The Girl With The Glowing Skin

Chapter 1

Idris Samhara was a beautiful baby.

    The day she was born was the worst kind of gloomy, raining just enough to make someone annoyingly wet and yet not enough to excuse spending a whole day in bed, and yet when Idris Samhara was born, she seemed to bring a sort of light into the world. Literally and figuratively, because while she would become a happy baby, bubbly and generally more enjoyable to be around than most babies, the child also happened to come out of her mother's womb glowing.

    As she gazed down at her daughter in that moment, Ana Samhara was more grateful than ever that she had chosen to give birth at her small home in the mountains, instead of in a hospital. Ana was a lonely person already, running from things no one could hope to escape from forever, and when she had realized she was pregnant, she had decided to do this, as she did everything, alone. She didn't have much choice in the matter, anyways - she didn't have enough money to pay for a bed in a hospital. Ana had never particularly wanted a baby, but she was a level-headed person (one had to be, living as she did) and she had prepared for every possible situation. Every possible situation, that is, except for the one presented to her now.

    Without screaming in shock as one would expect, she cut the umbilical cord connecting the crying, glowing child to her and proceeded to bathe her gently in a tub of lukewarm water. Then, when Idris was fast asleep in a faded green onesie and the rest of the mess had been cleaned up,  Ana set her down on the once-firm couch and stared, only now fully processing the gravity of the situation. If the baby was glowing, there was only one person who could be her father. One person, who was extremely powerful and arrogant, with a temper that shook the ground he walked on. One person, who happened to want Ana dead. Ana's mind quickly sorted out her options. It wouldn't be long before he came to know that he had a daughter. He would leave Idris alone, but he would definitely find Ana if she stuck around. Really, if she wanted to stay alive, she only had one option.

    And so, the next day, when the sisters at St. Mary's opened their doors at dawn to let in the soft early morning sunlight filtered through the trees and the fresh, crisp mountain air, they instead found a sleeping newborn baby that seemed to gleam ethereally in sea-green pajamas, with a note containing her name, a short letter from her mother, and a delicate gold necklace with an emerald green pendant.

5 years later Idris Samhara was taller, more stubborn and acutely aware that she was not like other children. The nuns had made the mistake of enrolling her in a local elementary, before remembering that children could be quite rude when encountered with something, or in this case, someone, they had never seen before. Idris had come home from school crying, and from then on the nuns agreed to homeschool her and keep her out of the school system. But 11-year-old Idris was even more stubborn, as well as substantially less glowy. No one could figure out what exactly had lessened the glowing, but Idris was definitely grateful for it, because she was tired of being stuck in a convent with a bunch of older women. Although she loved all the sisters who lived with her, her adventurous soul yearned to meet kids her age, even if the thought of them being rude to her again did make her nervous - to make friends and play with them, to giggle over boys together - mainly, Idris wanted to be normal, and now that she almost looked the part, she convinced the nuns to enroll her in a school not too far away. And so, Idris Samhara began to immerse herself in normalcy, wearing long-sleeved clothes year round to hide all the glow she could and never letting herself be seen anywhere even remotely dark. She changed her speech to the way everyone else talked, she liked the things everyone else liked, and she made fun of the things everyone else made fun of, all the while making sure to pretend she didn't care too much about fitting in. But the fear of being found out to be different bothered and scared her, and it kept nagging at her until she turned 17.