(№3.4)

But what the girl definitely sensed the next time, after the scraps of hard, enduring winter had passed and the light seemed warmer, brighter, upon the return of the most famed Crew at that times, was that at least one of them was evidently serendipitous to see her again, curiosity mixing up in the pieces, perhaps the only confusion and curiosity they admitted a glimpse of, wondering how she could still worship them like gods, further entangled and skidding only nearer to darkness.

She sat on the edge of the rocky cliff with pointy rocks eddied like a lion proudly baring its teeth, hoping for her to jump just like many had before and would do again, engulfed by the stream and mangled remains washed by the constant sea. She'd applaud after each song, then at the end of their stay, the girl had the opportunity to draw out paper and ink pen, arrow and bow to leave a message, getting only better and finer at aiming.

She always met the deck, one time accidentally would have almost pierced that infamous blue lantern and shatter it in result – she was quite acquainted and friendly, if one could ever call it that, with whatever creatures residing on the boat, but amity and enmity both knew limits and the transition points when to turn from one to the other – but thankfully missed by a few inches.

It was almost a habit, to wake the next morning, after not realising when or how she fell asleep, blades of grass nicking her nose and rock boring into her back until she could not tolerate it anymore, unto waking fully, always spotting her arrow returned to her feet, always a letter written in blood waiting for her there in trusting fidelity.

She smiled, blushed and hid for the rest of the day in the forest, to not cross over the planted plague, misfortune, misery for the villagers and as long as avoided would leave her be unscathed, one time being a gigantic wave destroying the entire village, not beyond repairing some houses but not fully, so to not have them flee altogether, as they weren't done with them, oh no. One year, a few fishermen went missing, until their corpses had been found in the main water supply with dead fishes forced down their throats, looks plastered on their rotting faces matching those in bewilderment who found them – the fountain at the market – for the villagers to stomach the horrifying concept of drinking scraps and pieces of their bestest of friends for weeks without any clue whatsoever.

The girl stayed completely to herself now, isolated almost precisely from her people with a mind in goal, only making sure the second day after her 'friends' arrived her father was still alive, which he always was. She didn't know if she could forgive them if they murdered him next, succumbing to just another plague, her father abandoning her after a decade of trying and forcing and fake playing, but her father, forbearer nonetheless he was.

Sometimes, she'd talk to him, but eventually stopped, as their little talks almost every single time resulted in him throwing a very heavy object after her and his daughter to destroy his furniture in an anger attack, shouting the malicious truth of what a hopeless loser he made himself to be.

Their relationship was complicated, you could say. The easy answer above would be she'd absolutely forgive and forget, should the Skeleton Crew decide to finish him off. She'd pardoned them gladly for any plaque, any death they brought or hungrily inflicted themselves. She might be protected, saved and curated by the nasty nuisance only steps away, but just as anyone entrapped into the maddening, sickening schemes of the Skeleton Crew to receive her respectful punishment in far more cruel fashion, captured into gruesome nightmares she could do absolutely nothing to flee, wishing she'd be dead and rotten just soon. The Crew wasn't human after all, and any flicker of faintest emotion was a twisted role, a ploy, a facade to get what they wanted. The girl wasn't important at all, marginally an obstacle to be bent, a cause to be atrociously corrupted. The means to an end greater still to understand not yet.

Same thing applies to the villagers. The Crew had only toyed a little with them, simply superficially assuaging the internal famine that kept them going, envisioning already how their own personal affronted out-cast would be their inevitable downfall.

The downfall of everything. And how dearly they adored irony.

Unaware of the detrimental harm she was to afflict one day, the girl did her best to survive the harsh true realities of torpid autumn and long winter, feeding herself from fruits and vegetables dried and prepared, the animals she hunted down and on considering the dire winters found a dry cave somewhat hidden under the cliffs, where you had to jump on a half-way concealed platform practically blindly and by missing even so much as a hair's width, you were done for, tumbling down in your icy, sharp death, scattered body parts would be carried on by the outer iced crust of a wave, down and down towards dawn. Once overpassing this kind of trouble though, a warm, dry cave awaited her, inlaid with thin hide, made out of many does, sewn together as a unison forever unbroken and keeping her quivering body from befelling to hyperthermia.

If it was too unbearable, the creeping cold, the collision of waves and shattered ice breaking at the rock, making her shudder and frightened due the night's notice, she permitted herself to sneak in the cabin of her father, thinking her to be quite intelligent of him not knowing, sleeping their like a ghost unnoticed and parting long amiss before dawn mired the horizon. He always knew when she had joined him, but quietly allowed it, owing her that for the years of cruelty and the lack of love he never procured.

Her life was great, really, preferably when the Skeleton Crew paid them a visit, which they did now far more frequently, compared to the past where a gaping decade had sheltered the village from more pain and suffering and she really couldn't complain, being fond of watching them be beset with malady and disease, twice and thrice deserved. Looking forward to being someone else for one evening, the shard, a mere idea of insight of another girl's life that - most importantly - wasn't her, debauched and lured in, how somehow the Crew didn't seem so bothered by her appearance and quietly reserving her from the evil bestowed upon the next day, nasty in nature yet not on long-term really harmful. Being isolated from everyone and worshipping real demons manifested to be her allies with not a second thought apparent why they countenanced.

Maybe it was a sad life, maybe not a life at all.

She didn't care if it really was and loved it on the contrary, indulged and coveted by her, yes, persuaded herself whole-heartedly to love it for as long as it would stay. She was already too gone, too lost to see her misconception and the path things were to presume.

And when destiny decided to resolutely parry the way things were supposed to tackle along, in the form of her father, do not cheer or avow to glory, for that little straw drawn by the universe of elementary help would be massacred long prior to taking fruit.

For it was very unlucky or quite lucky depending on the point of view, when her persistently obsessive dynamic just had to be ruined by her father, who on her two-decade anniversary fell ill with a terminal malady and felt convened, summoned to decide as his last wish, last important, meaningful deed on earth how he would arrange a marriage for his estranged daughter, to have someone look after her ways of impulsivity and have her back when enmity approached as it would, regarding a girl living the life of a savage.

She, by discovering his betrayal over a dinner he begged her on his old, frail knees to have, an evening where he invited her to dine with him and she agreed to partake in reluctantly, sensing he was to pay his debt of nature quite too soon and that might as well be the last instance to feast together, started screaming at the revelation, crying to her father, knocking the beautiful, arranged nourishments consisting of sour cheese and dire lamb from the table and cursing to him with the most vile, ruthful handfuls she had adapted from the fishermen and spare boys rummaging through the forest, yelling as the contract would bind her without a choice of hers, a last resort she could tackle to banish the manacles threaten to shackle and ty her forever to a greedy man she could never love, her hands powerless:

The negotiation was long done, cowardice commenced and exploited dastardly behind her back, for the wedding had been carefully prepared weeks prior, the food was cooked, animals slain for goodwill and sacrifice, a noble hinting to their modesty for burning such good meat.

In fact, stated her father calmly, face contorted to a blank space betraying nothing but exertion and fatigue, all prepared most discreetly, so the girl shall be wed tomorrow, and he could finally exit the world to be united with his wife, resting in peace knowing his opulent cornucopia to be safe and his male heir by ceremony a responsible man from town, at least this time around not the disgusting, wild-eyes, unkempt priest himself, but moving near his lineage, for it would be his brother the groom, only ten years surpassing her age.

This wasn't assuring or in any sense a consolation for the girl so she hit her father square in the face, pinned that weakly, limb form of him at a wall and hissed she would never love him, never forgive him and he could decompose for an eternity in hell and she wouldn't shed a single tear for him, because he deserved it, not having done a single good thing on this Earth.

Her father, in a vast, grabbed a knife across the counter and sliced the girl's arm open, with trembling hands and a set grim, thrusting her from him. He was terribly ill and weak, yet he ought not to expect some rebellious disgrace emitting from his daughter, thinking she shall do however she pleases.

The scenery went silent, the world, the movement from a peak slowed down deadlock, halted and collapsed in the damage done together in concordance of both father and daughter, both stopping locked in tracks and only gazing at each other intently, with vibrant, firing intensity they never had done before alike. He would pay for his terrible mistake.

As his daughter stepped away, seemingly impervious to her blood-sodden sleeve and the crimson liquid greedily seeping to the floor in streaming droplets, a weird look spread over her features, certainly nurtured with contempt, albeit also drenched with resolution. Composed, sure. Quite opposite to the tormenting, never-ceasing gale roaring inside of her, anguish rubbed raw and anger clawing at her simultaneously with overbearing sadness, her sight more and more converted to dull and tear, that wretched, wrinkle-devoured face of her father unbelieving to what he just did, but screamed after taking her heels to herself, warning her they'd come for her no matter the distance, not relenting, not giving up until they had seen her wed. She could travel over all the seven oceans and ridiculously, unceasingly they would hunt her form forever.

It had been the booming, trembling, dictating voice of a parent assuming his duty to reign over his stubborn, verdant child, being clawed apart of bitter anguish, as he knew for the better and still felt as if he had chosen wrongly, watching her recoil, eyes squinted in utter disgust. By saving her from her delusion, he had lost her now forever.

The stomped pathway of dirt and shambles of leaves hollowed loudly in unison with her overwhelmed heart, her steps beating the same rhythm as her feet, racing through the so familiar forest, branches hitting her in the face and thorny bushes slashing open her forearms and elbows, tears threatening to spill over and mark that escape even more hazardous a graver proposition, but she let them eagerly come, the pain displayed in ruptured thoughts of her lungs fueling her with enough measured misery, enough tempered anguish to run 'til the domes of the neighboured empire should cradle her view, regret and disgust pooling in her simmering stomach, smouldering bows of self-loathing and hatred eating her alive while she desired to burn herself on a pyre for being so obliviously stupid thinking her father any different than being a traitor, a heartless, horrendous creature capable of anything but treason towards her shrinking liberty she watched fraying at the edges and coming loose the more she ran and ran, inescapable the walls of her confinement itching, daring closer, ready to gulp her hollow and wrecking any of her character, until she drowned in the hapless heap of rubble suffocating her.

The moist salty air of the sea revived her and her tears she finally let conclude sharpened her mind significantly. Almost by herself, a chance arranged if by fate, she arrived at her favourite cliff, the place she had spent countless waking hours in mirth and content, all but a fake costume, a wrong system ready to collapse under and mock the happiness she could claim for a couple of hours, before the real world demanded her back. She gambled with fire kin to be singed and that was the price she paid for shorthanded joy, unacquainted with the life she should have, longing for something else, something that wasn't real, the genuine lie she fed herself in spoons for years. Darkness framed her, as her gaze brushed over the pine trees above here, ripe corns the dark spots to the star-freckled abyss above she found so soothing to look at representing a million different opportunities and changes, rendered herself now incapable in watching the protective canopy of Earth above her head, the ocean bled in front of her, waves with tips of foaming cushions softly tugging at the cliff, sultry, stinging drops from her blood-shot eyes falling down in the grass and her forearm smarting with a ferry intensity, small pinches of pain rushing through her entire body, the wreckage of her lineage at last.

She sat at the edge of the cliff, thinking. Bleeding still of her wound, tears leaking on her cheeks, trembling in absolute for-knowledge.

What to do? What to choose? Impossible it was.

Run and hide, leave the battlefield like a filthy hound, her fights for someone else to fight, a coward with no simple honour in her flesh, exactly to what the villagers denounced her only eagerly obliging. The wasted fatigue numbing her limbs to listless rigidity faded to ferocious, bitter rage, ire kindling in her insides, injustice sour glowing like timber embers flicking in the hearth. Resolution fiddling not, rage always larger than the cage she had to assume.

This was not the way she would do things, no, she would stay and beat her way out of this.

On other hand, why shouldn't she accept the marriage, as her loneliness slowly would have killed her, only the flora and fauna as her eternal companion, the shell furs of innocent animals she slew, dusted with the perfume of the forest a meagre apology and an even shallow replacement for the lacking warmth of a family, people avoiding her as she'd spread a plague with a look, and her father who would scratch her with a blade without second thought and tonight proven how he despised her as much.

It was horrible. Her existence was abominable. Who in their right mind would willfully choose to dwell like this.

She wiped her salty face in misery, isolation once her best feature and prevention, now the thing that was to slowly drive her mad.

She was so lonely. Alone all the time. How come she never noticed her fatal solitude until the day arrived her father promised to end it for her?

And still remained each option sheer unthinkable to prod in words.

She knew the man she was promised to from a distance, he was one of the brighter fellows, quite more reasonable than other bestial men in the community, tending more to his faith written in books, but that was the knocking, crystal-clear point obvious to her, where the opinions would differ sharply; He was a grown man and she a girl, barely a woman for not so long, expected now to assume after marriage only three things:

Children, children, children, only the kitchen her realm and God as an accepted activity to spend any viable energy on. She was to carry children, even if she still was one. That wasn't just, that wasn't beautiful. The things she despised with every fibre of intent in her insides and gore, the initial very heart of manicured, pitch-perfect little path to ensue.

But what else was there to do? To say?

Was there any other option, something not absolutely horrible, a choice she could live with? If she'd bail right now, she was both a hypocrite craven and a fugitive to be contained likely, for there was not anywhere to run. Another choice, where do you hide?

Apparently, there was not.

Her decision was made, grimly but gracefully, fists clenched and jaw set in a stubborn line. All her life she had run from her problems, had to grow up when other's of her generation still could pass endless days jollying around, served and tended to by the chaste layer of childhood, akin and bonded only by the fact of being all motherless in their entirety. She had made up her mind and there was nothing to recant of her choice to marry that man and still be true to herself, the first of women to essay it.

Though she claims to be indomitably appointed and convinced of her devoted arbitration, it wouldn't mean someone would capitulate to guide the world back on its track it's supposed to follow and make her question to abandon her latitude straight like that.

A ship made its way towards her, to the very town, looming doom headed to the cliffs a frustrated girl was sitting onto, running from one end to the other, one extreme to the to challenge the night and curse Fate for what she attempted to do with her, muttered dark incantations of a heart pure in the core, sheathed of decaying corruption but on the outside already on to infect the unmitigated organ and apparently to much, for the poison reached her mind, seriously considering to go through with the wedding. Dark chants perhaps with which she conjured upon a third option to present itself.

She was so deep entangled in her own rancid mind running circles, skipping back and forth ensuring she was not about to commit a mortal mistake, fidgeting still to halt and gaze beyond the silver-tipped edge of a cliff concluding to a basin studded with razor-sharp tips of starving rocks.

Well, people certainly committed the deed of the impure, self-inflicted certainly for less...

A sound erupted from the core of darkness, a hook darting from beneath to secure around her heart, chills wallowing on every exposed part of skin, a music divine it could stop a heart and equally tempt the dead to return to the living.