Chapter 1 SAGE
SAGE
Istood at the edge of the world, or at least that’s how it felt.
The horizon stretched endlessly before me, a bleak canvas of muted gray and pale gold, where the sky kissed the earth.
I stared out over it, my gaze searching, desperate for something— anything—that might anchor me, might offer a sign, a symbol or a fragment of hope pointing me toward a future less suffocating than the past I’d just fled.
But there was nothing.
No answers.
No revelations.
Only emptiness.
An infinite expanse that mirrored the hollow ache twisting deep in my chest, as vast and silent as the thoughts that churned in my mind.
Thoughts too heavy to speak aloud and too sharp to release without bleeding myself dry.
The adrenaline that had carried me this far, that electric pulse that had driven my escape, was ebbing now.
It drained from me slowly, leaving in its place a cold, suffocating stillness.
And within that stillness, one question took root, pressing hard against my ribs until I could scarcely breathe—What now?
My father had always said that life was a choice between two things—boredom or tragedy. He would sit at our kitchen table, cigarette smoke curling in spirals above his head, and mutter it like a curse he couldn’t escape.
“Boredom or tragedy,” he’d say. “That’s all it is... Pick your poison.”
He was a master of pessimism. Some people called it cynicism. But I knew better.
For him, it wasn’t just a belief. It was a truth.
One carved out of bone-deep misfortune. A lesson learned the hard way and over too many years, that was paid for in scars both visible and hidden.
Growing up, I never once doubted his conviction because I truly lived it.
Our lives had unfolded like a series of dull, gray days, broken only by brief flashes of something brighter.
But even in those moments, the rare fragments of happiness never lasted.
They slipped through our fingers like dry sand, no matter how tightly we tried to hold on.
Even when my mother was still there, smiling with that distant look in her eyes, joy was fragile. Almost ephemeral.
One wrong word. One sharp glance. That was all it took to shatter it completely, until one day, she was just simply… gone.
No warnings. No explanations.
She just vanished like dust being taken by the wind, leaving behind only the faintest whisper of her absence, like the echo of a song long forgotten.
After that, my father stopped pretending.
He dimmed.
A man who had once been full of life, in his own strange, dark way, became little more than a shadow draped in old flannel and regret. He carried his grief like a heavy, unshakable weight. And somehow, in the cruel calculus of family inheritance, I took on that burden too.
As if her disappearance wasn’t just his cross to bear, but mine as well.
Every day, I woke up beneath the weight of unanswered questions.
Every night, I laid them to rest like ghosts I couldn’t quite put to sleep.
It took years before I saw my father smile again. And even then, it wasn’t the kind of smile that reached his eyes. It was thin and hollow. A mask carefully placed to make others more comfortable, to hide the ache he carried like an old wound that never fully healed.
Regardless, we stayed close because we were all each other had.
We spent long hours together, sitting in the dark, talking about the things we could not control.
Generally, this consisted of the universe and human nature.
We tried to make sense of the chaos. Tried to stitch meaning into the vacant holes my mother had left behind, but no amount of words could fill that space, and in time, I stopped trying.
By the time I reached my freshman year of college, my father’s body had begun to betray him. He grew thinner, weaker and his once sharp mind began to soften at the edges as sickness overtook him.
I dropped everything—school, friends, plans for the future that already felt flimsy at best. I took odd jobs to pay for his treatment and our livelihoods when he no longer could. Anything to keep us afloat and to keep the fragile world we’d rebuilt from collapsing again.
One of those jobs led me to The Bloodwine. A club pulsing at the center of the city’s rotting heart. It was a place where money and desperation met under red lights and low ceilings, where men whispered promises they never intended to keep.
It was there that I met Klay.
He was everything I wasn’t.
Charming. Confident.
Money to burn and no shame about setting it all a blaze, but it wasn’t his physical presence or outward show that drew me in.
It was his focus.
He saw me…or at least, he pretended to.
And after so many months of feeling invisible, of being just another girl pouring drinks and counting tips to buy her father’s pills, I was desperate to be seen.
Klay became a regular. He always requested me. Always flirted, making me feel wanted and desired. Something I hadn’t ever felt before.
Eventually, I said yes to a date.
We grew close, especially as my father’s health worsened.
He stepped in and paid bills I couldn’t cover.
He offered me a kind of stability I hadn’t known since before my mother disappeared.
At first, I thought he was saving me, but in time, I began to feel the invisible chains he had wrapped around me that were soft at first, like silk, out of sight to anyone who wasn’t looking.
And I wasn’t looking.
Not then. Not at first.
Because I didn’t understand that every favor he did for me, every dollar he spent, was a debt I was expected to repay.
Quietly without question, like a silent form of bondage.
But he still helped, even when he began to act differently towards me and maybe that’s why I let him treat me the way that he did.
But then my father died, and everything changed.
I saw Klay for who he was—a master manipulator who had been pulling my strings like a puppeteer, twisting my reality until I could no longer see an escape.
The night of my father’s funeral was when I realized who Klay really was, when I came to him, and he dismissed me like I was nothing but trash to be discarded.
But even he wasn’t worst of my fears.
That night…
Something worse happened.
Something I still can’t find the words to explain.
Something that hollowed me out completely and left me broken, as the ghost of the girl I had once been.
And it was that night I decided to run.
I packed what little I owned.
I climbed behind the wheel of my father’s old car.
And I drove.
No plan. No destination.
Only the desperate need to get away from this city, Sanele, and everything it had stripped from me.
The pain.
The memories.
The life that felt more like a sentence than a gift.
The parts of myself that wanted to give up, echoed in my mind that it was all pointless. But there was a flicker of something small and stubborn deep inside me; the last piece of the girl I used to be, and she whispered:
Keep going.
So I did.
I drove north, into a world I didn’t recognize.
And five hours later, just as dawn cracked the sky open, I found myself at an empty port.
A weathered wooden sign leaned crooked in the dirt, its peeling letters spelling out:
“Town of Providence, 2 Miles East.”
The name stuck in my chest like a hook pulling me in.
Providence.
A promise?
A warning?
I didn’t know, but at least it was a direction, and any direction was better than the one I had just come from.
***
When I arrived, it didn’t take long to realize that Providence was nothing like Sanele.
Sanele had choked the life out of everyone within its city limits.
Its factories and power plants casted the streets in permanent dusk, compounded by the air that was thick with smoke and something like hopelessness.
The people wore exhaustion like it was all they ever knew, all hollow eyes and thin mouths, but Providence…
Providence breathed.
It was old, but not broken.
The buildings were sturdy, their stonework softened by ivy and time. Fields stretched wild beyond the town’s edge, full of life, with air that was clean and crisp, filling my lungs in a way that made me dizzy at first, as if I’d forgotten how to really breathe.
And for the first time in years, I felt something stir inside me.
Hope.
Small, fragile, but real.
It made me feel like I could start over here and that maybe I could build something new.
Something better.
A life carved from boredom instead of tragedy.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy.
I knew my ghosts weren’t finished with me.
They would find me in the quiet moments, slipping through any cracks I hadn’t yet sealed, but for now, I could pretend.
So, I found a small apartment days later and took a job at a café, the kind of place where people smiled for no reason, and for a while, I let myself believe I belonged.
And I believed it, until my past found me again, and everything I thought I’d escaped came crashing back.