villain from such a young age. Still, they treaded into nightmares and made you wake up, heart hammering against your chest and making you gasp for the breath that had been wickedly stolen.

But I have a secret. A regret. A confession.

I didn't stay away from the villain in my tale. I didn't avoid the ruin that I knew my villain would bring into my life despite all the signs. More than anything, I stayed ignorant. I knew they were bad; I knew it all along. I'd been dealt with their treacherous intentions and actions first-hand, seeing the consequences. But I turned a blind eye, going back again and again, introducing myself to masochistic traits.

Particularly when I entered the villain's dungeon, unintentionally seeking out his touch. His gaze. His words. His false promises. His malice.

I'd been warned away multiple times, especially by my parents who'd suffered at the hands of their own tormentors. My parents, who had suffered the punishment for love and had been marginalised from society, not finding a single place to belong. All they could do was put their pride aside and find work in a rich town with single-minded people whose only goal in life was to bathe in money and one-up their neighbours. I'd always followed the limited rules they'd imposed on me, not wanting to trouble them further, and in that town, the most important and prominent rule had been to stay away from their bosses' evil and unhinged son.

And for as long as I could, I had obeyed, never questioning why or questioning their jaded past. They were my whole world, but their world had collapsed around them earlier on, cruelly tearing them away from their families and abandoning them.

There was a single pin-point in history when everything had started to go downhill. I knew it existed, only I wasn't sure when exactly it was. Maybe it was when my parents' eyes had met and their love story began, leading all of us straight to the pits of hell. Maybe it was when we first stepped foot in Glésford, cursing ourselves to an eternity of agony. Or maybe it was when fate had thought that it was a good idea to draw a full circle in the intertwined lives of six people.

Three of those who were the mastermind of the horror story they'd drawn in bloodshed. A story in which I found myself barely breathing through, teetering on the edge between life and destruction. Not that they cared. They were selfish. They were greedy. They didn't have a single care about the wreckage they caused, or how without their fingerprints all over my life, I wouldn't have come across my villain.

Or maybe that was wishful thinking. Maybe it was my destiny to come across my villain and for him to become the bane of my existence. The one who was there at every corner, taunting and teasing me, finding any chance to bully me and trample all over my naïveté.

My villain wasn't just a monster who had emerged from the darkness of the night and appeared in my nightmares, however. My villain was, instead, poison. My villain was the feelings that seeped into my bloodstream like poison, slowly, painlessly, until I was trapped tightly in its clutches of death, never to see daylight again. My villain was River.

It was a twisted turn in my life. Unwanted, really. Until all I wanted was him. Until I was there, feeding on the poison right of out his palm. Until I was starving, only satiated when he fed me the lies that I was desperate for. Until, of course, that changed too. Until our places switched so that I was the one who was burying the skeletons of our past, never to be found by him. Until it was me who held the key to all the immoral sins in our kingdom. Until it was me who was begging him for forgiveness when he found out the truth. Until the only enemy in our story was the bitter revelations.

It was inevitable. Just like invisible burns we'd been born with that had turned into a glistening crimson to symbolise the wrath and all-consuming misery in our tale. It should've been a warning, but we continued to stay ignorant, continuing to walk toward one another on a path that was sure to explode into ugly ruins around us.

There was always no certainty that things would have worked out. There were too many scars, too many wounds and the aftermath of our lies were so raw, so potent that it was near impossible to get over. But we still tried. We still managed to reach up to the sky from the depths of the sea and claim our endings. Whether it was the ones we wanted or not, only time and another retelling would tell.

And moral of the story: don't trust anyone and definitely don't fall in love with boys who have cold eyes like the ocean that drip with honey-laced ivy.