Chapter One: At Land's End

"Full many a gem of the purest ray serene

The dark unfathomed caves of the ocean bear

Full many a a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Thomas Gray

Elodie

The time was half past midnight and the streets were hauntingly empty. There was nowhere for her to go. She had long since given up on returning, broken and withered, to her family abode. There was no point, she told herself, in going only be to given sad looks and snide whispers. Her mother detested her for her sickness and her father coddled her to within an inch of her patience. No, she certainly could not return to that.

Her escape from the ward of the never-returning sick ones had been miraculous. She had no intention of every being forced back into the hellhole. She would rather die first. She turned, her slightly matted brown hair twirling in the late night breeze, to stare back up at the dimly lit sanatorium where she had spent the last two years of her life. From Cassandra's window she could she a shadowy figure. She raised a hand as if her only friend could see her, down among the normal people, down where she hid among the shadows.

The streets were deserted and it sent shivers up her spine. She was not insane like some of those living in the place up on the hill, forced into seclusion from this little village. She very much had her wits about her. But her parents didn't know what to do with her. Her illness was far too much for them to handle. They didn't understand it. So they had shipped her off here. She didn't know where here was. That was perhaps the more frightening part of escaping late at night. She knew not a soul and found herself quite abandoned by her own desire for freedom.

"Now what do I do?" She crooned gently as she squeezed herself, her spindly arms wrapped around her frail figure. "I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here. There is nothing but tiny houses and ocean and forest." She began wandering, aimlessly, toward the beach. Normally she avoided water at all costs. There was something sinister in the great lengths it stretched and the depths to which it dove. It was endless and more alive than she could ever dream of. It was unknown and that frightened her. Tonight, however, she had no plans to avoid it. This might be the only solution she had left.

Her old dress, the one that they had made her wear in the sanatorium, was ratty and in need of mending. She pretended she was a foul ghost haunting the streets of the village brave enough to host a place for the terminally mentally ill. She began to gently hum to herself as she weaved down lanes, twirling her dress about her. By the time she reached the ocean her legs were exhausted. She willingly collapsed, ignoring the pain that shot through her spine as she fell to the ground. She pulled her tiny legs up to her chest and rested her head upon them. Sometimes her head felt so heavy. So unbearably heavy that she just had to lay it down for a moment.

She breathed in and out. The feeling of her ragged breath was unnatural. She felt spent and barely alive. She felt so close to being free of the shell of her body. She smiled, full with ideas of what would soon come. She forced her eyes open and stared out at the ocean, watching the waves beat continuously upon the sandy shores. Mesmerized, the sound of water hitting solidness and the feel of salty air breathing life onto her skin; she forced herself up onto her feet and staggered toward the water. One foot in front of the other, she told herself. It was as if her body had forgotten how to walk.

The water was cool beneath her feet, slipping in between her emaciated toes and shivering its way under her heels. Her ankles were left cold. This was life. This was what she had wanted those two years hidden away. They always promised a seashore trip if they were good. But someone always ruined it for everyone else. Usually it was her because she refused the nourishment pushed toward her. She stuck out her tongue at the thought of it all, the disgusting mashed food they dared to call the nourishment that would save her.

Well, she had gotten herself down to the beach without their food or their assistance. She was stronger than they all thought. She was filled with the desire for one of them to see her now, standing with her toes dipped into salt water and her eyes so alive with the hum of the ocean's power. She wished they could see her now. Her last thought before she blacked out, falling onto the wet, sandy beach, was that she was stronger and more alive than any of them thought.

Erik

The beach was empty at night. He loved the beach. There was something forbidding about it; something beautiful that he should have not been given the good grace to experience. He never frolicked in the water like children or like the lovers he sometimes spotted from the place where he stayed, just on the edge of the village and the rocky shore. He had to travel some distance to get to the smooth beach, the place where people came every day. His home was off to the right, barely reachable by the deathly sharp and jagged rocks that scattered the beach.

It was his at night. Which was just as well as he preferred late night walks to sunshine anyway. On his way down he glanced up at the sanatorium, dimly lit from the inside. A shiver traced his spine unwillingly. Annoyed, he cast it off and continued to study the building's grim façade. The villagers often pretended they couldn't hear the ungodly shrieks that rose from the place on occasion. For being incurably and mentally insane, he suspected every inmate liked to take pride in their screams, knowing they scared the little children down below. Sometimes he wondered if they opened the windows just to scream as if their lungs were about to explode.

Further up on the beach something drew his eye away from the building of destitute and crazed souls. There was a tiny figure tracing her way toward the water's edge. She was taller than an average child, her dress sweeping the sand, but her frame was so deathly thin that he wondered if, perhaps, she was not real. Her spindly arms were bared by the sleeves of the dress shoved back, she struggled to lift up the dress as she placed a stick thin leg out toward the water. Her hair was flowing around her. He watched, mesmerized, as she stood on the edge of the world and water. Her head was thrown back in delight. There was something compromising about the situation. And there was something wrong with such a tiny figure standing alone on a beach late at night.

He watched her fall, her fragile body slamming unforgivingly into the ground. He imagined for a moment that her body was tired and sad that it had not burst into dust upon impact, only further proving that the soul trapped inside had another day to live.