Captured Grace

One night, as the eerie mist spread throughout the lethally silent woods and the ground blanketed with a thick layer of pristine snow, Emarie surged her way through in a desperate plea to survive.

As peasants, life was not as elementary. The higher status individuals abominating you wherever you lurked, Snickering at your well-being quite noticeably. Grotesque dirt soiling the rags you call your clothes, threadbare and ill-fitting, yet only being able to provide hot water for a thorough cleanse once every blue moon did not seem to help.

However, the higher status bathed in their own luxury, caressing their soft silk quilts and their cushioned velvet pillows; accessories worth more than your entire existence, all the while gaping at you suffering to the point your ribs visibly show achingly through your thin felt shirt that pinned itself unyieldingly to your own flesh. And yet those above you dared to use the individuals prospering in poverty for their powerful grace, as if their mocking persona was not yet adequate.

Certain individuals are birthed with an exquisite ability. Emarie being one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill, but graced as she is- she never expected to dual against other gifted individuals in order to survive. Of course, survival is an everyday obstacle for her. Except this is different. Every decade, a few of the 'gifted' vanish in a concealed mist, the higher and wealthy flourished thrive of becoming captured by these mysterious phenomenons in hope to gain the astonishing luxuries. Until, a handsome masked figure with toned muscles and iridescent skin glimmering in the starlight of the eclipse collides into Emarie, swooping her up to haul her away somewhere far, her life instantly at risk and in the hands of this strange figure clutching her fragile and scrawny body while he soared up into the night sky.