Allurement || A Ghostbird Fanfic

Prologue || An Unlikely Encounter

6 years ago.

Sang has never felt fear like this before.

She was kneeling on the floor with her tiny head down and tears currently at war with her eyes, battling to break through.

"I told you to stay away from my bedroom, you useless child." Her mother sneered down at her, holding broken shards of a crystal ball she had accidently dropped.

"I'm so-" Sang sniffed but didn't get to finish her apology before a hand came down across her cheek with a deafening 'smack'. Sang grimaced and bit the inside of her cheek to distract her from the external pain. She should be used to this by now, but through each punishment, it always hurts more than the last.

"Enough!" Her mother scoffed. "Hands."

Sang lifted her hands hesitantly, unsure why her mother wanted her hands but showed no movement of looking up. Usually her mother would just yell at her and sometimes get physical, but it never went further than that.

She heard the rustling of a belt and Sang's head shot up in alarm. Before Sang could flinch or even pull her hands back, a stinging pain pierced her skin on her wrists and Sang cried out in pain.

"This is what you deserve for what you've done. If you can't follow simple orders then you deserve this punishment."

Her mother had stabbed the shards of glass through her hands and wrists and tied her hands together with the belt. Sang's body radiated with pain, fear and sadness all at once.

She couldn't take it anymore.

A swirling of emotions danced from within her, causing her body to start shaking. If her mother noticed she showed no sign and continued berating her.

"Clean all of this up, I don't want to see a single speck of this floor dirty, you hear me?"

Sang managed to nod and her mother stalked upstairs back into her bedroom.

Sang waited for a second, her body still shaking, to wait and see if her mother would could back. When she knew her mother was asleep, Sang let loose.

She silently cried in the middle of the room, her hands aching and bound and her head pounding like a giant doing ballet on a glass floor. With each tear drop that fell, Sang gave it an emotion she felt that day; anger, sadness, confusion, pain- so many emotions that were just too much for her to handle.

Suddenly a loud crack in the sky made Sang flinch and jump in surprise. She had been too busy weeping to notice a rather ravenous thunderstorm happening outside. She could smell the pristine scent of the rain and wet wood, the way the leaves glimmered under the crystal like water. She was even busier noticing the intricate details of the lightning bolts to even realise that through every tear she shed, they never touched the ground.

Sang looked around in astonishment and saw every single one of her tears floating around her. Her eyes widened and she reached out to touch one of them.

The tear rippled before she could touch it and it started sucking in all of the other tears around it, creating a bubble of tears around the size of a heart. She watched as the tears starting glowing a pale pearly pink while forming symbols with the water. She had read enough of the books in her father's study to know what they were spelling out.

H E A R T S O F A L L U R E M E N T

Hearts of Allurement? Sang furrowed in confusion, her curiosity becoming superior to her pain.

Before Sang could blink, the glowing pink water of her tears suddenly made an elegant heart shape and burst around her, the thunderstorm outside calmed down too, it was still raining a tad, but the sunlight streaming through the gaps of the clouds shimmered along the reflection of the water that had burst around her making it seem as though thousands of tiny little diamonds were sparking in the sky.