Where Broken Wings Fly (Chronicles of Saoghal #1)

1

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At some point in my life, I stopped looking for the light.

It wasn’t as if I woke one morning and gave up on ridding myself of the cloak of dread around my neck. It was subtle shifts that under any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have noticed.

It was driving by a sinking sun beyond the horizon and not feeling my chest warm as gold light spilled across the earth.

It was sitting in my childhood home during a holiday meal, my loved ones laughing around me and feeling my eyes go glossy as I slipped into the abyss of my mind.

It was walking by the piling dishes in my sink or the two bags of garbage I had stashed by the front door for over a week.

Really, it all came down to this: existing in a world that was larger than me but seemed to shrink every day, the walls of my life closing in and leaving me curled over in the corner.

Depression, the professionals called it.

A corpse with a heartbeat and bills, I called it.

I wasn’t drowning in that bottomless pool all by myself, though. I had Charlotte – my lifelong friend who had chained herself to my wrists and rode every bump in the road at my side.

The clouds cast over me grew denser and darker the day that she died.

It was that day that I stopped believing there was a light to chase altogether, the day that I laughed at myself for ever believing such a thing to exist. So as I sat in silence at her funeral and let myself seep deeper into the pit of tar beneath me, I was content to accept my life as it was.

Life carried on, like life does. Until I received a slip of mail in my post-box, addressed to one Olivia Loughty and sealed with a solicitors stamp. Within it, Charlotte’s dying wish – her task that she had entrusted to me, and me alone.

What I was sure Charlotte didn’t know, what I would one day tell her when we met again, was that not only did that letter set me on the path to find the light once more, but that it would help halo me in it for the rest of my life.

~

It began in London.

I had signed up for a cross-country tour offered by a low-revenue travelling company.

The name of the tour was something like Hillsides and History or Solitude in the Sights.

The name itself wasn’t what caught my eye, it was the fact that for a measly couple-hundred pounds, I would not only have travel sorted but shelter in the form of run-down motels. A bed was a bed, after all.

I loaded the coach early Monday morning in London after arguing with the tour-guide that my name was indeed Olivia, that the online ticket-booking service had only allowed me to use four characters which was why it read Liv, instead.

Only after begrudgingly giving him an extra twenty pounds so that he could “verify this information”, I was given access to the stingy vehicle.

Finding a place in the farthest bench from the driver as I could, I slumped down into my seat and awaited our arrival in Stonehenge.

The whole drive there I listened as my phone pinged, over and over, from where I had stashed it in my pocket.

There was no point in pulling it out, I already knew what would be waiting for me on my screen.

An onslaught of texts from my brother, updating me about the little things in his life that he had and I didn’t.

Likely a text or two from my boss, gossiping about how the clinic was falling apart without me.

And if I was lucky, another text or two from my parents explaining to me that taking the train and skipping the tourist-trap that was a travelling agency would have been “wiser”.

For all of those reasons, I reached into my pocket and flipped the device to silent, content with letting it buzz until it died.

The tour-guide, a man well into the second half of his life with enough grease in his grey-hair to be considered a fire hazard, rose from his seat in the front.

“We are approaching Stonehenge. This will be our first stop before we hit the motorway. Those who wish to view, proceed to prepare yourself for arrival.”

He sounded about as joyful as I did day-in, day-out.

As I worked at tucking my one bag beneath my seat, I watched a large group of Americans shoot upright, unfiltered excitement radiating their faces just as the sun began to peek up from the hillside beyond.

It was with envy that I watched them huddle together, love for one another and thrill for the day ahead beating their every step towards the front of the coach.

Whispering a beyond-grave insult to Charlotte, I pulled at one of the small pouches within my backpack and tucked the pendant full of some of her ashes into my pocket.

Of all the things she could have asked me to do for her, travelling the country to deposit essences of Charlotte back into the earth was the last thing I had expected.

~

Stonehenge was stunning.

Even with the continuous black smog over my mind, I was able to appreciate the raw beauty of such a relic. The circular design of the stones that towered above me, seeming to stretch up to the heavens, was enough to remind me how small my problems truly were.

While the tour-guide — Evan — rattled off a thousand facts in an octave I recognized as bored, I cast my eyes up to the sky.

Some divine being had removed rain from our forecast for the remainder of the week.

I almost wanted to credit it to Charlotte, but if she knew what I was doing she would have ensured that it thundered for the entirety of my trip for her.

She had a cruel sense of humour, in a way.

Once I finished soaking in the heat of the sun and the blanket of blue above me, I slipped behind one of the stones, pulled the pendant from my neck, and got to work.

Cracking open the compartment within the black jewel, I watched as her dusted remains spread across the sea of green grass beneath me, and then tucked the pendant itself against the nearest hedge.

There, Charlotte would remain for the rest of time.

Unless some asshole stole the necklace, which was a real possibility.

I was compelled to consider crying. Not because I could feel it bubbling up my throat, but because I knew it would be human of me to cry as I let a little piece of my best friend go.

But that was the thing about depression, the veil between myself and reality grew so thick that a numbness took root in my chest, until I felt the same at weddings as I did at funerals.

Instead of shedding a tear for Charlotte, I closed my eyes and let one of my fondest memories lapse behind my eyelids until Evan blew his obnoxious whistle and yanked me back to the present.

“Site one done, you grumpy git,” I whispered to the hedge with a smile on my face.

~

It took us a few hours and far too many stops to arrive in Bristol, but just as I finished scarfing down my lunch-dinner of a ham and cheese sandwich, Evan rose from his seat once more and declared our timed stop at the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Why Charlotte chose the bridge as one of her sites, I would never know.

It was grand in a way she wasn’t, exceptional in a way that neither of us were.

There, standing at the edge and looking down at the river, I released the next cloud of her over the rapids.

“You would hate this place,” I sighed as I worked at closing the clasp.

“If you only did this for me to look out across the currents and feel something, you were wasting your time.” With another grin, I took a deep breath and released the second necklace, watching as the glinting metal soared down and was absorbed by the water. “Site two done, you little bugger.”

Maybe she had been on to something, because as the city below was cast in a golden light, I did feel something.

Just a tickling within my chest, enough to force a genuine smile to my face as I looked up at the collection of clouds floating by.

There was something about sunlight that dared to bring me into the light, but it never seemed to get a strong enough hold over me to complete the task.

Yet again, bad-timing in the form of Evan blowing a shrill whistle drew my attention — and my body — back to the coach.

The third site, also in Bristol, were the Roman Baths. Instead of remaining here for a few hours like the tour promised, the integrity of Solitude in Sights was proven when we arrived and were denied prolonged entry due to the fact they were closing for the night. We were given ten minutes.

I sprinted away from the group with as much earnestness as I could muster and slammed to a stop just on the outskirts of the columned monstrosity.

Yanking the third necklace from my pocket, I flicked my eyes over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

“If you thought I was going to pour you into the baths, you were sorely mistaken.” Snickering to myself, I powdered another pinch of her into the grass beneath my feet and set the obscurely purple gem necklace against one of the columns. “Site three done, you menace.”

~

I couldn’t remember the last time I had spent so much time outside of my home or the clinic.

My skin was unfamiliar with the feel of constant sun-beams penetrating it, my eyes were growing heavy under the gentle breeze that graced our country, and my body was spent from being around others so much.

It wasn’t like I was interacting with them, really.

Quite the opposite, I was actively avoiding the tourists on my trip and offering only sharp glares at Evan when he tried to speak to me.

But with every minute I spent out and about on my strange task, my little black dog was lagging more and more.

I knew better than to get my hopes up, though. Such a feeling never lasted.

Our last few hours in the coach were spent on the road, aiming for the motel in Exeter where we would call it quits and rest before our last and final journey.

To Cornwall.