Skye had been walking for two weeks by the time she finally reached Coppelia. Her throat still ached, her hair hadn't grown back yet, and her provisions were running low. Every night, she opened the book of fairytales - or rather, the book about Snow White. No matter where else she looked, Skye couldn't find so much as a inkling that there were any other stories in the world. As she perused it, she noticed that the format of Snow White had chaged slightly. The girl was now cursed by a jealous fairy after her mother died in childbirth, her father sending the child into the woods to protect her from the very fairies she would soon be cursed by. A mysterious stranger was described as saving Snow White from death, instead condemming her to a lonely existence until the Prince came. As the season changed from summer to autumn, both in the book and in reality, Skye avidly read the description of red and yellow leaves falling on the glass tomb of the Princess. A curious thig happeed however. Skye couldn't read any further than the autumnal leaves floating down. It was almost like the story was happening in real time.
Fairy stories aside, the two weeks Skye was on the road were the hardest times of her life so far. After the first day, her feet were heavily blistered. The day after that, her calves and ankles were in agony. Four days after she left Princess Eleanor, her arms and face were scratched from diving into brambles every time a carriage drove by - it was bad enough that she was alone on the highway, but if she was discovered to be a girl, and worse, a mute girl...well, Skye didn't even want to think about it. She had heard terrible stories from her mother about the times when she was a Healer to teenage girls - the mutilations, the diseases, and sometimes the children that were forced into the service of the Library - all as a result of not taking precautions on the road. So Skye ducked, and dived, and scraped her arms and face. A week into her journey, Skye finally found some civilisation. An old mill turned its lonely wings a few metres off the road, and Skye was longing for a bed. When she did eventually reach the mill, she realised that a bed for the night was out of the question.
Carabosse had obviously been here. A dark cloud hung over the whole place, and the wooden structure of the windmill creaked loudly in the wond. Skye wondered briefly to herself why there seemed to be planks of wood hanging off the end of the wings. When she lifted up her torch - a present she found in her rucksack when rummaging through it, Skye had found that if you pressed a button, light came out of it (she thought it might be something called 'electricity' - but that was nowhere to be found in Giselle) - she took a step back in horror. The miller, his wife and their three young children hung from the neck of each of the wings. The man and his two sons were missing legs and the lower part of their trousers, while his wife and a girl maybe Skye's age had bloodied and torn skirts. Looking closer, Skye could see that parts of their hands were missing, and their faces were covered in spattered blood. The white, unseeing eyes of the miller's wife and a little boy who looked only five glowed slightly in Skye's torch beam. All Skye could hear was the creaking of the windmill and her own shaky breaths. A cold, cold wind flew through, making the arms of the dead wave wildly, while Skye shivered and pulled at her jacket, trying to completely cover her body. Almost without noticing, Skye moved two steps closer. She could see now the face of the girl, contorted into a scream, the skin of her cheek ripped and bloodied, flapping in the breeze. Skye gulped, realised she was starting to fall, and laid one hand against the wood of the windmill.
Suddenly a bright light burst out of her fingers, almost blinding Skye. A wild, whipping wind tore at her skin and carried away her cap, letting Skye's short hair flutter uncontrollably in the wind. She could hear the windmill spinning round and round, ever faster, and she had a sudden image in her brain of the three children and their parents whirling around in a blur of flesh and blood and death, while almost behind them a woman with long, dark, wild hair fought against Skye's light, black and dark purple beams splaying out her hands. The smell of decaying flesh hit Skye's nostrils, and she almost threw up. Only her hand pressed against the wood kept her standing. Suddenly Skye was aware that a pain was building up in her hand, a strong pain, and Skye opened her mouth and screamed silently, tears falling freely down her face, her lips small pinpricks of pain as the heat from the fire scorched them, and Skye screamed in her head, Make it stop, make it stop, MAKE IT STOP!!!!
The suddeness of the comparitive darkness made Skye dizzy for several seconds. She jerked away from the mill, walked a few steps away, and promptly vomited. Shakily, she righted herself again. Skye ran away, without looking back once. If she had, she would have seen that the cloud of darkness had been lifted from the mill, although all that was left of it was the burnt ruins of a foundation. Four gravestones slowly materialised out of nowhere, two tall, one medium-sized, and one for a child. In the opposite direction to where Skye had left, a teenage girl dressed in black slowly walked towards the graves of her family. In her hands she held a bunch of forget-me-nots the exact same colour as Skye's eyes.
***
When Skye finally reached Coppelia, she was ready to collapse.
For the past two days she had been without food or water. Skye's throat, already sore and rough from the curse by the Pixie Queen, was now as dry as one of the deserts that she had read about in her books. Her hair was lacklustre, hanging down across her face in greasy rats-tails, and her eyes had lost the spark of intelligence that was always remarked upon whenever she was seen. Her stomach was painful, and it felt as if there was a monster in there, clawing at her insides, trying to get out, clamouring for food. The blisters in her feet had grown, burst, and hardened into callouses, and Skye's face and arms were criss-crosses of tiny cuts that hadn't yet healed. The final push to get to the city of metal children was a hard one, and mainly uphill - the primary reason Coppelia was so rarely attacked by the other Kingdoms. It was in the last hour of sunlight that Skye finally crested the top of the hill, and looked down on what she saw with a faint sense of horror.
It was a wasteland, a rubbish-tip, the drop-off point for all good humanity. The sky was black, stained permanently from the smoke of the many bonfires around the vast, scarcely uniterrupted landscape. Every so often, like a blotch of ink that had fallen from a pen, a huddle of little black houses clung together for dear life. And everywhere, everywhere, were the unearthly children of Coppelia.
Their bodies gleamed silver in the dying rays of the sun, occassionally blackened by soot or rust. None of them had anything resembling clothing on, but the shapes of their bodies were chaste and genderless aside from a slight swelling on the chests of the older girls, like the little dolls Skye used to play with when she was little. They moved quickly, frighteningly so, and Skye could hear, even from way up in the mountaintops, the wailing of mothers grieving for their alientaed children. Suddenly, the low moans permeating the atmosphere increased in volume and pitch, and Skye watched in horror as a teenage boy was dragged out of a small house by two fearful machines half the size of him. He was tall, at least six feet, and Skye winced as the smaller of the two automatons punched his hip, breaking the bone, incapacitating his right leg. He screamed in pain - in a way, Skye was more afraid that a man was screaming than the enormity of the task before her - and the two ex-children dragged him along by his upper arms, the boy's face scraping against the hard, chalky ground. The two machines forced him into a chair by the nearest fire, manacled his hands, and ripped out his throat in an explosion of blood.
Skye instantly turned away, more reflex than conscious thought. Unable to stay upright, she felt her legs give way, and she fell to her knees in front of a tall, narrow tree. She would have thrown up, but there was nothing in her stomach for her to eject. Skye clawed up her hands, raking them down the tree in front of her, letting her fingers get covered in splinters and scraped from the bark, as she tried to shut out the noises of that poor boy's flesh being ripped from the bone. Almost more horrifying was the sound the robots made. It was the most awful thing Skye had ever heard. It was the sound of children laughing.
Skye stayed in her position, head against the tree, hands clawing into it, knees on the floor, for as long as she could hear the ripping of flesh and the laughter of children.
It was midnight before they were done with him.
