escape

It was neither unknowing crime, nor need for beasts of burden that saw you grasped in the talons of the monster that stole you away. The last thing you remember before being dragged across that twisted hellscape was glimmers of shadow taking your shape from a framework of sticks and leaves, and wondering what the hell would happen to your sister.

And then, after that, spiraling, vomitous, shifting landscapes that no mortal was ever meant to see. Talons over your form, molesting you, changing you irreversably, into the perfect hunter. Glittering scale, tremendous, proud wings. And yet, though you wore the skin of an apex predator, you were no more powerful than you had ever been.

No, this monster had a plan for you.

It was all you ever heard from it. Over and over and over and over again. Unrelenting. Whether given task and lauded as the beast’s perfect huntress.

Find the Fire.

Find the Fire.

Find it, or you have no worth, in Faerie or otherwise.

But you couldn’t find it. No matter how hard you tried, you have never found it. You don’t even know what it looks like. You don’t know how you would know what it is. If Prometheus stole it, then he did a service by spiting this awful thing.

The lashings were never physical. Though the beast was capable of horrific, bloody feats of violence in its quest to rediscover its lost name, it knew your weaknesses. It drove wedges into your already fractured mind and tore apart your self worth. Over, and over, and over, until you were in pieces. And in Faerie, all metaphor may as well be real. You remember being rebuilt and re-molested all over again, when you would fall apart, never quite allowed to let go. And then, the cycle began anew.

Find the Fire, or you are nothing.

And the cycle kept going, and kept going, and kept going again. Never ending, never broken.

Until the day a passing thought shot through you like a bullet.

“Sister wouldn’t treat me like this.”

That moment shattered the chains around your mind, and suddenly your clarity returned to you, all at once, in a dizzying and blistering haze. You were human once. You had a mother. You had a twin. You had a home, and a life outside this abuse. You knew you needed to get back to it. They needed you, and you needed them. You loved them with all your heart. You didn’t even know what had become of your twin. If the beast stole her, you never knew about it. If something else did, you didn’t know. If she was still out there, unknowing, you didn’t know.

But you needed, with all your heart and soul, to find out.

When the monster next sent you out to “find the Fire”, you simply never returned. You ran, and you ran, and you ran, until you ran through Arcadia’s veil, and you tore whole-cloth like a rampaging wyrm through the thorns of the Hedge until finally you spilled through a gate into the real world you left behind.

And as you took those first steps, bloodied and wounded from rampaging through the briars, you realized you weren’t anywhere remotely close to the place you were taken from.

You smelled sea salt, and tasted the tinge of smoke in the warm, dry air. The sky was so hazy that the sun above you burned in an angry red. It was a little bit tough to breathe, and on top of that, you were torn up and hurting. You wandered aimlessly, trying to find where you had been dumped, and eventually you came upon the knowledge that you were dragged entirely across the continent.

Now, you stood in Victoria, in the province of British Columbia. A country you weren’t from, on the complete opposite coast.

You remembered that figure of you, the last thing you saw before you were taken. You knew you had been replaced. At first, you were angry. But soon, as the feeling of being utterly lost overwhelmed you, you knew that that copy didn’t ask to exist any more than you had asked to be here.

You thought about your sister.

If you had been replaced, she’d notice. She’d lose her mind and run off to do something that she might not regret, but you would. You knew her. The two of you had talked about it. If she had been taken, she was either still in there, or had escaped and been spit out somewhere else.

Whatever the case, the life you knew had been destroyed. You could never have it back, you could never go home. And you just had to accept that.

It was days, weeks, of sleeping on benches and dodging getting mugged before anyone found you. When they did, they took you into the city’s notorious Chinatown. You were brought to a space in between four buildings, one in each cardinal direction, and told you were safe here. You were told of the Courts, of your new existence. You knew now that even if you did go home, it still wouldn’t be the same.

Without a moment’s hesitation, you chose to walk to the West. The two who found you seemed surprised that you would take that mantle even after describing the year of hazing that such Lost must endure to enter that court. But you know yourself better. You needed that discipline. You needed to work the imperfection out of yourself. You can’t go back to how you were, ever. And the utter breaking of your will, over and over, still stung, even if right now your durance was still hazy.

No, now that you were free, you would ensure that no one would ever suffer that way again. You would learn the art of war and you would turn it toward the Others. And you would happily take it right to the beast that stole you away.

Even if it was the last thing you ever did.