Someone

The brown haired woman watched as a light looped lazily through the air in front of her, drawing her from the path. More joined the first, until a whirling torrent of golden bugs spun upwards, like a luminescent silk scarf trailing from the fingers of a dancer. Up and up in a spiralling wave that gave the full moon a gold halo, and brought colour to the monochromatic land beneath it.

She missed the fireflies when they left, but she knew she couldn't follow them any further. Her wanderings had taken her too close to the woods that rose up on her left in foreboding darkness, pale trunks gleaming like bones among the snakeskin leaves that murmured rumours to the shifting air around them. The wind picked up, desperate to spread the gossip, pushing aside the tall grass in its hurry. The stalks rippled and bent, the wind screaming now over their bowing heads, sending them dancing in silver waves. The woman's ears stung from the sudden ferocity of the wind, as the air boomed around her.

The rain started, each stinging drop boring into her skin and planting seeds of cold in her bones as she tried to protect her face from the writhing vegetation around her. The wind buffeted her to the ground where she knelt, arms thrown upwards.

"Leave me alone!" she screamed. "I never wanted you!"

The wind laughed in her ears. The bowing grass chuckled at her self-deception.

"You did" it whispered back. "I have always been there. Always. You were just too weak to get rid of me, too weak to run away."

"No" she sobbed, the word ringing in her ears, her short brown hair whipping in her face, disgusted to be part of someone so weak, so insignificant.

"Yes. You know it is true. You tried to run from me before. I found you. I will always find you, until you stop running and give in. You know it is the right thing to do. I can protect you. You are more when we are together."

The woman squinted into the darkness as the world bucked and lurched around her. The fireflies spun crazily, glittering orbs thrown by the air towards her.

If I was a little firefly where would I hide?

The orbs arced and tumbled, the dancer pirouetting closer and closer, trailing her scarf behind her: into the woods.

The woman started to run, the bugs a shifting nimbus around her head, leading her onwards. The leaves were silent, baffled by her bravery. She was strong now: flying towards the place that she feared. She wouldn't go back.

"Face your fear,

And you will hear,

The way to become,

Someone."

"I...will...not...stop." She screamed into the wind.

The woods rose up to meet her, pale branches beckoning urgently.

"NO" the wind screamed "you don't know what's in the woods. It will hurt you and you will return to me, shattered, once more. It will break you as it broke you before".

The wind surged in a final effort to wash her back into the silver waves.

The woman hardly hesitated before leaping into the darkness, the undergrowth swallowing her up. She stumbled on, the branches supporting her, the noise of the storm fading behind her, until at last, her exhausted body slumped to the ground, the moss cushioning her slumbering frame, the trees watching over her as she slept, their leaves whispering memories to her.

A brown haired girl playing among their diamond leaves,

picking the blueberries beneath their bows,

watching the rising sun framing green buds in a multitude of reds.

A changeling sun from the one that woke her. A changling sun from the one that sent dappled shadows flickering beneath the tall trees.

But it was beautiful all the same.

Why had she been scared of the woods? She had never been scared as a child, indeed she knew now that she had spent much time there. She stepped out, last year's leaves skittering around her feet. Why had she never remembered her childhood when she was on the plains? How could she have forgotten this place of peace? Where she was someone more than the wretch that could do no right.

It was all wrong.

Things weren't what they seemed.

She opened her eyes.

The foreign sun illuminated each perfect leaf in emerald green, each plump blueberry in frosted purple, each symmetrical fern had an unnatural sheen.

It was perfect. Too perfect

She started to run, identical trunk after identical trunk flashing past her.

It is all wrong.

But it felt so real. Everything had seemed so normal until the woods, until she had looked for the detail in the familiar landscape.

"It's not real. Any of it." She breathed.

"No," the voice came from behind her. "It is not."

The brown haired woman turned slowly

"I made it. I made it because..."

And the memory hit her.

Red spreading in a dark circle across the floor of their flat, staining his blue uniform beneath the gold badge. Right from his heart. The heart that he had loved her with.

"I made it because I never wanted you to go. I couldn't cope with you dying like that," she told him. "And I will miss you for as long as I live. But I must live now. I must be strong. I want to be real."

He smiled at her.

"Go. Leave me. Become someone."

And the stranger sun shone bright white, peeling back the illusion that scattered before her like fireflies fleeing the wind.

* * *

In a room the colour of snow, a woman with short brown hair looked around her, and smiled at the real world.