REKINDLED || Completed

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"Always remember that in everything, He loved us first."

Depression.

Some say it breaks you beyond yourself. Others say it changes you.

But for Asher—just Asher—depression was not just an emotion. It was a force, an abyss with no bottom, a silent captor that pulled her deeper into its suffocating darkness. It was a slow descent, one that offered no mercy, no reprieve.

The years had not been kind. They had molded her into a shadow of herself, shaping her suffering into something she could not escape. Her childhood, a bitter prologue, had been the first hand to push her over the edge. The demons came after, patient and unrelenting. They wrapped around her like a vice, whispering, clawing, breaking. Depression had its dead arms around her throat, and though she longed to scream, no sound would come.

She had learned early on that fighting was futile. Acceptance was all she knew. Whether right or wrong, fair or unjust, she took everything as it came. It was the way she had been raised—to endure, to obey, to survive. But survival had its price.

Nights of torment blurred into each other, stretching into an endless cycle of pain. The echoes of stolen innocence and whispered threats haunted her even in the daylight. She was broken. She was defiled. She was worthless.

She was afraid.

Yet somehow, she was still here. She had no recollection of how she made it through—how she kept waking up, breathing, existing. But she did. Her body bore the evidence, old wounds tracing paths of suffering across her skin, but none ached as much as the scars on her heart.

With a tired sigh, she hugged her arms against the biting cold, seeking warmth where there was none. She sat with her back pressed against the wall, her gaze distant, lost in the infinite, merciless void of her thoughts.

Then she looked down.

Her thighs, bare and scarred, told stories she wished she could erase. Each dark rip, each cruel mark, was a memory. A memory that burned. A memory that poisoned. A memory that would never leave.

Her fingers brushed over them lightly. The touch ignited something inside her—grief, rage, shame. Hot tears welled in her eyes, blurring the world before they spilled down her cheeks.

Rick Sherwood.

A name. A nightmare. A monster.

And if one man could be so monstrous, then surely, all men were.

She had been just a girl, but the world hadn't cared. The world never did.

As time passed, neither did she.

She wiped her leaking eyes with the back of her hand, her breath unsteady. Her gaze lifted to the calendar on the wall. She would die one day. She knew this as fact. And with each passing sunrise, that day crept closer.

She welcomed it.

She longed for it.

Her fate was sealed, a story she had written with every ounce of suffering that had bled through her soul. She had come to her conclusion, her final act.

But the Author of her existence had not.

Little did she know that the story was not yet over.

Little did she know that the One who truly saw—who had always seen—had written a different ending.

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I honestly do not know where this goes. We'll just have to find out. Kindly vote and comment, thank youuu.