The Return of Time

Chapter One: Everything, Nothing, and Something

Fire has such an underrated elegance to it. Despite how volatile and destructive it is, the colours that radiate off of it can and will mesmerise anyone. The golds, yellows, oranges, and reds and blend together, flickering hauntingly. Strange, how so many people rely on it to warm themselves during the colder nights and days when it can destroy lives. No matter how many it'll kill, reliance on it has never gone down. It may be slandered in the news or feared in movies and television, but the reality of the situation is that everyone needs it in some way or another.

One can get closer to the fire, but when it comes to them... that's the game-changer.

The world of humans is constantly moving about -- the millions of roads covering the lush lands never unoccupied, the cities never sleeping, the countrysides never uninhabited.. A little girl's family rides in an inconspicuous car down a highway, other cars surrounding them completely. In the middle of the night, the stars glisten, effectively grabbing both her and her brother's attention. Oohing and aahing at the different patterns in the night sky, their parents smile gratefully as the family makes their way back to their house.

The mother looks back, grinning. Children are such a gift to this otherwise wretched world. They enter the world with an unnatural amount of innocence to them and are easily corrupted. Children are the most fragile of all the species; defenceless, scared, and codependent on their mothers and fathers, they cannot thrive alone in the real world.

But sometimes they have no other choice but to survive.

No one understands what happened on that night. The car's engine began to smoke, and before either of the adults could raise a concern to the other, the dangerously beautiful flames broke out of the hood of the car, quickly engulfing the family. The sudden explosion caused the car to turn around, crashing into the previously undisturbed meadow. Glass broke, blood was bled, and screams were heard.

Some cars stopped moving, but others drove away, scared out of their minds. Soon enough, police entered the crime scene as firefighters put out the bright yellow flames. As quickly as they could manage, the first responders pushed aside rubble and remnants of the car, desperate for survivors. It was a family of four, they heard; a father, mother, and two little kids- boy and a girl. Seconds tick by, followed by minutes, and then hours. All the workers at the scene were going in blind, slowed down further by the darkness. Yet they manage to hear a voice.

One voice. One survivor.

After frantically pushing through the metal, they discover a little girl, covered in scars, blood, and ash. She cries, the only thing she knows how to do in a situation like this. She calls out for the family, only to be met with silence and unfamiliar voices. Innocent tears fall from her eyes, making lines of clarity through her soot-covered face. By the time the tears fall from her face completely, they're almost blackened with the blood and ash covering her. Almost a perfect resemblance of the loss of innocence.

As the crowd of adults help her out of the wreck and bring her to the hospital, each one wonders how to tell a child, a mere decade old, that she's the only one remaining. That before she could do anything, naivety was stripped away from her, leaving a child in the midst of a harsh world and constantly on the verge of breaking. Almost as if she knows, the little girl cried harder, unsure of anything but that the world was changing, and she needed to change with it. This was something she decided a week later as she was standing over her family's empty coffins at their funeral, her life in ruins. She was going to an orphanage on the other side of the state, yet another way her world was being flipped upside down -- yet another method of isolation.

In the car ride, the little girl wonders how others expect her to life while all alone. Tears prick her eyes as hatred for the world enters her mind: their lives weren't shattered before their eyes. So what inexcusable mistake had she done in the ten years of her life to deserve this? Swallowing an upcoming sob, silent tears of agony run down her cheeks, this time without the soot mixing with it.