A.N: Thank you to everyone who created a character for this story, and thank you so much to Pixelfun20 for leaving a lovely review of the prologue! I hope you enjoy the first chapter which follows and introduces our first central character. Please let me know what you think in a review. I have tried to include a short mention of each accepted character so far, but they will each get their own introductory chapter and viewpoint as the story begins to take shape. There are still two slots open for characters, so please don't hesitate to submit yours!

I would shun the light
Share in evening's cool and quiet
Who would trade that hum of night
For sunlight, sunlight, sunlight
Whose heart would not take flight?
Betray the moon as acolyte
On first and fierce affirming sight
Of sunlight, sunlight, sunlight

I had been lost to you, sunlight
And flew like a moth to you, sunlight

Like Orpheus he had led them from the Underworld and into the light, and like Orpheus he had warned them not to look back as they ran.

Yves hadn't listened.

Danny kept waiting for that fact to alleviate the grief and guilt that still stirred her heart late at night, when the stars had risen and night descended, when she had no company but her own cruel thoughts and the memory of what had been and what could be once more, tangled amongst her veins and her nerves like something terrible and tenable. She kept waiting for that little fact to make a difference. Yves hadn't listened. Silas had warned them. Silas, their own personal Orpheus, had taken them by the hand and urged them to run, run like the devil himself was at your heels, run until your lungs burned and your heart felt like it would burst, run run run and don't look back.

Yves had looked back.

They hadn't even given her a chance to regret it.

Somehow, knowing that Yves had sealed her fate by looking back didn't make it any easier for the girl who had once been Mary to sleep - especially not on the bad days, when the nightmares suffocated her and the memories choked her and she could almost believe that the past four years had been some frenzied delusion from within the gilded cage of the mansion. On nights like these, she found she had two choices: she could lie, still and sleepless, in the cramped, cozy room that had once been intended for some small perfect human child which had never arrived, or she could slip downstairs, silent and subtle, past the master bedroom and down the narrow stairs and across the cold tiles of the kitchen, out through the Dutch doors which overlooked the back paddock where they kept the last of the nursing ewes.

She so rarely flew anymore - for such a long time, her only memory of true, unpinioned flight had been tainted with the panic of escape, scarred with the trauma of watching her siblings vanish into the ribbons of ether strewn across the horizon. The pain had not been merely emotional - the adrenaline of the open sky and the pursuit of mansion security behind her had masked for a long time the agony of whatever damage had been done to her right wing. Some sort of dart had torn through her veins and nerves, Danny thought, with a tracker embedded within, as though the mansion was determined to leave some sort of mark upon her - if they could not keep her trapped within its narrow perimeter, then it would ensure she could not flee far without retribution.

The man she now knew to be the kindest person on the face of the planet had been the one to remove it for her, sweet, kind Robert, and she had spent the following three weeks in a state of persistent petrification that it might have been too late - that they might have somehow locked on to her position, that they might arrive at any moment to raze the farm to ash, and slaughter Robert and Lucas and William, and drag Danny back to the mansion in chains. But those three weeks had passed, and life had gone on, and eventually Danny had roused enough courage to again venture beyond the narrow confines of her room and participate in the world once more, torn between hoping that she was truly hidden from the clutches of Doctor Faulkner and deciding that hiding from the world when she had gone through so much in order to step out into it.

And right now, the world seemed to unfurl before her like a picturebook, for a single instant utterly infinite. Surely there could be no more beautiful place in the world, Danny thought - for even in the dark, her acute senses could perceive the deep emerald of the sloping hills, the rich lavender heather and bright yellow gorse which carpeted the precipices and the cliffs, the velvety darkness of the night sky filleted by tiny pinpricks of perfect aureate light. In the moment of escape, that first taste of pure freedom, she did not think that she had consciously chosen her destination... and yet, Danny thought, gazing across the farmland and the wilderness beyond, if, in that moment she had emerged from the hell of the mansion, she had known anything of the world, she thought that she would have chosen this place. There were no walls here, no limits, no labs and no experiments, only grass and sky.

Yves would never see this, Danny thought. Her older sister had looked back. The others had escaped, and scattered - Danny could still remember seeing the eldest of the six, Prim, silhouetted against the sun like an ambitious Icarus, her long hair in wild tendrils about her head like some sort of demented halo. Prim had not looked back, but spread her wings and caught a thermal and rocketed upwards into the white light of the dawn, her yellow tartan skirt obscured by the glare of the rising sun. Crow had not looked back either, but set his wings and dived low to skirt the sand dunes which surrounded the fertile oasis of the mansion, his dark wings churning up tiny devilish tornados of dust in his wake, moving quick with the kind of certainty that only the dark-haired boy could conjure. And Danny had not looked back either, but had run just as Silas had instructed, and then launched herself bodily into the air with the desperation of one who has realised that if she cannot taste the sky then she would rather die trying.

Don't look back, don't look back, don't look back.

Yves had looked back, and Danny had tasted the sky, just as Silas had promised.

And tonight, she could not hold herself back from doing so again.

Two steps forward and her wings burst out to either side and she was up, up and rising. Glossy, smooth and black, they caught the wind effortlessly and lifted her even further, totally untethered to the surface of the earth, utterly without ties if she chose to be without them. The toe of her boot brushed a tall strand of grass; she could hear, more than see, the movement of sheep among the long rushes in the back paddock, the soft breathing of the new lambs, tiny innocent creatures, all delicate and long-limbed. Danny couldn't say she didn't notice a resemblance with the creature she had once been.

Higher, then?

She rose. The stars were achievable for one such as her - indeed, she and her siblings were perhaps the only ones in the world who could possibly hope to reach for the stars, the moon, the very edge of the skies. And reach she did. Above, silver light: the moon waxing full and rich and starlight splattered across the cliffs like so much spilled wine. Below, golden light: the aura of rich honey coloured radiance pouring through the windows of the farmhouse where Robert had forgotten to switch off his bedside lamp before falling asleep, as he always did.

Higher again. The wind rustled through her bobbed hair, ruffling the short strands into a sort of dark crown. Danny sometimes wondered how far she could go if she dared to try - if she went far rather than high, if she ran, ran, ran like Silas had told them to all those years ago. How long would it take her to find a sibling? A day, a week, a month... years? She always hoped they were hidden well enough that she would never find them, even if she had tried to search. That Prim had gone to ground and used her abilities to stay one step ahead of their hunters, never needing to look over her shoulder like Danny did. That Crow was out there somewhere, studying and working hard, a normal life softening all his rough edges. And the others...

Danny didn't know what it was about this night, of all nights, that was tearing open so many old wounds. By rights, she had a new family: Robert, who had taken her in and dressed her in his dead wife's clothes and cared for her like Danny had always dreamed of a father caring for his daughter, and Lucas, who was a brother to her in the way that the other winged boys never could have been, all indulgent and rambling, and William, who would never introduce her to his husband or daughter but who tutored her in his spare time and had guided her through those first most awful days in the real world and had given Robert that first and most invaluable piece of advice: "you can't call her hey you forever".

She was Danny, and she belonged to them, or at least she should have. But there was a part of her that would always belong to the others, no matter where in the world they had found themselves, even if they were dead, even if they had made the mistake of looking back just as Yves had and been dragged back into the Underworld, without an Orpheus to save them this time. A part of Danny was inextricably tied to them still, like a little red ribbon which bound them together, no matter how far from one another they strayed.

No, she thought, not Danny - Mary.

Well, she had left Mary behind, killed her and buried her and abandoned her just as she abandoned the earth now, rising higher and higher, her flannel shirt whipping about her lean forearms as the air grew colder and thinner and her boots grew level with the top of trees rather than grass. Wherever her siblings were, she thought as she gazed out across the highlands, her hazel eyes alight with the quiet delight of this secret home she had forged for herself in the depths of nowhere, wherever they were they were gazing at the same sky and the same stars, and maybe they were thinking of her too.

The Flock:

Girl 1: Prim, created by Pixelfun20

Boy 1: Crow, created by gamergirl101

Girl 2: Yves, created by arrosaarmiarma

Boy 2:

Girl 3: Mary, created by chiaki ebooks

Boy 3:

Other key characters: Silas Monroe, Mira Argento (created by ShadowWolf223), Rosalia Conti (created by POMForever)