Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
T wenty thousand years was such a long time to be alone.
I missed the sun. And the stars. And the moon. Oh, the moon was my favourite with its pale face and haunting presence. After the sun and the stars. Third favourite for sure. It was so round and... no, not round... it was egg shaped and yellowy blue and...
Stop thinking about the moon, it always drives you insane.
I sighed at the waspish comment and bit my lip petulantly.
It wasn’t the moon that drove me insane, it was the sea.
Swishing and swirling, drawing in and out with a sound which was so relaxing and yet so, so sad.
Listening to it was what had eventually driven me to madness.
This insanity in which I lingered day in and day out, where nothing ever changed and all I could do was wonder whether any of anything I’d ever remembered had ever truly been real.
I could almost recall the sea if I concentrated, the way the light caught on the crest of each brightly coloured wave-
Well, the sea never used to be orange...
I shook my head in defeat. It was so hard to remember what was real these days.
It was like trying to hold sand in my hands.
At first it had seemed easy, but over time, bit by bit, the details were falling away.
It was the truest cruelty of my curse that I couldn’t just sleep this time away.
That I was trapped here aware and alone and so fucking empty for so, so long.
I ached. Just plain ached for a taste of anything.
The wind on my cheeks, birdsong caressing my ears, a pang of hunger which I might actually sate, even the roaring pain of a blade piercing my flesh, or fire burning me away into nothing and no one as my screams sounded so loud that they deafened me.
Yes, I would take agony over this nothingness now.
I would take the end of days themselves just to have this lingering ocean of emptiness end.
Six thousand days was such a long time to be alone.
I sighed, leaning my head back against the curved, golden wall of my eternal cage.
Was I smaller while I was in here or was the golden coin I was housed within bigger?
No one ever told me that. It was the kind of thing I should have known.
But I didn’t. And anyone who could have told me was long dead.
All the Fae I’d ever known and loved, loathed and hated.
They were dead. Rotted and ravaged by time and nothing at all beyond bones and ash now.
I knew it in my soul even though it shouldn’t have been possible for the fair folk to die out.
But they had. I’d felt that long ago. The moment the break happened, and the Fae fell.
The moment their immortality was wrenched away from them because they no longer deserved it.
Every one of them had lived out mortal lives, their eventual deaths the price of that one little lie. Every single one, but me…
Four hundred months was such a long time to be alone.
I was so alone in here that all I ever had to keep me company were memories of the ones I’d once known.
I closed my eyes tightly and thought about my sister, trying to capture the feeling of pure love I’d shared with her and hold onto it.
I tried to picture her kind face and how her green eyes used to sparkle with so much love when she looked at me-
Brown eyes, idiot.
I frowned. Brown? No, hers were green and mine were brown.
Weren’t they? My heart ached as that detail was tangled in the fog of my memories, and my pulse began to thunder as I realised what that meant.
If this final piece was gone then that was it.
It was the end. And I couldn’t bear the thought of that being true.
I leapt up and started pacing, keeping my eyes clamped shut as I tried to force the memories to come back to me, to give her back to me in that small and tangible way.
Please, please, don’t take this from me. Don’t let me lose the last I had of her. She’s all I’ve got left.
Panic welled up in my chest and my heart kept thundering so hard and fast that I was certain it would burst, and all the pain trapped within it would come flooding out to drown me and finally take me from this place.
But of course it didn’t. It wouldn’t. I was left here to linger in the agony of realising that I could no longer picture her at all.
My beautiful, kind and loving sister had been stolen from me just like everything else, and the pain in my heart and tears on my cheeks did nothing at all to bring her back to me.
An agonised sound escaped me at the grief of my final memory being stripped away and I dug my fingernails into the flesh of my arms as I fought to give the pain inside of me an outlet.
I’d lost the sound of her laughter first. That had been taken from her when he’d killed her anyway.
When he’d ripped her from this world and destroyed the good in my existence with one brutal act of hatred that had been the beginning of the end for all of us.
Then I’d lost the warmth of her smile, my aching heart unable to recall it as the years slipped by and the pain of her loss stole the joy of her presence from me.
And the memory of her hand in mine. The sound of her voice was gone forevermore, lost in a sea of grief, never to return.
Bit by bit every piece of her had slipped away until the memories I’d once known so well felt like stories I was telling about someone else, the details changing with each retelling and more of it left uncertain until the truth may not have been there at all.
I’d only had her eyes left, watching me in the dark as I slipped into the chaos and insanity of my own personal hell in this metal prison. Now they were gone too.
A tear slipped from my eye and ran down my cheek, tumbling over my chest before falling into a glimmering pool at the bottom of my cell.
The chamber I’d been given to rot in for all of time was a round, golden room with no doors nor windows.
All around the edges of it a bench ringed the space, lined with plush cushions which were as gold as the chamber itself, the space between them lined with that pool of tears.
That was it. Nothing more adorned the place I’d been trapped in for so long that I’d lost count of the days.
Nothing at all to keep me company aside from myself.
Sometimes the light seemed to mirror the world outside my prison – golden light during the day and pitch blackness pressing in on me at night, though no doubt it was simply my own mind creating the changes.
I had no idea if it was day or night, raining or blazing sunshine beyond my prison.
Right now, I had light at least. Light to see the ripples racing away from me across the pool as my tear added to its depths.
I stretched my leg out towards the water and the soft blue shoe I was wearing fizzled away, leaving my foot bare so that I could dip it in.
The water was warm. So warm, it sent a chill down my spine.
That’s not right, you fool. You’re confusing warm and cold again.
But didn’t cold burn? No, no I was right, or other me was anyway, cold was the shivery one. The one that was making my dark skin pebble with goosebumps right now. I withdrew my foot from the pool of tears and a shoe reappeared to warm my chilled toes.
Eight million nights was such a long time to be alone.
Had I really deserved this fate for what I’d done?
I didn’t even know anymore. I could remember the blood staining my hands and the fury in my soul, I could remember hungering for death more than I’d ever hungered for anything in my life before that moment, and I could remember loving the taste of it when I took it.
Or was that just a dream I’d had of what I’d so desperately wanted to happen?
I couldn’t recall. But either way, I didn’t think that made me bad.
Wasn’t it right to crave the death of someone who deserved it?
Wasn’t it worth becoming a villain if justice was served by my sins?
I sighed again because I didn’t know anymore. I wasn’t sure I’d even known that back then.
I drew my long hair over my shoulder, looking to distract myself from the morbid thoughts that plagued me, twisting my fingers through it as it shimmered red then pink, blue, purple, orange. Every colour. Any colour.
You should match it to your sister’s to help us remember her.
I stroked the length of my locks, willing them to take on the colour of my sister’s hair and after fluttering through a rainbow of choices, they eventually settled on purple.
I smiled as I waited for the memory to form around the colour, willing my fractured mind to draw up an image of the girl I’d loved so dearly.
This would do it. This would bring her back to me in some small way and then I’d remember why I was here, why I would take this fate a thousand times over for the sake of justice in her name.
It hurt to remember her, but it hurt so much more to forget.
I knotted my fingers in my hair as the memories failed to rise, gritting my teeth as I tried to concentrate, but nothing came to me.
There was no light in the dark and I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working because-
People don’t have purple hair, idiot.
I sucked in a sharp breath and frowned at my hair. That couldn’t be right. Because my hair was purple, and I was people so how could my hair be purple if I was people, but people didn’t have purple hair? Were there purple people? Or maybe-
I hate you.
I dropped my hold on my hair as the sombre thought which I always fought against echoed through the empty space. If I hated myself and there was no one else, then what did that leave me with?
Fifty thousand years was such a long time to be alone.
I chewed my lip, hating myself, hating this place, hating the entire world out there beyond my cage for all the good it did me.