9.2: Free

9.2

Stellina

Retracing my steps, going further, and returning to the place my city should be, I find myself swarmed by a forest of moss and desecrated structures. Each ruin seems as though it is returning to nature before my very eyes. Vines and nightshade flowers climb over everything; weaving like snakes between broken branches, sprouting from trees, splitting rocks. They encompass this alien world I have woken to. 

Speckles of sunlight split from soaring trees, their leaves a vibrant, wild green. I look upwards to see branches clinging to the broken remains of white constructions. Some are swallowed whole. As far as I can see, there is ruin, there is chaos.

This is not my home. Though I can not explain how I got here. My home is vivacious, beautiful; this place is long since dead, wild, disordered. My home has trees of silver, not sickly green and muddy brown. 

Something happened here, long ago. Something horrible and unworldly that left these structures to crumble into pieces. I run my fingers over an entanglement of roots and rocks and stare at the foreign structures around me: towers collapsed in on themselves, a fallen staircase, scattered glass beneath a carpet of underbrush.

What comes from Zela, returns to Zela.

My mother’s voice is so vivid, that I whip around with delight dancing into my eyes, expecting to see her, tall and effervescent before me.

But she is not there.

She had only told me that once when I clutched the lifeless body of a beautiful purple and blue bird in my hands. Its feathers were whisper-soft against my palms. Tears had fallen down my cheeks and onto the bird’s trailing lime coloured tail. My mother had taken it from me, kissed its cold head, and sent it into the air as shimmering dust.

Look around you, Stellina. Think. Observe. Open your eyes.

Xada. He is dead, I know this with an aching throb in my chest. Though, it feels like his presence is right next to mine. And, if I strain my ears, I can almost hear the clacking of his heels against marbled floors.

My eyes seem to peel off a hidden layer. The scene before me reveals itself in horrific detail. The world seems to zoom out and warp dizzyingly. My head feels as though it is wedged underneath the ruins around me. My throat clogs as I relive the moments my city was crushed, decimated to the ground. The ground shaking beneath my feet, the sirens, the whistle of wind taking Xada from me. Walls tumbling, rubble falling, trees burning. My mother with a hole in her chest, bodies piled in front of the sommelnium, silence when I woke up.

My city. Not a memory, but here before me.

The abodes in trees; the structures absorbed by the forest. The walls around the city; giant rocks in misshapen heaps circling behind me. The soaring turrets; the broken circular structures soaring above fallen staircases. The glass bridges; the large shards of glass fragmenting the forest floor. The elegant white stone and bark of the palace; the white ruins all around me.

I am still in Lumnia. I am where I have been all my life. And I am alone.

It can not be so. It can not. 

But it is. It is not.

It is.

The air is suddenly hard to breathe. My legs give way to the floor. My hands shake weakly.

Weak. So weak, so powerless.

No one knew how long the sommelnium were supposed to put you to sleep. They were a new installation, constructed just before the last conflict with the necromancers. It was predicted to encase the user in serene sleep for, at most, a decade.

This was not a decade. This was centuries.

Centuries of growth. Centuries of no living thing keeping nature at bay.

No. Living. Thing.

O, Ethereal One, what have you done? What have you done?

Those words are in my thoughts, they are in my mouth. Someone curses to the Gods. I am the only someone it can be.

With each repetition, this new reality sinks in and clouds over. Lumnia is gone, long dead. Lost to the earth. My people? Probably slaughtered by the monsters that attacked us, but who could tell? My mother? My father?

My mother with blood covering her dress. My mother with a window in her chest. A muted fog breaks, casting blinding daylight; her wound was too grievous to heal. You can not fix something that is not there. And her heart had been completely burned from her body.

My mother with my father’s blood on her dress. Her unmarked hand grasped around mine. My mother held my father as he died. My mother sent me away after she lied, lied, lied.

Xada. I could have saved him. If I had listened. If I were not so weak, so impatient, so naive. Falling unconscious all the time. Crying all the time. Puny, fragile little Stella. No wonder they never told her anything.

I could have saved all of them.

My face is burning. Hot tears stream from my eyes. My gut wrenches with pain and my heart empties into a void, swirling like a black hole. 

Nothing will ever be as it was. I will never be as I was. I cannot be.

My shaking hands, where the freckles are silent. They no longer glow as they once had when surrounded by my kind and the magic of the stars. It only affirms what echoes in my heart. Over and over.

No one made it. I am the only one left.

The sob splits from my lips as a scream; a spear slicing the quiet of the woods. It is feral, desperate, and hopeless. Any strength I had seeps from me and I slump onto the ruins of the once great city, clutching my aching body as it is pressed into the cold, broken, white stone. Tears dig crevices along my face. I squeeze my eyes shut to avoid this new life. I suck in warm air in moans and tumble into my misery, knowing nothing will ever be the same.

The remnants of clothing on my flesh, Xada’s blood on my hands, and the wild memory of Lumnia surrounding me are all that I am left with. I pray that I die here so I can see my kind once again; my mother, my father, Xada, Rixa, and Elix, in the stars. I pray to return to the abyss from which I was born, to the cyclical nature of life. I wish to lie here and lie here and lie here, never to see what tumbles around me again, to retain the memory of the past forever in my mind.

If only I could be proven wrong. If only I could feel the tap of a warm finger on my shoulder and be guided back into my life. If only someone could find me.

The last of my prayers are answered; something finds me.

A faint, eerie hiss enters the air above my quivering back. My eyebrows furrow above my closed eyes. I wonder if it is an imagination created by my grief-stricken brain. An utterance of the wind that whispered before my mother’s death. But that had seemed almost tranquil, this is quite the opposite.

A grasp of pure ice alights on my shoulder; frozen, bitter, death spreading through the nerves of my body in spiking icicles. It is not what I expected. I take my prayers back.

My body bolts upright, my eyes fling open to meet an endless darkness. Cold fog pours from this vacancy and into my face. My eyes feel like they are freezing, my lungs burst in pain.

I whip my head away from its gaze, blinking to send moisture and warmth into my eyes. I push whatever looms over me and touch nothing but an empty cloak. Yet, it stumbles backward. I take advantage. I leap to my feet and growl out the words for the most hungry of all elements: Fire.

Ignito ta tinte.

The dark fabric catches flames immediately. Thousands of screams whisper from the hood of the cloak as it vanishes to ash. The voices spiral in a foggy, grey mist into the morning sky. They disappear beyond the crowns of the trees and they are gone.

The foliage shifts behind me. Faint hisses reach me from beyond the city walls.

My mother may have lied, and she may even have controlled me, but she did this to protect me, she did this to make sure I stayed alive. Everything and everyone I know is dead. They have been for centuries, the evidence lies at my feet and in the past. But my mother and Xada strived to make sure I survived. To make sure that I avenge my kind and bring order back to Zyrona, as us Star Elves were made to do by our Goddess, Zela.

I could not be weak again. I would not. As fire comes from ash and ash from fire, I renounce my old self and kindle someone new. Someone my family would be proud of. Someone I could be proud of.

My heart screams, my body buzzes, my eyes glow.

My name is Stellina Alessa Lumnia, daughter of Queen Lianora Lumnia and King Verlonti Lunasa. I will never be caught dead without a burst of flame.