This is a short story based on a profile I wrote for an RP. I'd gotten carried away with writing the bio and I thought maybe I could fashion it into a nice story while I'm at it. Took forever, since I lost the story due to stupid reasons and couldn't bring myself to rewrite it, but whatever. It's done now. Probably sucks more than the first rewrite that I lost, but whatever. I just wanted to get rid of the space in my flashdrive.
.*Drowning Angels
I knew we would come to this. It’s quite inevitable, but I will provide my disclaimer: I can’t vouch the sincerity of the incidents of my past, so you best not judge me by them. It is an undeniable truth that the criminal is as faulty a witness as his peers, hence the adage ‘The person known least is thyself.’ I have no idea who invented it, but he must have been a very great man to achieve so much renown for merely stating the obvious. I can tell you the sky is blue, but I’m not recognized worldwide-
I’m straying. If I could manage to express any form of emotion, I would express my wrong, but I’m afraid that it is beyond me. Either way, it is time that we begin my history, so let us proceed:
I guess I had been a normal girl. Nice family, average siblings, good home, satisfied life- the works. A father named James, a mother called Samantha, a pair of strikingly similar boys titled George and Gregory, two young sisters known as Emma and Gracie. I was woven between the boys and girls, the middle child. I’d provide my name, but I’ve forgotten it. It’s been too long, I suppose. Strange how I remember theirs, but not mine, but life works for us in that odd way, doesn’t it?
Or at least, for me, worked.
I wasn’t special in any form, besides being the tiny doll no one could bear to force into work, the porcelain toy set aside so that my skirt would never get wet. I was a simple girl, a simple being with a simple life. I didn’t have a remarkable talent for dancing, singing, or anything both natural and not. Not even mentally or cognitively; I didn’t manipulate my peers or anything. I was so oblivious, so incredibly guileless, I never understood how a single smile could compel my stubborn brothers and lazy sisters to assume my chores, washing laundry and shepherding the livestock. Even to those younger than me, I was the child, the baby, the nurtured. I don’t know my opinions of this role, though I was probably too naïve to even notice how others threw themselves into my path if only to keep my shoes unblemished by mud. Of course, this hadn’t happened literally, though it neatly fits my past situation.
I remember how everyone in my meager village, too far and too isolated to be noticed as part of our country, used to call me a ‘sweet flower,’ because I had once been a very soft girl, clumsy and somewhat dull, but pretty and eternally childish. Not like a spoiled brat, but something exceptionally innocent and untainted by reality, as I once heard an elder villager relate as she petted me head. I was inspired, determined to sustain the villager’s approval. I must have been perhaps ten when I first heard those words, and I can recall how I desired to strive by them, how to remain the sweet flower until my death.
And I did.
On the morning of my seventeenth birthday, I couldn’t even scream when I woke up. Something was wrong. Not anything visible or something drastic like that; I was just overcome with the urge that something was purely and undeniably wrong. By the end of the day, that feeling had bloomed into full-fledged paranoia, one huge freak-out party with me on the guest list. And if the guests are insane, then I wonder how the host is? It was only a feeling, a sense, but it frightened me nevertheless. The entire next year was horrifying, my persona becoming more and more reclusive and less cheerful, though I always presented a sugar smile when others asked of my condition. I was still me, but I was morphing, changing. I was still nice, still kind, but I was also so detached. Gradually, bit by bit, I drifted farther from my family and my village, becoming less and less like me and more and more like an antisocial someone else. But they never noticed, even as inexperienced I was with lies. Maybe I was better at deceiving than I thought, maybe I was just too innocent to be doubted. But either way, no one noticed anything was wrong with me. How they could miss it, I never knew, but they still did.
The villagers began whispering I was finally lovestruck, considering that I was far older than the average age of wedlock; they would gossip, their clucking and eager voices betting and predicting as to whom this mysterious boy could be.
Whatever they believed, I was at least glad that I could hide the change that was consuming me. Yes, it was a change. A definite morphing from what I was to what I had been. Confused, my beloved audience? You’ll understand soon.
Happy eighteenth birthday, I’d become a woman, I guess, though I still resembled a child, quite literally. I hadn’t aged at all since my seventeenth, still as tall as fourteen Emma. If there was anything I would have demanded to retain in this way, if I had been presented the choice, I would have asked that I keep my innocence, if anything. I would have begged to remain a child at heart, to be oblivious to the darkness of the world and sustain that youthful optimism. I didn’t want a child’s body; I wanted a child’s purity and oblivion. But as time passed, that child's heart had rotted away, sick but sweet decay marking my soul as I felt it slowly slipping.
I can still smell it now, ironically. You'll understand later.
This year, I did scream when I woke up. No, I didn’t the instant I awoke; it wasn’t like that. No, I merely opened my eyes, the strange wrongness flooding me as usual; grabbed my dress and my decrepit but loved hairbrush; stepped outside and into the village washroom; filled up the tub (I was fortunate enough to grab first dibs on the warm water, considering that our entire village used the same tub of water for the entire day and that by sunrise the water would have been icky and lukewarm with mixed human sweat and grime); yanked off my nightgown; and stared into my liquid reflection, noticing something weird along my shoulder blades (I was turned to the side, therefore providing the reflection with only a profile of my entire side and some of my back).
That was when I screamed, when I shrieked until my own ears could have bled. There were sienna wings on my back, soft and tiny and frail. Wings. Maybe for those of you who are dreamers, who would adore to be presented with this gift, you might have appreciated the new sight, but the only thing I could appreciate was that I was obviously insane. Stark raving mad. I was seeing things, things that weren't real, obviously. Because people didn't sprout wings spontaneously on their backs. But they were there, so real and unbeleivable they almost looked fake. Just imagine a pair of hand-sized feathers poking out your shoulder blades. Can you imagine it as something real? Tangible, in any way? Well, I couldn't, even if the real thing was right there.
It had taken me weeks, under the kind but terrified supervision of my family and the village’s elders and herbalist, to accept that I wasn’t crazy. Of course, the notion that followed my dismissal of insanity was, naturally, that I was either cursed or a monster. Suicide was the rational option. Loving despite my mutation, practically the entire village restrained me, cooing and humming soothing lullabies to cease my frantic gasps of killing myself. Ironic how I had abandoned the notion that I was insane only to plunge into lunacy. But as time goes by, things boil then simmer then fade into the calm that they had begun with.
Or at least a semblance of it.
Either way, I was almost nineteen and relatively lucid as to my state. The others were still so kind, so gentle, whispering fantasies that I was becoming an angel, that God was granting the innocent young Cadence the ascension she deserved. And for a while, I had allowed myself to be lured by their honeyed promises, to delude myself that maybe I wasn’t a monster. Maybe I really was going to become an angel, perhaps I was a divine being, or at least a human ascending into the said divinity. And so our lives continued, though I was more isolated than when I began- the villagers respected my sudden demand for solitude, much to my relief.
A lake neighbored our home, a nameless mass of water that I had always loved since my childhood, though I had not visited it in years. In my solitude I would wander the shores, adoring the soft waves that brushed my bare feet. There had been legends of a mythical being possessing the lake, a deity of water. A Water Nymph, they said. I had begun to hope that maybe this being did exist, someone who could relate to me, who could accept me for what I had become. I began talking to the lake, giggling about the latest little endeavors of the village, sighing into the clouds as I floated along the water’s surface, and singing the same lullabies that had lulled me from suicide.
I even invented a name, being that the lake was anonymous, only referred to as ‘the lake’ by my village. It happened when I had jumped into the water, plunging into that eternally warm water. Something grazed my cheek, resembling soft and loving fingers, and the most beautiful voice ever whispered in my ear, my entire body as if held by a beloved embrace- Lsari. It was as if the lake’s god had spoken to me himself and told me his name. But gods didn't exist. Only God. I was an angel, after all, so then that god couldn't have told me his name....could he? But with every second, every minute which passed, steadily, my resolve grew stronger. Gradually, I knew that I had been wrong. I hadn't invented the name. No, I had been provided one. I had been told by the Nymph who he was.
And I was impossibly charmed.
It was almost my nineteenth birthday, the days numbering in only one until that date. One single sunset and moonrise and midnight until I would become nineteen. I had planned to spend my time with Lsari, to celebrate my next year in that unchanging body. The villagers often joked that I had found my lover, their hands still caressing my face as if I had never sprouted wings, now only slightly larger than when they had birthed. They still treated me like a human child, but at the same time, they revered me as a higher being. I had become something else, yet I was still loved. No matter what I had become, my lovely family, my entire village, still adored me, still cradled their hands beneath my every step, always ready to catch me lest I fall. It wasn't exactly needed; my new wings had given me a strange poised grace, made every footfall soft, no longer as clumsy as they had been when I was human. It was like I was walking on air, something I had hoped to accomplish with my wings eventually.
So much for that now.
Strangers had visited our home before, but never any like these. Swathed in pure black, their heads hidden under heavy cowls, they approached my parents and threw a heavy bag at their feet, pointing at me. Their heavily-accented demands had been simple- they wanted me. Maybe I was too foolish to walk around in the daylight, my wings, still too small to support flight yet always shuffling with hopes to, folded against my back. When I entered their eyesight, the hungry gleam glinting beneath those hoods already betrayed their greedy intent. My parents, whom I am so grateful for, even in my sour fate, denied the offer and threw them from our home. As a matter of fact, my entire faithful village kicked them out, promising several unpleasantries if they chose to return.
We had underestimated their greed.
I was dragged from my bed, gagged and restrained as I was forced outside, to Lsari’s shore. There were at least a dozen more people there, all cowled and hooded like the two who had kidnapped me. I was too dazed with some strong-smelling drug to really comprehend what was happening; I only knew where I was thanks to Lsari’s sweet presence, holding me with desperate comfort. He was as frantic as I, terrified of what these people had in store for me. It didn’t take much for me to notice the archaic circles, the heavy books in their pale hands, and the strange whispers rolling from their lips. Lsari translated them for me, hate lining the wonderful sounds of his shore waves; they were asking him permission for something. For power. And not just any power; they wanted a specific kind, a very special kind. It may sound strange that he would tell me their words, but Lsari was kind in that way, too gentle with me to blind me from the inevitable. Because he couldn’t remain silent when I was in peril and because he couldn’t lie to me, either. What had happened afterwards were the elaborate rituals of a young cult, wannabe witches and warlocks. They believed that Lsari had made me what I was and that if they returned my soul to him, perhaps he would give them my abilities instead. He was revolted at such stupid reasoning, his waters slapping the sand and rocks with fury and disgust; he was trying to stop them, but something held him back. Something restrained him from saving me.
That thing was me.
The strangers had hung me on an old tree, entangling my limp arms into the branches until only they supported me. I dangled there like some broken doll, unable to cry out at the sharp wood that stabbed and scraped my skin. First, they wanted my eyesight. I don’t know exactly what they did, but they shrieked that for my left eye, they wanted divinity, the ability to know all and see all. And then white fire slashed my mentioned eye as they ripped it out. I don’t want to think what they did with it, but I heard sounds that dreadfully resembled my numb horror. They were eating it. And when they had finished with that eye, they took my other one. This time, I screamed, I fought and writhed, but my body couldn't move. Maybe the drugs had kept me still; maybe they were holding me down. I couldn't see and couldn't tell. My wings were next, stabbed into the tree in which I was crucified in exchange for the ability to ‘ground the dreaded fowl and rise on bracken feathers.’ I couldn't understand what the H*ll they were talking about, but I stopped caring somwhere around the time they began sawing my wings with some blade. As if being without my sight wasn't enough, they had to rob me of my beloved wings, too. For things that I shouldn't hhave owned in the first place, they had hurt. A lot. Too much for my screams to fully encompass.
Lsari couldn’t take it.
There was no transtition between my life and death. I could see. I could see my own corpse, tears still streaming from her- my- empty sockets, blood still soaking those downy coffee wings, the same ones hanging against our back by a small shred of skin and flesh. Just a tiny nib of flesh. But I- we- wasn’t hanging from a tree; I (and we) was floating in the water, gazing parallel to my dead face. I couldn’t tell which of us was underwater, though I suspect that I was, not…the dead me, the concious me. The one with the eyes, with the ability to see. Something hovered beside the dead me, a shadow I couldn’t identify. But along my peripheral, I could sense a strange familiarity with that shadow, something deep and profound stirring in my soul (I had no other name for the self that lay 'underwater'). I had glanced to my side, not my dead one’s but actually turned my head to see what lay beside me, to inspect the smoky enigma. And then, like some light had flicked on in this terrible darkness, I knew. It was Lsari, a visible shape yet somehow not, his liquid hand clasping my soul’s translucent one. There but not there, solid but imaginary. Both and neither. Oxymorons are so easy to hate but, oddly, so far easier to understand. His presence was overwhelming, euphoria pouring into me from our intertwined fingers. There was something about that single and unreal touch that flowed between us, as if our contact opened our souls to each other. Or at least, what little sould remained. His tears were dark, black against the lovely blue of his lake, drifting up and towards our cadavers, because his corpse was up there, too, I knew. I couldn't see it, but I had a momentary idea that maybe his dead body was the lake itself. Could that be possible.
Yes.
And something shivered between us, some form of energy flowing from him to I and I to him. I no longer doubted that our fingers held a link much more powerful than just touch. But I ignored that. I was consumed with my imagination, envisioning his ebony locks, curling and swirling like seaweed in a soft current, and maybe teal eyes, bright and piercing and unbelievably gentle, as tender and kind as his waves. As kind and soft as him. He finally faced me, and I saw something for beautiful than creativity could ever grant, sea-green irises peering behind wavy blue-black hair and framing an exquisite porcelain-white face. If I wasn’t dead yet, that breathtaking visage would have killed me, would have drowned and suffocated my soul in that beauty.
"Happy Birthday, my love." I felt the soft whisper of lips against my own, tasting of raw bittersweet emotion.
And the dead lake who I loved. Who I still love, despite my death.
.*
Gods and angels may live eternally,
but though our souls have passed,
our drowned love is forever.
FIN
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