Taint, Time and Tangents✔️

≑ Chapter Twenty

To LowwLifee (Rachel) for the beautiful cover on the multimedia corner. Thanks! ^.^ 

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 C H A P T E R    T W E N T Y 

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CALLIE

 

Calliope.

Voice as smooth as thousands polished gems, soft as the tender waves of sea at night, and as innocent as the baby on the arms of a weeping mother. That voice kept ringing in my ears while my eyes were embedded on those marbles awashed with a shade of the deepest blue.

An eventful night transpired a decade ago wherein a cloudless sky watched an angel struggling to escape the constraints of a secluded and stern place she called 'home'. She had wings- heaps of feathers as snowy as the others' but never as majestic as anyone’s. She had that pair of means to roam the world other than her feet but she never had any liberty. She had been granted with a blessing she was never allowed to use.

She was supposedly to be as free as the birds in the sky but steel, rigid bars encircled her, molding her like a worm - crawling, chained and locked-up- longing for a sign of the day of her metamorphosis.

That night marked the biggest turn-around of her life, the stepping stone to brighter days. What she obtained on the narrow cliff was neither freedom nor a ticket pass to a more open-minded world.

Life didn’t throw her lemons. It just handed her a puzzle piece- the missing chunk of her life she was desperately looking for.

What she needed was neither a vast place nor a pair of elegant wings. What she needed was someone who could make her complete. And life had given her just the right thing. It gave her a friendship more valuable than any treasures in this world.

The heavens bestowed her Zeke, the person who gave her the most smiles enough to make her feel special in her entire life.

...I think I’ll just call you ‘Callie’.

Inside the soaring walls of our fortress, I was the youngest, the baby of eight other angels. My name was Nine, the stubborn but sweet red-haired angel. But above the ground of that cliff, I was Callie- the lost, inquisitive girl who made friends with an obnoxious stranger.

Zeke didn’t only give me a name, he provided meaning to my dull life. He gave me another identity, compelling me to forget that I was an angel and he was only a human. We developed a relationship no one would ever consider existing in this world.    

We both know that it would never happen, Nine.

Nine words- a sentence that simply ended with my true name. It came out from his mouth quick enough to shatter my world. Seems like, it grew a hand and delivered a hard slap, waking me up from a deep slumber, destroying whatever illusion I had for the past ten years.

We were the best of friends but it would never erase the undeniable truth that we were living in two separate worlds. Our friendship had a time limit- a bomb implanted in the heart of our fate. The two digits inscribed in my mirror- counting down to the day I should say goodbye to him, counting down to the day I should accept the fact that we were never meant to be friends from the beginning.