(Versions of) Tangled Stars

Version 1 Prologue

    “Were the children ever seen again?” a young child demanded. “No, never.” the father replied mindlessly, brushing the child’s hair back.

“What? Where did they go?” She questioned, rocking back and forth on the cold floor. The room was faded. Only the ashes from the fire kept her warm, but could never persuade her to sleep.
    “No one knows, Azura. It was after sunset, and there was this huge fog...” Her mother explained, as she placed her hand on Azura’s shoulder. She knew that wasn't the whole story, it couldn't be. If it were, then why would they still be talking of it almost a hundred years later. Of course, she couldn't tell her daughter that.
     The streak of blue in her hair brushed against her baby’s cheek. The mother leaned Azura’s head back into a wooden bowl full of water. The water warmed her head and her father wrapped her in a blanket. The chill of silencd started to come back.
    “Could they still be there?” Azura whispered.
    “I don’t know, sweetie,” the mother said sweetly, “I don’t know.” She opened a small glass bottle and poured a blue liquid over Azura’s hair in one streak, going down, on the right hand side. This would be Azura’s first hair dye, finally reaching the age of four.
    Azura dried all of the undyed hair and laid down on the blanket. As the parents left the room, the words from the story echo. “They had all stood approximately one yard apart from one another, hiding behind the evergreen trees. Sixty-seven years have passed since that mysterious day. All that remains in their memories is a faint whisper now and then about the mysterious teenagers who came and went.” Used now just simply as a story that everyone knows by heart.

But the mystery still lives on, although it seems that people have forgotten to wonder and just had to live with the facts left at hand.