Starborn

8 years ago…

The Wind Continent was a wild and ruthless place for a ten-year-old girl; and when there was a mad man after her and she was all alone, Ivory was as good as dead. Terrified, but unable to look away, she watched as her father was struck, slain by the shadowed man. Her breath fogged the damp glass when she cried, the palms of her hands left tiny, smudging marks as she willed the glass of the window to evaporate so she could reach her bleeding father. Her loving, dying father. His blood wept crimson into the grass that he had once spent the entire day chopping down with a kitchen knife so that Ivory and her mother could have a picnic. The wind that had always, always fought against him now seemed to sing along to his agony, harmonizing with Ivory’s mother’s shrill screams.

A strangled, meek sound escaped from Ivory’s throat, which was swollen with tears and screams that could not seem to escape. Her fist stung with the cold and a forming bruise as she banged it again against the glass, the shadowed man was standing over Ivory’s mother now. She was bent over, her body wracked with sobs, her screams so loud that she did not hear him draw his sword. Her spirit so broken that even if she had heard, Ivory doubted she would care. The wind picked up then, and the killer’s sword was almost ripped from his grasp. For a moment, a spark of hope flared in Ivory’s chest, if her mother could get away and make it to the shore, then so could she. Quickly, nimble as a doe despite her frozen limbs and numb joints, Ivory leapt from the window ledge. She may as well have thrown herself down the stairs with the speed in which she flew down them. If she had time, she would have stopped to look at the pictures that littered the walls; her mother and father at their wedding, Ivory as a newborn, her as a gangly toddler sat in her mother’s lap as they both held up their Christmas presents for their father’s camera.

Her winter boots were stacked by the front door caked with mud and soggy from the stream that morning. Her father had taken her to catch fish, but Ivory had been more distracted by the squirrels in the trees. If she had known that would be a few of the last moments with her father, Ivory would have listened as he told her how to string the bait, savoured every minute. She would have watched a little longer as he sat at the edge of the water, so content, before she had clambered into the woods.

Her heart constricted as she pulled on the coat that her mother had sewn her just a few weeks ago, it was thick and warm and layered with hours of consideration and love. Her mother had told her she needed a new coat, but Ivory had never felt cold, not even during the many harsh winters she had endured hereon The Wind Continent. Now, all she could feel was the cold, in the air and in her heart. She now realised, that the warmth she had always felt, it must have been love. But now, she had nothing. A tight pain ripped across Ivory’s chest and red coloured the corners of her vision. In just seconds, her entire, happy life had been flipped on its axis. As light-footed as a moth, as rapid as a fox, Ivory made her way down the hall. The only noises in her head were the voices of her parents.

One. Keep all the lights off, you know your home much better than any intruder.

Ivory danced around winding corners and jumped over the corners of rugs, she reached the kitchen in seconds, her next goal blazing through her mind like a beacon.

Two. We keep an axe stuck underneath the dining table; it is sharp and easy to use.

When the front door crashed open, Ivory was already underneath the table, pulling the axe free from its hiding spot. The third warning her parents had given her struggled to break through the torrent of rage in her head, but she willed it out.

Three. Run. Hide. Do anything to keep them from catching you.

Ivory listened in the dark silence. The man went straight up the main staircase. Now was her chance. Axe clutched tight against her chest, oxygen held in a tense ball in her mouth, Ivory bolted. Silently, she slipped from under the table, above her she heard crashing, but that only urged her on faster as she used the noise of the shadow man’s desperation as her cover. In one fell movement Ivory grabbed her boots and then pulled the front door shut tight, bolting it from the outside. Adrenaline rushed through her and, absurdly, Ivory found herself grinning at the man who stared at her through her own bedroom window. An exasperated breath finally broke free from her throat and then, she ran again.

Running, she could do. Hiding, she was the Hugos family reigning champion. But facing her dead father…

She had to do it; his body was there in the path leading to the thick woods. The path that he, Ivory and her mother had carved out with their very footsteps. Ivory squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath as she leapt over her father’s body and kept on running. Her mother? Ivory barely gave her absence a second thought. The heels of her boots banging against her side did not slow her, the handle of her axe growing slippery with sweat did not distract her. The shoreline was an hour walk away, Ivory figured that if she didn’t stop running it would take her half the time. But she had to do the math, the shadow man was double the size of her, so his strides would cover the same distance in half the time. But he was already behind.

That thought stopped short, slamming Ivory’s train of thought and her steps to a sudden halt, when a crash echoed behind her. It was so loud it drowned out the banshee winds that screamed across the meadow. She almost didn’t want to, and knew most certainly that she shouldn’t, but Ivory turned slowly around. A choked gasp sputtered from her mouth; the shadow man was not a shadow at all. With his ebony cape wrapped around his fist to protect his knuckles from the window he had just smashed, his identity was revealed like a sunrise. His skin was white as the moon, his hair silver like the ash trees Ivory’s home was built of. He scaled down the building like those spiders Ivory’s mother was terrified of, the ones that Ivory kept as pets. Ivory tilted her head to the side as she watched him, as if in a trance. He moved like the assassins she had read about in books; he moved like the wind itself. But he killed like the devil.

Three. Run. Hide. Do anything to keep them from catching you.

Ivory spun and fled, cursing aloud at herself for her stupidity. He was on her heels now; she had to be smart.

She raced up hills and through streams, and yet the shadow man’s taunting, arrogant footsteps always echoed close behind. Ivory felt like a toy being played with, a mouse feeling safe in its burrow, when really it was in the belly of its predator. Eventually, the cold froze her feet, the sound of her every move was magnified by the enchanted silence of the forest. As she ran and stumbled as fast as she could, Ivory found her mind wondering back to the tales that her father used to tell her, grappling desperately to them to keep her sane. Even if it was the most absurd thought to have when running for her life.

She remembered her father telling her the stories of this forest as a bedtime story. He had told her that hundreds of years ago, a war had broken out between the gods, and this world had suffered greatly. Nature and life had been completely wiped out. Until one day, it came back. It came back in the form of a small egg, implanted on this island like an offering. It was told that the egg stayed here, unhatched, but pulsing with life and growing with vigour for over a century. In that century, trees sprouted from the ground, thick with nutritious sap and plated with armour of bark. They crowded like soldiers around this egg, giving life to the ground when they came. Meadows grew around the island, as if overnight. Rain came for the first time in over one hundred years, filling every dip and crevice with the freshest of water. The magic that had grown here was of the purest kind, but it was wild. When the egg birthed a vindictive witch, that wild magic became her weapon. Though her father had always skipped to the end to not scare Ivory before she slept, the moral of the tale was that the pureness of this forest could never be tainted by that witch. Still, the trees stood tall, now not protecting their queen, but something greater; each other.

There was a calmness in the air that stilled Ivory’s heart, even in this moment that she ran for pure survival. The trees beckoned for her to rest beneath their gallant shields of leaves, the wind promised to sing her a lullaby like her mother used to. But Ivory knew that she could not stop. Even as her feet bled and her heart cried, her spirit stayed a flaming torch in her chest, pushing her on. Soon, she came to another stream. This was the one she had dreaded, it was too deep for her to wade through, and the currents during this kind of storm were near to deadly. Before she even reached the river’s edge, Ivory could hear the torrent roaring of the rapids, she could feel the spray of the icy water. Skidding down the sand dune, Ivory whimpered when she saw the frothy rapids, looking like propellors ready to chop her into pieces. She stumbled to water’s edge; an ominous shiver ate down her body. Ivory turned, feeling like she was reading a sad book where she knew the ending, staring at the pages so hard as if to change the fate of those characters.

The shadow man stood in the trees, watching her like an estranged sailor watches the flash of a lighthouse. Ivory stared back at him, he held a strange aura, Ivory felt as if she could sense the souls of her murdered parents still stuck to his own tarnished soul. They were both stock still as they watched one another, the shadow man with an odd intensity that Ivory could not understand, and her full of complete anger. She wanted to attack his face with the axe still primed in her palm, so that no one else would ever have to look upon it knowing what he had done. But she could not fight him, not in a thousand years would Ivory ever be able to overpower him. So, she turned and delved into the river.

The last thing that she heard before the currents dragged her away, was her own name, ripped shrilly from the man chasing her.

She might have thought it strange that the man who had just murdered her family had called not only her name, but had called in such a desperate, terrified way. But, as soon as she was pulled into deeper water, two things suddenly pulled at her chest.

The first was a clawed hand that felt as if had ripped right through the front of her and out of Ivory’s back.

And the second was a hot, fiery power.

It awoke seemingly in the deepest pit of her stomach and rose.

Gold light exploded around Ivory; orbs of yellow and orange exploded across her vision as she squeezed her eyes closed in pain.

A scream not much unlike her mothers had been earlier that night ricocheted through the water, and the hand lodged in Ivory’s chest retracted itself.

The last thing she felt was the heat burning her extremities, an excruciating contrast against the Baltic water.

And then she was gone.