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The Mysterious Ophelia Majestic
In a whirl of white she streaked
across the night sky. Her pale, bare feet blurred together as she moved. The
pine needles and sticks jutting up from the treetops stabbed into her ankles
and calves, but they were mere nuisances compared to the internal anguish she
was experiencing. She moved almost at the speed of light. The turn-over time of
her feet propelled her forward so quickly that she was invisible to any human looking
upwards. But the things chasing her weren’t human.
She looked up, observing the sky. The number of twinkling stars had
diminished, indicating their individual defeats. Her family’s star was still
illuminated, but it was much fainter than Calliope’s. The battle between them
had intensified, and the faint red line stretching out from her star meant that
surrender was near. An increasing amount of color seeped out of her star, and
she wanted to catch those dying souls in her hands and cradle them back to
life. She could feel their extreme anguish as if she was burning too.
The Lumiere de la Vie’s temperature
increased as it sensed how close it was to home. From its spot in her pocket,
she could feel its energy seeping into her injured leg. It desperately wanted her to heal. It yearned
for its place in the sky and knew that she was the only person who could take
it back. Funny how so small of a object could contain so much power. It held
enough energy to keep an entire world alive, but it did not possess the ability
to cure a scrawny girl’s fatal leg wound.
Her left leg started to drag a
little. If the ball of light wasn’t providing her with strength of mind and
endurance, then she would already have tumbled down into the tangle of trees
and into the fléche’s open arms. She needed to get higher still, above the layer of fog encircling the
dense woods. The clearing of the trees that opened up to the river and the
great waterfall was close.
She could feel the blood sloshing up
and down in her shoe as she ran. The pain had yet to sink in. Panic and then
fear had been the overruling emotions compelling her to start running. Once
moving, her entire body went completely numb. But the bite was big, and she had
been running for almost an hour now. All she could think about was how she
needed the next sneeze to be just as big as the first one, or she would never
make it up to the portal in the sky. She desperately wished that the jump would
come before she could no longer put pressure on her injured leg. Before the
venom spreading through her body completely paralyzed her. How long had Celeste
said it took for the fléche’s poison to
spread through the human body? A couple of hours? An hour? The longer she
thought about it the more sluggish she felt. So she focused her attention again
on the star, trying to send a mental message to her dad to send someone to
help. To tell him that the Light of Life could make it back before Calliope conquered their world. But she
didn’t know telepathy; she just knew how to fly.
The rustlings of the fléches beneath
her moving through the trees sent shivers down her spine. She could visualize
their long, muscular and clawed arms rapidly swinging from tree to tree. The
cackling of their laughter intensified. They were like blood-thirsty hyenas on
the prowl.
Her foot was dragging a bit, and kept
kicking up dust and the scent of pine from the trees beneath her. She inhaled
eagerly, hoping that the dust would make her sneeze so that she could leap from
the trees before the clearing. But it had never happened before. All she needed
was to feel that dizzy, light feeling in her nose spreading to her forehead in
about a minute’s time. Why did she always sneeze at that specific place? It was
like something deep inside of her felt the magnetic pull from the star. After
all, it was her family’s star.
He was
one of them.
The truth kept repeating itself over
and over again in her mind. Celeste had warned her to keep hidden and to let no
one know of her whereabouts but Sophie. But she had trusted Max too. Perhaps
more than she had trusted Sophie. He was beneath her now in the trees, moving
in the mass of brown and green bodies trying to catch her. Remembering the
blurred image of him transferring into one of them caused vomit to build up in her throat. She tripped over a
twig jutting off one of the treetops and almost fell face first into the live
darkness below. Moving her arms up and down quickly like she was sprinting in
place she remained in the air but animalistic laughter echoed out of the woods
and burned her ears. She faintly heard him calling out her name. It sounded so
tender, like he was his old self.
It had happened so suddenly. One moment they
were lying together in the cavern and then he had vanished. She had been
wrapped in his muscular arms, damp from the sweat created by the fire burning
gently in front of them. He was breathing French into her ear. The melodic
sound of the words sent her into a dream-like state. When she listened to him
she felt just like when she gazed into those liquid blue eyes. The falling
sensation would take over. Her entire body would go numb.
“They will never
find us, Fee. Notre amour est comme un
mur invisible et indestructible. We are
safe here.”
Our love is like an invisible and
indestructible wall. Those tender words, like a spell, froze her entire body.
She was a fly so wound up in the enemy’s web that her wings were being crushed.
Obviously he had known this and preyed upon her even more.
And now she was running for her life.
The pain was just becoming tangible and the shrieking of the fléches beneath
her was becoming louder. They could smell the blood and her fear.
Up ahead she saw the clearing. Her
cracked lips ached as they formed into a small smile. She could taste blood and
smell it all over her body. But that didn’t matter. She was going to make it.
The final tree that she always leapt from had the top cut off so that it formed
a great human-catapult launch. It was
just feet in front of her. With a jump that sent a shiver of pain from her foot
through the rest of her body, she landed on that tree.
But then she hesitated. She had caught a
glimpse of the sparkle from the waterfall descending into the moonlit pool far
below her and recalled a time when she had been happy. Closing her eyes she could envision their two
pale shapes, running across the sandy beach and diving into the cool water. She
recalled opening her eyes under the water and at the same moment feeling his
cold lips press against her own. Later he had said her eyes had looked like
orbs of fire under the blanket of water. He had never seen anything so
beautiful.
The dark blue of her eyes welled with
tears and she felt a sob forming in her parched throat. She turned back the way
she had come and looked down at the rustling leaves. The fléches would be on
her in seconds, tearing her apart limb by limb. Through her matted, dark hair
dispersed across her face she could see their dark shadows moving in close. There
was nothing she could do to turn back time.
Whirling back towards her
destination, she squinted hard at the star and felt the sneeze come. Mustering
all of her strength and swallowing back pain, she jumped from the tree. Her
body started to spin and she was shooting upwards. The distance between herself
and the beasts was increasing by the second. The star grew brighter and
brighter. The window was near.
Agony shot through the bottom of her
foot as claws dug through the skin and then clutched her wounded foot. She was
being pulled back down to Earth. Down to death. The last thing she remembered
was seeing the red eyes with the gold rims, and then all went black as pain
consumed her.
