Sudden rain began to fall, its cold droplets tapping against the muddy roadway. The moisture quickly bled into the dry clothes of the lonesome girl, the fabric growing heavy and clinging to her skin as the warmth of her attire was traded for a damp, shivering chill.
A lonesome girl, who had defied instructions. A girl that did not know any better.
Remember what you did
She couldn’t. She didn’t want to.
Why did you do this?
She didn’t know.
Only ten minutes ago, she had been sitting happily in the back of a wooden carriage, the wheels rattling softly over uneven stone while casual conversation drifted from the front.
The shuffle of leather, and the slow rhythmic clop of hooves was enough to entrance anyone on this peaceful day.
There were only a few clouds overhead, nothing that hinted at bad weather. Or perhaps, this memory itself was only the daydream of a child trying to cling to something gentle.
Her attention had been buried in her book, orange sunlight filtering through the carriage cloth and striping the pages. From the corner of her eye, she watched the town she called home slowly shrink into the distance.
She wasn’t leaving forever. If she were, she wouldn’t have been able to see through the flood of tears she would’ve cried. Still, one figure caught her eye.
A lonesome blonde boy stood near the gates, waving with a bright, carefree smile. Even with the sun overhead, she found herself drawn more to his warmth than the light itself. Her heart always beat faster when she spoke to him, and today was no different than any other.
And what happened after?
Lines. Glowing threads stretched through the air, linking people together like invisible wiring. They weren’t cracks or markings, but living things, pulsing faintly. Wheels turned where the living wires connected, powered by their energy, but the girl had no interest in the machinery.
The boy was too far away to examine, so she turned toward the front of the carriage instead. She crawled forward as the vehicle rattled over the road, her knees scraping against rough wood, but her mind was too occupied to care.
Like a moth to a flame, she found herself drawn to the two luminous cores within their bodies. Faint green lines, wire-thin and unnervingly neat connected into their necks, while one core flickered through shifting colors, the other simply pulsated a static glow.
The wires shifted color whenever the core did, the change so faint it was almost imperceptible. As she crawled closer, she spotted a single white thread protruding from another core.
This one emitted a deep blue glow, unlike any Birthmark she had seen before, its color closer to the ocean than light, with only a single line running between the two cores.
The Soul and the Birthmark.
Connected to one another, the latter served as a translator for the memories, the history, and the experiences a person carried throughout their life. From the Birthmark branched every other line, each one resting neatly within the body.
Clouds that had once towered in a pure, radiant white now sagged overhead in heavy shades of gray, as though the sky itself had sunk into a quiet depression. The shift in tone usually gloomed the girl’s mood, but the beautiful lights before her pulled at her irresistibly, demanding her attention.
But the bodies carried a flaw that even the universe had not bothered to correct. On her right, her mother had a single thread protruding from the side of her neck. To her left, her father bore the same imperfection in the exact same place.
Curiosity was often labeled dangerous, for prying into the unknown could yield either wonder or devastation. The girl remembered this as the two of them glanced back at her with gentle smiles. But when they turned to face their daughter, she didn’t return the same smile that they bore. Instead, a dull, entranced expression settled across her face.
Lightning shot down from the heavens themselves, thunder crashing close behind. It was almost as if the world were trying to warn her, to stop her from stepping onto a path she would regret for the rest of her life.
But its cries fell on deaf ears. With both hands, she gripped the thread as tightly as she could. The two individuals’ smiles faded as unease crept in, before they were met with a sight no parent should ever behold. Their daughter’s eyes resembled that of a monster.
What did you do?
The girl knew, but she did not want to accept.
What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do?
Had she stayed put like her parents had asked, her life would have taken a different trajectory.
What. did. you. do?
…
I pulled it, the alluring threads that hung out of my parents.
From two organic beings who had once been children themselves, two people who had loved, who had lived, who had brought a beautiful blue-haired daughter into the world, their bodies began to dismantle, collapsing and unmaking themselves like a stuffed animal torn at the seams.
Skin, bone, nerves, none of it mattered.
The beings she had once known as her parents were no more. They harbored no memories, no thoughts. How could they?
The girl had ripped their souls from their bodies with a simple pull of a thread.
Without a shred of hesitation, the blonde boy spotted the crashed carriage in the distance and pushed forward, ignoring the freezing rain and the violent wind that shoved against him.
All he cared about was the girl, his friend’s safety. When he arrived, half of her body was pinned beneath the wreckage. A faint metallic scent lingered in the air, but he paid it no mind as he carefully pulled the blue-haired girl free.
She collapsed to the muddy ground in tears, fingers digging into the soaked earth. Though the lines weren’t visible on her own hands, she could still see them in the soil beneath her, and most of all, on the figure standing in front of her, blurred by rain and tears.
A shiver crawled down the boy’s spine when their eyes met. Something about her felt foreign to him. He couldn’t understand what kind of monster could have defiled those once-beautiful eyes. Or perhaps this was some latent ability of his friend that he had never known about.
Her eyes glowed unnaturally. Stacking atop one another, white, crystal-like pupils formed around her blue irises. The soft blue that had once defined her gaze was gone, replaced by a jarring lack of colors, twisting and blending in ways that made her stare feel alien even to herself.
The new intruders orbited the originals like moons caught in a planet’s gravitational pull, uncharacteristic and uncanny to the human mind. Despite this overabundance of sight, the girl still couldn’t make out who had saved her, and she was far too afraid to lift her gaze.
Following the strange metallic scent, the boy peered around the shattered carriage and saw chunks of human remains, their blood soaking into the rain-drenched mud beneath them.
It did not look like the work of a single blade. No, this was the work of a barbaric butcher. Limbs were scattered in impossible places, smaller bits already consumed by the earth itself. The stench was overwhelming, just the mere sight forced the boy to recoil in fear.
The culprit was obvious. There was no other explanation for what could have caused this. One girl with eight eyes, and two dead individuals.
To say their skin was peeled off would have been a mercy. No, their entire existence had been untangled into the mess of the world. Limbs were all that remained, the final proof that they had once been part of this reality.
The girl’s parents had experienced death, the permanent destruction of something that could never return. Their souls no longer lingered, not even as fragments as souls often do. No memories. No remnants. No way for the young girl to grieve for them.
From head to toe, the boy quivered in fear, his eyes wide, every strand of hair standing in protest of the girl’s existence. And yet, he could not turn his back on her.
Whines from a dying horse mixed with the splashing of the rain-soaked puddles as villagers who had witnessed the scene approached, their footsteps growing closer with each passing second.
Why? Why? Why? Why? WhY? Why can’t I see them on my body?
Her head jolted as an immense pain tore through her relentlessly. Every thought she tried to form only magnified her self-disdain tenfold. A primal urge surged through her, and she grit her teeth, curling her hand into a claw.
She clawed at her own neck in search of a thread of her own, but found nothing. In the heap of fear, she had forgotten that she did not possess a Birthmark, unlike her parents, and likely unlike the rest of the world.
Her nails dug into her skin, blood creeping slowly, mixing with the rainfall above.
Then a warm, gentle hand halted her, pulling her trembling fingers away from her injured neck. Though he saw only a grieving girl, she saw something else. The familiar cluster of lines, the same two cores, and a single hanging thread on the boy’s neck.
Bile rose from her stomach to her throat and spilled out of her mouth, however, the boy did not flinch. He pulled her forward into a warm embrace, the world around her softened with each passing second. Even as her skin and blood froze in guilt and despair, his radiating warmth connected with her very sense of being.
Cold mist puffed from her mouth as she struggled to breathe.
He’s too close.
As he held her with her head against his shoulder, she could not see his body, and with it, the lines that marked him remained hidden from her eyes.
“It’s okay. I’m here,” he whispered, pulling her closer, his hand caressing the back of her head.
She closed her eyes, shutting out the world she had stumbled into, focusing only on his voice. She had no intention of pulling away, and he had no intention of letting her.
When the village elders arrived, they saw a trembling boy clutching an unconscious girl, tears streaming down his cheeks, his nails dug into her clothes. All he wanted was to comfort her, yet he held an apex predator in human form.
He gritted his teeth so hard they could have shattered, holding her as if her body could serve as a pillow for his own racing heart.
When the girl finally opened her eyes, her vision had returned to normal. The dull grays and browns of the world enveloped her once again, and the lines, the cores, the threads, all of it, had seemingly vanished, leaving nothing but the quiet aftermath of what had occurred.
Mom… Dad…
I’m sorry, please come back.
Come back.