[A/n] Did someone say 'navigating through difficult situations?' When is Saya not doing that?
Written for the Maze Navigation prompt of the Twelve Shots of Summer Challenge, enlivening your summers with timed challenges and feedback from like-minded authors since 2014. Hope you enjoy.
The first time she hears that enchanting voice, it's in her dreams. High and pure as crystal, entrancing in every sense yet melancholy, plaintive like a princess trapped in her tower.
She wanders alone over the bridge that reaches across sparkling waters, through the grassy ruins of the ancient castle, down the dark hallways of the austere mansion. That voice taunts her at night and dances in her waking thoughts. She has the sense that her search is futile, that she'll never find the elusive songbird, that she's walking through a hopeless labyrinth.
I will find you, she says aloud. I will find you and free you.
And then she does.
The next of her memories to resurface is this: broken bodies sucked clean of blood, the gold and red of fire and darkness of death in the air, the old mansion crumbling and blackening beneath huge flames licking hungrily towards the midnight sky. And standing there in the flames: a girl, beautiful and blue-eyed and dark-haired, who looks exactly like her.
She is, by all accounts, a regular high-school girl. She likes pole-vaulting and eats a lot, and maybe she can't remember anything but the past year, but that's pretty much all that's different about her. She's shy at times but sweet and genuinely loyal to her small family. She is inexplicably drawn to a mysterious cello player with a bandaged hand and happens to be near where a high school teacher is murdered.
That is where it all begins.
They ask her to fight monsters. She does not know why, but there is a sword in her hand and somehow destruction is written into her blood. The monsters will kill everything she loves if she does not kill them. The weight of the world has already fallen upon her shoulders. She does not know who she is. She is drowning in a maze of secrets, and everyone knows her past but her.
She is not a human girl.
She, who fights monsters, is a monster.
She is accustomed to people proclaiming their undying loyalty to her. In fact, she wishes it would stop.
We work only to protect you.
I will always be by your side.
We will fight for you.
I exist only for you.
They don't understand that this is her battle. The life of sorrows is hers only, and this burden no one but she can bear. And she does not want them to suffer for her. Their lives are not her shield.
After it is all over, she knows that she must die. Otherwise she will be a war weapon after she wakes from her thirty-year sleep. She will condemn humanity to fight over her existence. She cannot shoulder that weight again. In this fog of war, she feels all too lost. Her footsteps are weary, and sometimes she knows not where she treads. This is all that guides her.
And as her eyelids drift shut, she tells herself, I will not fail. I will not fail.
If she didn't keep this principle in mind, she would have capitulated long ago. When her dreams stood before her, wholly attainable and in the palm of his outstretched hand, she would have accepted. She would have run away from the fear and the pain and traveled the world to see all its wonders, and she would have taken his hand in hers and smiled.
This is her battle. She will let no one take her away from her true goal, nor try to accomplish it for her, nor save her from what she must do.
It is over.
And they have not let her die. Family, he says. I will always protect you.
Perhaps she was wrong, she muses. Finally, if even for just a year, she has found happiness. She did not have to die.
Approaching sleep clouds her eyes that last night, and the moonlight alights on her features in pale blue.
She closes her eyes and walks into a labyrinth of dreams.
Fin