She lay in a particularly dense bed of grass somewhere deep in Bogachiel State Park, music flooding her mind as she cleared it of all thought and sense of being. The bubbles she blew out filled the air above her eyes, interrupting her view of the gloomy grey sky. If she tried hard enough, she could convince herself she had slipped through the cracks back to the sixties, a strange sense of nostalgia colouring every corner of her psychedelic daydream.

Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain, where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies. Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers, that grow so incredibly hiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Her fingers moved lazily through the air, directing rainbow sheened bubbles to dance loops around one another like a conductor of an orchestra, her favourite trick. Round and round they moved, a swirling choreographed waltz of pretty, perfect bubbles.

Newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take you awaaaaay. Climb in the back with your head in the clouds and you're gone-

It should've been the perfect day, and yet, all good things had to come to an end.

The punctuated, repeated loud yowls interrupted the catchy chorus she had been waiting for, muffled but impossible to ignore. Her moment of serenity bursts just the same as the bubbles she had concentrated on keeping whole, splattering her with tiny specks of cold, soapy water. Her little childlike smile breaks into a disdainful scowl, nose crinkling up as the barely muffled sounds get louder. I should've gone camping alone.

Deciding enough was enough, Jules pulls herself up, eyes on the rocking tent on the other side of the unlit campfire from hers. She doesn't want to hear it, she doesn't even really want to approach it- but she knows it's what she must do as she pulls herself together and gets close enough they can hopefully hear her over themselves. "Hey?"

The rocking, graciously, ceases- but she wishes she kept her earphones in because she didn't need to hear their breathless pants. "I'm taking a hike off the river trail, if I'm not back by nightfall call someone."

She pivots to leave without waiting on a reply, picking up her pack and a water bottle and her notebook. Jules had a feeling they'd be waking up to sleeting rain come the morning, or sooner, but she doubted the lovebirds were going to tear themselves away from a chance for some privacy away from Leah's house that she shared with her family.

The mood has shifted now. There's a crooked, brittle line between disappointment and bitterness that cracks a little more every time her best friend convinces her that things have changed and proves they have not. Every time Leah notices the way her whole world spins around Sam and goes out of her way to spare some time for her best friend, only to somehow ruin it all over again. Jules knows she cannot blame Leah, cannot see her as something to own and to lose in the way she has so many others before. Sam was there first. Sam and Leah had been a package deal long before she had crossed their path, and it was not her place to feel as she did.

And so she trekked on through the deep gorge carved out by the loneliness only her best friend could cause within her. She wasn't in love with her best friend, her bitter jealousy was not possessive in nature. She did not picture herself at Leah's side as any more than the ever rarer moments the two shared alone, booming laughter in the night and an arm tossed roughly over her shoulders despite the way she towered over the pretty, tan girl. Secrets shared over a card game on the rickety back porch amongst the thick blanketing sound of crickets in the depths of summer, confessions they invested in one another like deposits in a bank vault. Leah Clearwater was easy, like the summer sun, like dripping ice cream and road trips in shitty cars that could stall at any given moment. Like blowing bubbles that glittered in the sunshine up above the cloud bank. And like the sun in Forks, she was temporary, she was brief, and she could not keep her to herself.

Jules was not yet familiar with Bogachiel, not in the way she knew her favourite trails around Forks where she did not need a ride or the company of her friends to venture into the woods. It was her favourite place, a sanctuary filled with so much more than the rich, heavy scent of wet earth and the whispered promise of peace amongst the ancient trees. As she trekked through the dirt and sipped from her water bottle she allowed herself to slip into the shoes of another, one she shared no resemblance to in either features or nature. A woman she had never had the luxury of knowing, spending her youth amongst the woods with a notebook and a pack of drawing pencils so used they were little more than stubs by this time each year, where the weather window began to draw to a close.

Most of her hobbies were stolen like secrets from the ones she had loved and lost, and the one she cherished above all was from the woman she had never known at all. She knew her mother through her drawings, through the pieces of her too-short life she had captured on smudged paper in an endless collection of journals Jules had gone through the trouble of digitizing so she would never lose them to time the way she had lost her mother. There were never any words, never any sentences she could match to the woman who's voice she had only heard in childhood videos taken when she was little more than a blob in a blanket. She had built her own tether to Elizabeth Swan, strengthened it over time with practice and care until the fluid stroke of a brush or the scratching of led on paper became as much a part of her essence as the strands of fine golden brown hair she had inherited from her father. Now, whenever Jules saw a bird flitter by that she recognized solely from carefully shaded pencil, she smiled.

She did not often allow herself to wonder in the past. There were people she lost that she dared not think of, memories too painful to replay, and Jules did not like to linger where she could so easily drift too far. Instead she picked a tree not too far from the visible trail, slipping her water bottle inside her backpack and allowed the harsh sound of the zipper to ring off into the air as the last sound she would make before she settled like dried leaves after a tumbling breeze. The pen was more silent than a pencil, the ink free flowing and her movements fluid and meticulous to the point it would not disturb the scene before her.

She drew what was in front of her, at first, a fern with a curious coiled tip— and an hour of trekking later, a moss-ridden and worn wooden bridge that was cordoned off from usage with a rusted, thick wet chain that must have at one point been yellow judging by the faded, chipping paint that peeled away from the large links like wax from a candle in mottled water-logged clumps. Another hour, and she's reached a part of the forest that looks like an alien planet. The trees are ancient, thickset and as tall as what she imagines as the sturdy legs of a herd of brontosauruses, with thickset roots that dive in and out and twist and turn all around in great arches and curves that she's sure she can limbo under. She isn't sure if the gloomy sunlight that filters through the Autumnal yellow leaves are what washes everything in a strange neon yellow glow, or if the moss that coats every inch of everything before her eyes is more yellow than green. It's not a colour she had ever associated with nature before, reminding her more of a toxic va—

She realizes that is what she associates with the scene before her. Her personal image of the earth a hundred years after Nuclear Armageddon, the pure nature in front of her so vivid in hue it was unnatural to her eye. There is no path before her with the diversion she has taken in search of more drawing material, but she takes comfort in the compass in her pocket and the certainty that she can find her way back to the trail behind her. The promise of what she was certain was untouched nature, of something new her eyes had not yet seen- it was far too heady a muse for her to deny. Already her mind considers the paints she would need to combine to create the vivid almost-neon sparks of colour, the subtle pops of reddish rust brown in mushrooms that peek out from between the chrome oxide green of ferns, the shade of hanging moss that leans more towards the yellow end of the chartreuse spectrum- the golden glow of light through cadmium yellow leaves that bask over it all. It is a new palette of hues that she has not yet played with, and Jules imagines the scene painted with fairies, little specks of blue and silver and burnished orange that whizz in the static air between, bringing her imagined artwork to life.

Except there is no life in the scene before her, or at least, no sentient life that she can hear or witness. She decides she will venture deeper forward, find a better angle than the one before her where there is no true sense of foreground and beyond. It is in the solid formation of her new mission that she makes the first mistake.

She is too far from the trail now, and moving further into the depths of her false sense of security, in her naive belief that she is alone to witness the world she has found for herself. She makes herself at home atop a moss-coated root just wide enough and almost perfect to act as a bench if it weren't just a few inches too high, even for her impressive height. Her notebook is thus awkward in her lap, her movements slower as she takes more care in the curation of her multiple key sketches before she decides on what to include and what not to, on what to add in and what was too much. She no longer captures what is right before her eyes, but what could be, a world of imagination whose bare bones are stolen from the setting surrounding her.

Her imagination, when ignited, is a wildfire, a steady thing that raged on and got carried away with the wind. This was her next mistake, allowing herself to lose track of time, to take too long to create the forms on the paper, to waste away redrawing the same fine lines until she was satisfied, only to spurn on with a new idea, a new edition. This was her happy place, her tether to her mother tugging on. If Jules had been more aware of the reality around her and not the fantasy, she would notice the familiar ache set in between her shoulder blades from the awkward position, feel the strain in her wrist and her fingers as her artline pen flew across the page. She would notice the time ticking away on her wrist. She would notice that she had not moved nor changed position in so long that the life in the woods had begun to return, that her private world had been invaded.

Jules had never seen an elk with her own eyes before, and the next time she looks up from her journal, she sees multiple. There are six of them, all female, she thinks- or at least they have no antlers. She had come across owls before, and trails of paws and hooves alike- but never something as large as an elk. The sight stole her breath away, even from as far a distance as they were, moving unaware of the human beyond the trees together at a languid pace. She does not see the seventh, the young hidden by their mother as the group that lingered back journey to join a larger herd. She sees the shorter head only after she slides off the root to stand.

The step forward is the mistake that sets forth the chain. Something crunches under her hiking boot- and the animals heads snap in her direction almost as one. She freezes- but her other foot has to land somewhere, and the moment it does they bolt.

Jules was not about to miss the chance to draw her first large mammal by her own observation in her own hand.

Her backpack slings over her shoulder all while her eyes stay glued to the direction they had rushed for, setting off into a sprint. It's stupid- she'd have much better luck following the trail they left in their wake, imprinted in the mud of the forest bed- but Jules is Parisian and as much as she had learnt by now from her friends and her summers, and as much as she adored being outdoors, she was still a city girl at heart. She does not stop racing after the direction she assumed they had gone until she tires. Her backpack is too heavy for running, and her hiking boots are even worse, the sturdy waterproof leather kind with steel toes. She is fortunate she has not lost their trail as she ran, but she catches no sight of them as she pants and wheezes for breath, buckling over for a moment of respite after slowing to a jog and then a final halt, bracing herself against her knees. If she had thought the yellow tinged world behind her was foreign, she had no idea where she was now. It was stupid. Her final mistake was not turning back the way she came.

Instead, she follows the scattered hoof prints, the signs of a much larger group that had gone through here than the one she had seen. She's no expert, she cannot tell apart what is old and what is new, but the muddy ground beneath her boots are clear in their imprints as the pattern of her rubber soles joins the trail of the wild. She packs away the journal that had remained in her tight clutch her entire run, pulling out her bottle and being cautious enough now not to drain it dry no matter how much she wanted to- she did not know how long she would need to hike back to the campsite, and the thunder of her heartbeat rattling in her chest and the adrenaline pumping through her veins made her begin to regret the mistakes that brought her here, and dread the journey back. She is filled with hope yet, ears straining for an unfamiliar sound.

After a while of walking, it is the rushing of water that answers her silence instead. She follows it, more out of curiosity than little else- after all, she had been on the river trail, and there was a potential there to find it again if she were to find said river. The muffled noise echoes amongst the trees, something she is not used to, and it takes her a while to figure out which direction to follow so the sound gets louder. Eventually, she discovers where the trees grow more far apart, the foliage and the ferns less dense- and then a break, and in the near distance, a narrow gorge where a river on the other side flows and spills down into the jagged and deep, dark grey ravine. She dares not wander close, even from here she can see the moss that lines the bank like a thick, slick carpet- she did not fancy a slip and slide to her immediate death.

Instead, she notices the narrow, fallen timber, the crooked leaned logs that criss cross at odd angles from one bank to the next. She notices the old, rotting wooden fencing of a bridge that had long since stopped existing, and more that seemed to have once stood as a barricade that lined this deep part of the gorge. She does not notice the large herd of elk bolting through the trees on the other side of the bank, does not hear them over the rushing waters. She does not see the blurring shapes whizzing and darting in and out through the trees, giving chase to the proud creatures.

Jules does not see him diverting, but she feels it. That all too familiar chill down her spine, the goosebumps that had erupted over and over again for the past five days she had spent with the Cullens. She does not understand why she senses the danger, she does not even really notice the way she drops her water bottle or the way her palms fly up as if bracing for impact—

Her eyes register the streaking projectile heading directly for her a fraction of a second after the familiar force pushes forward against it, except instead of controlling the mass it controls her, sending her flying back so hard and so fast the world around her streaks and blurs instead- another fraction of a second, and her back collides harshly against a solid tree several feet up in the air before she drops like a rag doll at the base. The wind is knocked out of her, but in the moment it takes for her mind to scream that the threat is still there, the others come.

Edward Cullen is the first, a flash of blue and khaki and suddenly he is throwing a snarling Jasper back from just an inch away from her face. A blink, and Jasper is grabbed again from a third attempt, slammed against a tall tree so hard it cracks impossibly right before her eyes into several large, splintered shards as it falls over the ridge. Another blink, and Alice Cullen has joined Edward's side, helping hold her boyfriend slash brother back. A third blink, and there is burly Emmett, enough to subdue Jasper Hale and keep him at bay for good.

And then Rosalie Hale is there, right before her very eyes, blocking her vision of the boy who had just tried to attack her repeatedly. The girl had appeared like the others as if out of thin air, as if conjured by her mind. And in that moment Jules does not see the fear in her midnight eyes, she does not see the worry that lines her face. She sees the sunlight kissing her perfect, porcelain skin- and she sees her shining, impossibly, like a billion diamonds had been stitched into her very pores. As if she was made of the galaxy itself, the stars shimmering and reflecting off of her in an infinity of rainbows that scattered over the space surrounding her, on her jeans, on her jacket, on her sweater.

It is then that Jules remembers to scream.