Tales of PulchraGea, Vol. 1

Prologue (Final Version/585)

  I'd never had an easy life. To start off, I never actually knew my parents; I'd get different opinions of what kind of people they were depending on who I asked, and no two people said the same thing. I was shuffled around between family members for most of my childhood, and often used as a source of manual labor. I was never very strong, physically, just a pale skinny kid with innocuous sandy blonde hair and hazel eyes with flecks of deep green. I had no confidence, because when I wasn't getting beatings at home, I was getting them at school. I genuinely believed that that it was just the way life was, constant torture both physical and emotional. I felt like I was forcibly resigned to an existence of abuse and petty labor, despite dreams of freedom from it all, until I couldn't any longer. I decided to sneak out and end the pain late one night.
  I climbed the local watertower with designs of diving off. A fall from that height would mean immediate death. I stood at the edge of the maintenence platform, looked out over the town. There was nothing for me there, not even a single good time that I could remember in my whole life. This world was not a place I belonged. If I was going to leave, it should be on my own terms. I watched the streetlights go off one by one as the sun peeked over the horizon, the kiss of dawn's radiance giving me the courage to do what was right.
  As I prepared to step off the platform to the awaiting shores of the river Styx below something flew through the air and hit me heartily in the head. It clanged off the water tower behind me and clattered onto the platform I stood on, only barely failing to fall through the diamond grate. It was a curiously shaped thing, thin and shaped almost like a regular house key. It was made of silver that gleamed with the light of a star. It had no teeth to activate lock tumblers, but rather had a small dark jewel near the tip. The silver itself was textured with some sort of seemingly random, nigh fourth-dimensional geometric pattern. As I looked at it I knew with neither a doubt nor a reason that I was not destined to end my story here, that there was something more for me. I climbed down the ladder with the key in my hand. However, as I was climbing down the key slipped through my fingers and fell to the ground below.
  I slid most of the rest of the way to the ground, then frantically began searching for the siver key amongst the overgrown trellis and tumbleweeds at the base of the water tower. There was never a chance of me finding it in the early dawn amongst the weeds and caliche. I felt its loss deep in my heart: it couldn't​ have been a coincidence that an odd object like that just fell from the sky at the highest point in town, and I was mourning its loss heavily when I felt a weight suddenly appear in my pocket.
  I never kept anything in my pockets, so I was acutely aware of it suddenly. I reached into my pocket and there it was. I knew right then that this key, rather than a trip off the water tower, was my real ticket to freedom from slavery.