Part of Your World

Prologue

Aria

I'll never forget the way sunlight made the water dance. Sometimes, disrupting the surface to a calm exterior can be a beautiful thing, can give you a glimpse of something not many are willing see beyond. I loved the water, loved to swim down to the bottom of a pool or shallow lake and stare up at the top, my eyes drinking in the patterns the light made upon the surface. I loved the way the force of the liquid upon my ears hushed the noise of this world.

I still loved the water, even after the accident. Even after I lost everything that made me me. I never told anyone who'd done it, because I wasn't all too sure I hadn't been seeing things, simply imagining the entire atrocity committed before my eyes. Minds are a peculiar thing, truly; in times of great peril, the brain will often reach out to your most potent, happy memories, and squeeze them together into some sort of hallucination in order to cope with what is really happening in the physical world. Mine did, that night. It gave me images that all swirled together like a hurricane, where I was the eye of the storm over a vast, endless sea. One thing became a surety in the hospital that night after I was pulled from the depths, though.

I would never talk again.