Someone You Knew-After Stellarlune

Chapter 17

Ta-da!

Today I decided to double update!!

This chapter was a little rushed but I hope you enjoy it.

Sophie's eyes still stung from her meeting with her parents.

She had explained her situation to her parents, and they still seemed to trust her despite the misunderstanding. That made their goodbye more heartbreaking. When they were done saying goodbye, the Council leaped her to Lumenaria. They had escorted her through the prison, she could not see where she was going due to her blindfold but her photographic memory remembered that she took exactly 2496 steps inside the prison. 

Now, Sophie was in her cell (without her blindfold) trying to process reality. 

Her goodbye with her parents felt like days ago, in fact she could not guess how long she have been trapped in the cell. It could have been minutes or hours. Everything felt a dream, from the time where her friends turned her in to the Council to when she was first kicked into this very cell. 

Sophie refused to admit that her life was basically over. 

She had survived a tribunal, a banishment, and a million other near death experiences, she could surely get her way out of this, right?

But this time it was different.

She did not have her friends' support nor the Black Swan's. She was completely alone in this world...well except for Keefe. 

If her eyes had any tear left in them, they would have watered. Thinking about Keefe made her heart feel warmer and heavier at the same time. She remembered the his smile as if it was her own. It reminded her of how he used to make her day brighter and her shoulder lighter. Keefe really was a ray of sunshine. 

But now he wasn't here. 

Sophie felt a lump on her throat. Why was her life always messed up? Why couldn't she be a normal teenager for once? She had never asked to be the Moonlark. The responsibilities of it was too huge and scary for Sophie. It burdened her, causing her to doubt herself, loose friends, and experience huge losses.  

Sophie didn't want to be the Moonlark. No one can ever handle the burden that comes with it completely, and asking for a teenager to handle them was the biggest mistake the Black Swan had made. 

The Black Swan had thought that she would be able to change the world, make people see the Elvin society in different perspectives, and acknowledge the flaws in the Council's systems. But they were wrong. Sophie, the Moonlark herself was now locked up in a miserable cell, with no one that loved her. 

Project Moonlark was a failure. 

She was a disappointment.

Sophie was still pitying herself as a goblin approached her cell. "It's sleeping hours." The goblin told her, squeezing a purple pillow between the bars.

Oralie once told her that the sleep schedule in Lumenaria was random so that the prisoners lost track of how long they were imprisoned. Sophie thought that was a clever idea at the time, but now she wished the Council had been dumb enough to let the prisoners know how many nights had passed in their cell. 

She took the purple pillow, which was not the most comfortable thing she had cuddled with, but it wasn't bad. She lied down and slipped the pillow under her head, grateful that her head didn't have to face the cold floor. 

She was incredibly tired from her trip to the Elysian Island and from all the crying. Her eye-lids easily dropped and she felt exhaustion settling in. Sleeping never came easy to Sophie, but tonight she fell asleep quickly, listening to her own breathing.