DO YOU REMEMBER? No part of her wanted to remember the past.
It was a part of her that she wanted to bury, but everything around her became a reminder. She never deserved to be standing on her own two feet. Who could forgive her if they found out? E...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
_____________
CHAPTER ONE, poison ivy
THE CLOUDS had billowed into the sky that day, with the wind blowing past her ears and flowing through her hair. Her ill-fitted, grey dress lapped against her legs. A tinge of coldness pricked her bare skin. They wouldn't stop until she was dead. The girl panted desperately, running for as long as she could. In their eyes, she was just a little mouse ready to be clawed at and pierced apart.
"Don't lose her!" They shouted, their tone full of mockery and glee.
Messy strands of blonde hair sprawled over her shoulders, her perfect braids undoing themselves. Fog trapped her visibility. The coldness bit the girl, encasing her to shiver and violently tremble. Branches snapped underneath her feet, the sound alerting them. The girl's collapse to the floor left her utterly petrified, covering her body to prepare for their killing blow. This was it. Her end to her short life of being someone she didn't want to be.
Pick yourself up.
Their hands were raised and faces painted with an ugly, bloodthirsty grin. Cheers echoed across the forest trees, a hunter's cruel call to finally end the young girl. They wanted this. They enjoyed all of the suffering and agony being inflicted on her. She couldn't even bear to open her eyes and squeezed them shut to shield herself from the pain.
"Now kill her!"
The sounds of pierced flesh echoed in the trees. It wasn't hers. Their attention diverted from her and changed in just a second. A flash of swords were seen from one end of the forest to another, like a rhythmic sound of pierced skin before the collision of two metal weapons. A knife against a sword. She couldn't stop herself from watching the dance of an unstoppable, brutal fight.
A figure stood above the fallen bodies. His chest rose up and down, as if that moment took every bit of his strength and kept his back to her. A dark cloak obscured his features. Nothing about her world felt real. The swordsman could've stolen the kill all for himself and savored her for last. She knew he could've done the last gutting of her life.
Eris knew he wanted to save her.
"Who are you...?"
"What?"
A deep voice cut through her daze. The memories of the past fizzled away into the present and the man sat in the corner of the bar suddenly spoke. Eris had to ground herself into reality—she was a server in Shells Town and was taking customer's orders. Intense, brown eyes bored into hers as if they could read her through. She'd spoken without realizing it and the customer heard it all.
