#1: Between
Before she knows how to give back what she took.
"Lost princess, do you know what you've done?"
The woman was a ghost. She was a sheet of frozen azure vapors, alive with muted, watery light. The cloaked woman stared at her without eyes. And yet she could feel the sharp prick of her gaze.
But mostly she felt the waves of cool blackness against her skin. She felt the voidlike, mellifluous sea in which they floated like wisps of smoke, the wavering fabrics of their clothes lilting and dancing in unseen currents.
And, of course, she felt what she wished she could not. She felt the woman's unbridled anger. It hurt.
"You are like the one who came first. Your ambition cursed us all, and now everything has been lost."
The little girl stared straight at the figure's featureless face, unable to speak and not sure if she could. There were words in her throat; really, there were, but they climbed up into her mouth, saw the world outside, and shriveled in fear. Dead.
"Do not return, princess. There is nothing for you here."
The girl watched with hopeless confusion, hopeless silence as the figure's blue glow began to slowly dim, dying into the abysmal, consuming darkness. She wanted to beg for it to stay. She wanted, more than anything, to not be alone; not there.
Not anywhere.
The woman's light dissolved and there was nothing that could hope to take its place.
/\/\/\
The girl sat bolt upright on the boulder where she had been dead asleep, heart racing and eyes darting around madly. Her thoughts flew in her mind like they had wings, speeding this way that like drunken birds. Gasping in air, cold mountain air, she gripped the stone beneath her. And her knuckles would've turned white, had her skin not already been so pale, practically translucent—like it had never seen the light of day. Like the little girl was a fragile ghost, a stiff breeze away from being whisked from the world.
She knew she remembered. For every second of the dream, she remembered the cloaked woman who had so kindly shared the dark sea and her own unabashed fury; fury for something the girl could not hope to understand.
It hadn't frightened her. She swore to herself it hadn't. That racing pitter-patter in her chest was because she was nervous. Cold.
Lonely?
No.
She tried to think about something else. Anything else. She couldn't.
Because having the dream was her only memory, the only thing she knew. Nothing had happened before the dream. The little girl felt, somehow, that she had been dead.
She risked a glance around her, wanting to let out a gasp but finding she could not. Above her sloped an almost vertical mountainside, a flat face of adamant rock daring her to just try and conquer it, get as far as she could before gravity pulled her down again. It stretched so high that the peaks were lost in the white mist of sky where it must've met the home of the stars that only showed their ethereal faces at night. Snow traced in lines and claw marks up and down the summit, gleaming like pooled sunlight in the dawn glow. The sky was a pale purple-blue, no sign of a rising sun anywhere.
Because it was behind the mountains.
Looking to the west, the girl saw the rocks extend downwards like a wide earthen river, a shallow slope to where the harsh, rugged stones began to fade out into vast plains made of gently roiling hills, empty of anything but whispery grass and the occasional tree. There was nothing out there and surely nothing on the mountain. She was alone.
The girl allowed herself to lay back down on the rock, closing her eyes like she was trying to sleep again. She had to let her thoughts settle themselves so she could think rationally. Think, and forget the sense of hopelessness that was beginning to build up in her chest like a bubble of cold air.
Calm, she thought. Calm.
My name is Ida, was her next thought, appearing from nowhere, from nothing.
Her eyes flew open again, dark brown like mud, staring into the paling sky.
A.N.: Someday I might add to this, and it'll be a series of oneshots. Thanks for reading.