Author's Note: this is a random contest entry for Vocalize-san's writing contest on TinierMe; I thought it to be easier to access in this form. This is a backstory of an OC of mine in the story, named Kuroko Heiwa. She is a girl who lives in a world where magic and supernatural powers do exist, as she herself is one granted shadow magic. This is a story spun of how she came to be.
What Is:
She fled, feet pounding hard across the cobbled paths that ran through the small village she lived in, where no one knew anyone else.
Breathing in deep - not through her nose, because she made that mistake before, but ragged breaths through her mouth that burned her lungs and made her want to sneeze - she ran.
The air, the wind, the breeze.
It smelled of smoke and flame and bitter ash and soot and the faintest whiff of burnt buttercream frosting entwined with it all. The lightest wind blew by, caressing her burnt cheek and stinging it with sparks that looked like fireflies in the late sun.
Hurt then heal, hurt then heal, from the red-yellow-orange sparks that caught onto her skin - like the burrs that stuck on her clothes when she roamed the meadow and picked wildflowers - and sparked before dying, and then the cool breeze – it felt like a feather she found on the patio, when she pressed it against her cheek and laughed at the feeling.
The shadows invade, and press against her lively running form with cautious fingers that slip out of the sunlight, black as the nighttime it soon would be.
She shook her head harshly and ignored the dark brown-black strands that flew about her head in disarray.
Go away. Go away. Go away.
Sparks. She must keep running.
And so she keeps running and so she keeps thinking, her thoughts flying infinitely faster than the footfalls of her feet that now sound so very far away.
What Was:
And as she runs, she remembers, the painful memories tempered by bittersweet regret playing through her mind like a horror film stuck on loop.
Her parents enter the living room, the one room in the thatched cottage-house-home that seems to be chiseled out of the earth.
She likes it.
It's the room in the house that makes her feel safest. The one where she's protected. With her parents, it's the one that makes her happiest.
Both are dressed in their best attire – mother in the off-white dress she wears to the few parties she is invited to, and father in the suit he once wore to a wedding. In the simple monochrome, he looks uncomfortable, and she stifles a small smile.
Mother has put on her perfume, the solid scent kept in a bottle she's holed up for years. It smells of flora and fauna and woodsy pine and the musky scent of an untouched forest, fragile and deep and mingling. But underneath, it's still her.
And it smells of dried lavender blooms and clean laundry and potter's clay.
All present (few though they are) ignore the spots of dried clay (though they don't care and don't really notice) dotting and smearing the silken hem with deadened earth, a rustic brown like the countryside they have only ever seen in postcards and pictures.
Her father coughs, a low sound that rumbles in his chest and feels like it should vibrate the ground he stands on. It is deep and long and gravelly and smooth, like sanded pine planks.
"…Happy birthday," he says quietly, with a smile given while looking away, voice strong and steady and rich like the work he does.
Tugging sheepishly on his cufflinks, small wood splinters falling to the earthen ground, he looks up and meets her eyes with a tired smile.
Mother gasps, and he turns towards her like it's the only thing he can thing to do (oh, how they love each other, she thinks, and counts her blessings once more in her head).
"The tenth candle!" she exclaims with a quiet laugh, and the two turn back to the kitchen to retrieve the errant item.
And then the shadows whisper, a teeming mass of shifting darkness hovering about, uncomfortable and tense at something she does not see. They freeze as one entity, opening mouths in a cry that will not escape just yet, just one more precious second –
A second too late.
Something emerged from the kitchen, bathed in red-orange and setting everything in its path alight with a roar.
She chokes back tears.
It was a beast.
A monster made of molten lava and charcoal and fire and embers and ash, with a tongue of white ash, a thing of nature made into something corrupted by man. A being that left behind a trail of soot as midnight black as charred wolf pelt, and dried tears like crystals dashed heartlessly against the unforgiving earth. It was a grotesque creature that was beautiful in it's elegant deformity, a sadistic thing that took all it's time standing to watch the earthen stronghold crumble downdowndowndowndown –
Creeping a thickly molten-lead body ever closer, staring with eyes of eternal coal, it flicked out a tongue of iced flame, as searing hot as it was chillingly cold. The fire licks her cheek in a near-caress, a thin line of blazing pain left as a souvenir of its visit.
The burn stings and writhes and chills and melts.
It hurts.
The pressing weight on her chest hurts more.
Embers gone astray cling to her, bleeding through the thin clothes that offer a feeble shield. They blaze with an uncomfortable heat as ash swirls in dizzying patterns around her, a twisted wind.
Her world is spinning and she cannot see and she will not see and she is not sure if she wants to see any more.
Tears gather, not as hot as the embers that still stubbornly stay even though it feels like it.
She cries.
It's either because of the burn or the ash or the soot or the fact that her parents are dead and have just been cremated without her consent. Possibly some strange mixture of the four.
The shadows push and clamor as much as they can in their permeable forms, and she is sent back to the reality that she does not wish to return to, the world where she is officially ten years old and she can't breathe for the smoke and everything is tumbling down too fast in a bloody haze of red-orange-near white.
She cries as she licks her dry lips and tastes saltwater.
Every tear that hits the floor is an apology that wasn't yet spoken until now.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Goodbye; I'm sorry.
Thank you; I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry – all too late.
I'm sorry for that, too.
"I'm sorry," she croaks hoarsely into the flames that still burn umber and sienna and rust.
And then she runs and keeps running and no she won't ever stop she'll keep running and running and running away, away, away, from everything that hurts and burns and plagues.
Closing her eyes like she closes her mind, as the air turns ice-cold and biting, as the only thing that keeps her tied to the earth are the crunch of loose gravel and the clouds of dirt that rise from the ground beneath as she runs.
What Soon Shall Be:
She ran to the woods that grow dense and foreboding, and she doesn't know why, but she does.
Running through the thick woodland, suddenly drenched in the scent her mother once wore in a time that was not all too long ago, the tears are slapped away by heavy branches with soft leaves and damp ferns that stretch high.
A barren cliff, drying and empty and devoid of life – it pains her to remember that this will be what was once her home – waits patiently on the other side. Waiting is all that it has ever done, and it can be patient for a few more moments.
To that, she runs.
Sitting with her tired legs over the edge of the cliff face, and now knowing the feeling of suspension with nothing underneath, she watches the sun dip low in the sky.
The shadows separate and form their identities, an assembly of spectral figures, the shell that remains out of regret after the body has gone away.
Many are standing and so varied in their ways. A woman carrying a child in a bassinet, a poet with a pen that constantly scratches away on paper that is just as intangible as he, an elderly man that walks with a wizened cane and a haughty look in his eye, a boy and a girl who look like mirror images, and so many others that cannot be fit into simple archetypes.
They are old. Old, though the burdens of age do not come, unless with those who choose to bear it. All of them, so very old – even the youngest, the baby, is older than many in this world.
And forever reminded of the regrets that hold them here in a non-body, the weight of mistakes and what-they-could-have-done's just as heavy as when the first millennia passed, they shan't let the girl fall to the same fate.
They whisper through mindspeak in her head, lost-but-partly-found souls speaking in the only way they know how. Either that they do not know how to speak any more, or they will not try – no one has bothered to find out which it is.
A voice that sounds as though through a veil rings out from the rest.
"Ku-Kuroko!"
The voice sounds shocked, but muffled, distinctly feminine and a tone that washes over her like warm water.
A new one, she thinks absently. The new ones can speak if they so wish, she's noticed, but not all of them want to. Many of the new souls that accompany her are also reclusive, strangers to this ghostly afterlife where they are not ghosts, but shadows, the things they were taught to fear.
"Kuroko."
It's a deeper voice this time, lower and stronger and something that sounds like rolling thunder. So there are two new ones, and both of them are rather bold.
"Happy birthday."
She turns so fast, she's sure she'll have gotten whiplash.
And there are her mother and father looking exactly the same as they always have been, standing in front of her and looking like they're holding back tears.
The effort fails. Small drops of something dark fall towards the ground, but are absorbed into nothingness before they can hit.
They're the first Shades that she has seen shed a tear.
Both parents run towards their daughter, and she runs towards them as well, and they hold each other close as the other Shades politely turn their heads and speak of other things using that strange mindspeak that extends to all in the hovering realm.
Spectral arms sink slightly past the barrier of flesh and skin, and it feels like a shock of ice to her spine, sending a chill through her blood. And she wouldn't give it up for the world.
"Mother…father…"
Already, their color fades. It always happens, a part of the transition from dead to alive and from gone to shadow. Eventually they will turn into monochrome, and she will shut her eyes tight when it happens. And it always does.
But it won't for a while, and the time before is something she will treasure.
For now, she rejoices silently in this moment of strong nostalgia, with her parents that still remain in spirit and leftover soul, held by regrets and memories and loss.
She hides her face in her mother's silken dress with its splotches of potter's clay and tears, inhaling steadily as the tears spring forth again.
It all smells of soot.
Author's Note: Well, all I have to say - if anyone is willing to read this and give it a chance, maybe even review, I would be honored beyond belief. I certainly hope you found it enjoyable, if not terribly random. To all others in the contest, I wish you the best of luck!