Aeolia

1: Flight

The branches tore at her ankles. The screams of her dying mother rebounded through her skull. She ran from the soldiers trying to gun her down. She ran, and that was all. Though she was already bruised and bleeding and her ribs constricted with every breath she pulled, she continued. There wasn't a choice.

     Her bare feet thudded on the forest floor, rent with cuts from roots and thistles. Her head pounded, while fear thrashed in a crude dance to her frail and weeping heartbeat. But it didn't matter. The land swooned in her vision but still she ran—she ran from the prospect of death. She ran from the oncoming night, from the cold earth that called her name.

     But most of all, she ran from the hollows in her mother's eyes.

     She ran for a long, long time, until she collapsed to the ground, tears streaming down her face. She rocked on her knees as fervent sobs wracked her body—staggering and catching in her chest until she thought she couldn't breathe.

     Soon her mindless panic dulled, the thoughts of her ruined home at its heels. With a waterlogged chest, she fell asleep on the forest floor.

     And as she slept, the moon rose, a thin white figure through the trees. Stars hung round about it like the veil of a saddened bride. The forest whispered of the dark sky, and of the running woman. Their coniferous arms leant upon each other, a thatched roof of conversing needles.

     The trees talked all through the night, until white dawn mist crept into the forest. An unassuming backdrop, the mist listened to the woman's sorrowful tale. When morning fledged, the mist departed, and with it, a story.

     A hand of sun touched through the evergreen crowns. It was only at this time that the woman stirred and opened her eyes, knowing nothing of the conversational night.