Chapter 0 - The Beginning
I sat in my small turret and gazed wistfully out the window as the rain pelted our house. It was a side room you could only get to by going through my room, and since I was thirteen I was the only person allowed to enter it.
The walls were painted midnight blue with gold dots painted all along them. There were lines connecting different groups of stars, giving me my own night sky complete with constellations. The floor was more of an octagonal mattress-which was a regular mattress that I'd cut into the shape and dimensions of the turret-on top of a matching octagonal bed frame and box springs, also custom-made by Yours Truly. The door wasn't even a door. It was a black, light blocking curtain that I'd hung up using a shower rod, and not even the good kind where you screw it into the wall if such a thing exists.
The windows looked out into the big backyard and gave me a good view of the woods that separated my family's property from the person on the other side of the woods...if there even was a house on the other side of the woods.
I'd never been into the woods-my mother and older sister had always told me that it was "too dangerous" and that the woods were "rife with wolves, bears, coyotes and other beasts that wouldn't hesitate to eat me." I never believed them, though. It just...it didn't seem like that kind of wooded area.
I took a sip of my cocoa and pulled my blanket tighter.
One sucky thing about having that turret room was that it was drafty-and being that it was December in the mountains in upstate New York, it got really cold in that room. It wasn't anything I couldn't handle, though. Unlike my mother and sister, I had been born in upstate New York, so I was used to the cold. They, however, were born and raised in the South, so when it got cold I had to listen to them complain until it got warm, again.
I was about to open my book and start reading when movement from the woods caught my eye. It was small and subtle, yet somehow I managed to pick up on it.
I glanced back out the window, and that's when I saw her.
She had tangled brown hair with twigs and leaves caught in it, and from where I was sitting her eyes were large and round, and appeared deep brown, almost doe-like. Her nose was brown, as well, and the area around her face kind of seemed like a deer pelt.
The rest of her skin looked almost like a deer pelt, as well, and a pair of antlers adorned the top of her head. It was strange. I'd never seen anything like her in my entire life. It was in that moment that I was captivated by her beauty.
Suddenly her gaze turned from my turret to something in the woods, and she almost looked frightened.
I was about to go check on her when she gave my turret one last glance before dashing into the woods and away from civilization.
I thought I would never see her again.
But then, spring came.
