The Lost Girl ✨Once Upon A Time✨

Chapter Five

   "I'll murder you." She laughed playfully, between staggering breaths. It was quiet, quiet enough so that only her captor could hear. 

   No response.

   Fine. He was no fun to play at anyway. 

   "Psychological and physical torture, how unique? You boys really know how to have a fun time on this island. Funny, they never mentioned this in the stories." She mumbled against Felix's palm.  

  Her dearest nemesis's feet never met the ground. It was taunting, nearly a joke on her namesake. She was a wren who couldn't fly, a wren that had leaped only to fall to her end.

   Just the thought of death made her vision go blank. Her legs collapsed beneath her weight, but Felix was prepared: shoving her back to her feet and towards the hovering Pan. The action was accidentally helpful, a comment she would've made if anyone there had actually been paying attention to what she mumbled; but rather, the hoard of boys glared at her with knowing humor.

   With horror, the girl came to realize the green static that engulfed her adversary was not the poison of unease clouding her mind; it was his power. He literally glowed with spite and narcissism. Glittering-

   "Pixie dust-"

   Wren hissed the words, half not knowing what they meant.

    He had flown before. Pixie dust, pixie dust glittered like that- and-and there was a boy- he had flown too- a boy- there was a boy-

   Her vision swam once more, head screaming with alarms and shutting down. 

   Wren fainted yet again. There was an annoyance in Felix's sigh as he took on her weight. He didn't speak, but his arrogant grimace plead for Pan to stop placing him as the bearer of the girl who couldn't seem to stand up on her own feet. 

   Pan snickered at the sight, almost disgustedly. If she hadn't been so pitifully weak, then perhaps the situation would've been truly humorous to him. She was broken, a disappointment- but then again, what should he have expected from someone of her nature?

   With a snap of fingers, his cruel laughter was sliced from existence; an unwavering grin once again stretched across his face as Wren began to awake.

   "You're welcome."  He sang. 

   Wren found her way back to her weight, for the first time noticing the lack of scars littering her body. No singed handprint stained her face anymore, no ashes coating her clothes or sticking to her boots. The tears in her jeans and cuts on her ankles had been resewn. There wasn't even a rat in sight (unless you counted Pan's sniveling lackeys; in that case, there were several dozen rats in company). It was as if the chase was a mirage, a false memory. 

   Wren took liberation in Pan waking her; healing her, using it as an open invitation to elbow Felix's hand from her mouth. Felix seemed careless at the action, and Wren was sure of that much because she wasn't dead already. 

   "Too bad, it wasn't just a nightmare," Wren jeered wistfully. She attempted to make up her composure's losses by brushing non-existent dust from her shoulders, but the show she had put on was more than enough to ruin her reputation. 

   Every person on the entire island knew more about Wren than her own family.

   She was young (but not in the sense that she hadn't quite yet reached sixteen); desperate was a better word for it. It was clear. She'd reached a point where a child would break, and child was one possible way to describe the young woman. Maybe it wasn't insanity so much as it was a lack of patience. She was trying to fill shoes that weren't designed for her, become a person she was not, and the loss of her friend certainly hadn't improved situations.