Eternal Spring

Chapter One: Curses

{suh dudes, I wanted to say sorry for taking a break but then I remembered I don't owe you anything, so, here is a new book no one asked for.} 

Azura, an angel-like woman, with her raggy blonde hair and white, thick feathered wings, her eyes filled with passion and fury, was always yearning for something, always curious. She always wanted to explore, to spread her wings and fly until she couldn't anymore. She admired how the birds could fly so carelessly through the air.

Yet, Azura constantly felt incapable of truly loving it. Truthfully she hadn't felt she could truly love anything, not in the ways that everybody else could at least. The 'issue' never bothered her much.

That is until she found her parents heaving up petals onto the hardwood floors of their clandestine cottage.

Azura learned quickly that she would be the reason people suffer, she, the almost ethereal being, would be the reason love was so painful. And she hated it.

She spent many nights researching what was wrong with her. No book could give her an answer that fit. Many suggested asexuality, but Azura knew that wasn't right. Being asexual wasn't wrong, it didn't induce the kind of pain she was dealing like cards.

She deduced it was some kind of curse nobody knew about. Perhaps she was sleepwalking and accidentally offended a witch. As crazy as it sounded, it was her only solution, her only explanation.

She felt as if there was a black hole, a void, that replaced her heart, and each time it beat it devoured the affections of everyone around her.

But this curse, this disease, didn't stop her from yearning for freedom, it didn't stop her strange curiosity.

And now her parents were no longer there, there were no voices of reason, nothing holding her back. She hated how she viewed them as a setback, but in some ways, they were.

After all, she couldn't love.

So she stood up from the old rocking chair on the porch, tied her hair up haphazardly, and walked to the edge of an endlessly intimidating cliff.

Azura knew what despair felt like, she knew the pain of existence. She had spent too many nights at her parent's low graves to not know, too many days peering into a foxing old mirror, cutting hair with dull scissors and tears. But as she leapt from that treacherous edge, when she spread her wings once bound, she felt that despair almost be set aside. For a blissful moment, she was free. It was a beautiful moment. So beautiful in fact she almost forgot to fly.

The fall was peaceful, it was Azura's discovery of being at peace. Sure, falling causes one to panic, but she knew she'd be able to save herself from the all too dreaded plop. Splat. So for a moment, she knew that peace, all the voices in her head yelling at her to do something had gone quiet. Oh how she wished it could last forever.

The moment was quickly put to rest by the instinctive motion of her wings flapping, pulling her from the forceful hands of gravity and into the gentle whisps of the wind.

She sighed and expected the loud roar of the voices returning, but as the wind flowed through her hair and feathers, she realized they weren't returning just yet, they were allowing her this one last moment of peace. She laughed at the realization, she laughed giddily as she soared above the clouds, watching them change colors in the setting sun. She turned sideways, putting her hand into the clouds below her as if it were water.

She smiled, it felt like the first genuinely happy moment in a long time, and it was. Between the thorns suffocating anyone who loved her, and the voices coaxing her in strange ways, she never had the time to be this free.

She dwelled on her pitiful happiness for another moment before diving down. Down, down, down.

The wind made her eyes tear up, but she just couldn't close them, she couldn't miss this.

As the ground got threateningly close, she rose once again, gliding just above the ground. She peered to her left, just for a second, just for a sweet moment, and of course something caught her eye, something captured all of her attention.

For the first time in Azura's existence, she was infatuated, possibly the closest thing to love she had ever experienced.

A woman, sitting by the low waters of the fen, drinking tea and pondering something. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin, almost the complete opposite of Azura. She looked up from the still fen water.

For a fleeting second they knew each other, they saw into their futures, their pasts, and their presents, they understood one another in some weird way.

Azura wasn't able to look away, but perhaps he should've because she was quickly thrown off of her flight path. She tumbled through the tall grass and flowers. She quickly discovered why they were called blades of grass.

"Curses," she muttered under breath.

She began examining her fast healing cuts and scrapes, barely able to catch the black blood barely escaping her skin.

The voices returned with a roar, racing for her attention, her compliance. If she hadn't just been introduced to silence she wouldn't have minded, she would've ignored them until they were white noise. But the sudden uproar was enough to give her a migraine.

Her only saving grace was the wind humming a melody as it passed. It sung a lullaby she remembered fondly, but the memory was quickly soured.

She shook the thoughts off as the voices continued pestering her. That is until the loudest of them all decided to throw its hat into the ring, for it wanted something. And this voice, so influential yet so calm, could change Azura's mind in mere seconds, it could change her.

This voice wasn't Azura's own voice; she could care less what her own voice wanted. This voice wanted blood. It knew that eventually, that is what she would get.

But for now, most of Azura's attention was pinned towards the pain in her wing that was getting increasingly worse