Influences of Stars

Chapter 1

Prologue

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There is a dark, flaky rust building up around her soul, twisting it into a compressed nothingness. She wants it to go away, so that she might feel nothing again. She imagines it to be easier, almost like floating along the surface of a glassy black pool which moves only because her body breaks its steadiness.

Charis' hands cling onto the skirt which had once just belonged to a dress, but is now a wedding gown because she wears it outside a church with a man waiting inside to claim her as his own. If she turns and runs away, how far could she reach? How far would the trees she calls her own, the water she splashed in as a child and the stars she could point to when the clouds were away last before she finds a strange place she cannot name?

The wilderness seems to promise something else now. A life away from the man who frightens her; who stood above her as she wept and demanded she married him. She doubts he would chase after her. Perhaps for him it would be enough to know he had invaded her life so fully that she preferred to abandon all she had ever know.

No one would be able to find her. She could wonder the world for a lifetime and never find another soul. And she would die. Would that be better?

If only she held no regard for her own life. Yet she does. She is afraid to let it go, to watch him enact the threats he had made. Instead, she will step through the doors and promise to obey the man who ices her blood.

And so she is paying for her life with her body. A small price to pay, her mammy said. Everyone other woman has done it. Why should she cry over something that was always going to happen to her?

Yet she hadn't thought that way once. Once she had been so filled with summer, with happiness, that she seemed lightly solid in a world that promised her nothing yet contained an almost pale joy. She belonged only to the word's of those around her, and existed in herself, and he was hers. Lord, she wishes she could hold onto those days forever, to hide in a memory that is now blurred in the edges yet still moves her heart to ache, a sweet pain that causes her to return to it again and again and again.

***

The woods were alive. Everything seemed to dance, creating a chime of sounds which haunted the air with its parade. Yet no wind moved. The world was dead in a summer heat, its life slipping into a moment of blissful afternoon slumber warmed by the glow of the sun. So the life came not from the sky or from the earth or from the air. Instead, it came from three girls running away from a boy, their feet pounding against the dry earth and their bodies almost floating through the trees.

"Wait! Wait!" called out Charis. Her face was red not from the shouting, but the oppressive heat pounding against her as she ran. "I want to wait for him!"

"Running away is the fun of it! We're like birds flying away!" Tibby said back to her. She soared ahead of the others, excitement rising within her body alongside the heat as she grew faster by the moment. She pretended they ran from a beast, a twisted creature who intended to devour their souls and if she didn't run fast enough then he would tear them apart, tear them apart, tear them apart.

Her fear overcame her like a twisted rope suddenly unwinding in a spiral as something pressed onto her hand. She tried to jolt it away, but was turned around by its pressure. Her scream died away as her view became filled not with a hideous monster but a flaxen angel. "Let's hide instead. I'm all sweaty and mammy will get angry if it get my dress too stained," Constance said.

"There's no fun in that!" Tibby said, slowing down.

"Yes there is. We can watch him flounder about trying to find us," she replied, a devilish glint in her eyes.