1|Heaven Rejected

A young girl awakens with a gasp, jolting up from the floor. After a moment to settle, she finds herself overcome by shivering. She bundles the pile of rags wrapped around her body closer, eager to blame it on the cold. With these stick-thin limbs and overall miniature frame, she could believe it. But she knew that not to be true.

"Accursed night-terrors..." I hear her say. "Can I not simply enjoy one night of peaceful sleep?"

She slumps her head back down to the hard floor, with only a bundle of twigs rapped in cloth as a pillow. Asking such questions was meaningless. There was no escape from the nightmares.

Prickles of sunlight creep through the gaps between the wooden planks of the shed as the sun rises over the hill on the horizon, and unusual birds chirp with unfamiliar chirps. Accepting the fact that another night's sleep has been stolen from them, she tosses her bed rags aside and clambers out of the pile of used fabric at the back of the shed, rubbing under her eyes where deep black circles had formed. Lifting her own weight up with such ease still came as a shock, she was up so quickly that she almost launched herself into a stack of garden equipment leaning beside the next wall.

Fiddling with the lock, she unbolted the door and, peering through the gap to assure nobody had caught her sleeping in the shed, she quietly exited and re-bolted the door behind her.

Shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, she walked out into the yard and, stepping over various strewn segments of rusted metal and accumulations of logs, she reached the entrance of the alleyway and walked back out. Among these narrow, winding paths crammed behind the shadows of buildings, her breaths always felt shallow and short, filled with dust and smog, like the world that existed in those alleys exuded a constant suffocating aura, one that she could barely breathe with lungs so small. 

Squeezing herself around corners of brick and around fences, she was still not used to the idea that she could even navigate spaces like this at all. But that equally came as a benefit: from a younger age and even now, adults would never think that someone would be able to fit through the holes and gaps required to get to the shed in the abandoned yard in the deepest reaches of the slums. And, in case anyone did, her selection of traps and misdirection tools would help with that. Which reminded her, she needed to deactivate those when she returned, as she always did. Not a good look to be caught by your own traps.

She slipped aside the loose wooden plank at the back fence of the orphanage and crept inside. As much as the rotting, old sign may fool you, this was indeed still 'Jericho Orphanage'. The name was just as unpronounceable, as well.

Creeping through the tangled ferns and rusting iron supports wound with vines, she had almost made it inside undetected. In the final few steps, she was especially suspicious of being caught, as always, but, after it seemed the coast really was clear, she snuck in through the back door.

Jericho Orphanage was an orphanage in name only, she had discovered. It had no official support from any organisation, so those that taught there did it out of charity, which she found odd. It was a shock to her that anyone was there to teach these children anything, although, on some days, there would be no-one, and the children entertained themselves with pebbles, stick insects and daisy chains, and often cut themselves on broken glass. Many of the what you might call 'classes' that happened at the orphanage she was familiar with. The literature class was rudimentary; typically they would learn from whatever book had been found lying about in the street that week, or they would refer to an old, dusty imperial tome featuring praise of the realm and its deeds and a long, fantastical history of the monarchy and their noble lineage. She found a lot more enjoyment in the random books, which contained a lot of stories about highway heroes defeating thieves and men learning lessons from their hubris. They made her chuckle, because the longer she spent here, the longer she knew that those kinds of people could only exist in stories, and not here.

There were no calligraphy, divination or archery lessons here. There was a writing system, one with many circular scribbles and unusual angular letters that consisted of only one or two lines each, and it took her a long time to fully grasp it, even longer given that their writing teacher was only in the orphanage once a week as he had to travel from two towns over. To cover archery, which she continued out of boredom on some days, she made a bow out of a flexible twig and a spool of cord she found in the courtyard one day. The pull was loose and inconsistent, it made for a poor weapon, but it gave her something to focus on.

After she'd had her fill of bread rations and stimulation, she would sneak off back to the shed. No matter how tired she was, no matter how dark or how many drunks there might be lurking nearby, she'd have to remember to deactivate the traps on the way back in. So first was the tripwire, which she'd subtly hidden the failsafe for inside a crack in the wall operable using two switches at the same time. Then there was the pot on the fence pulled down by a rope, which required moving two bricks and a shovel to keep in place. And there was also the broken wooden platform over a hole, which could be reinforced and walked over safely by pushing in a hidden plank mixed in amongst three others. It was a chore to undo them all, but if it meant she could sleep soundly at night without risk of being kicked out, then it was all worth it.

Except, tonight, all of them were already deactivated. That was impossible, she thought. She was the only person who knew every single method. Did she forget to reset them when she left? No, it can't be...

"You look like you've never been more caught off guard in your life," spoke a familiar voice.

A young boy with a spiky mess of silver-white hair atop his head stepped out from the gloom, the first part of him visible. The rest soon came into view, punctuated by the reflection of his teeth from inside his light smirk.

"Don't fret, it's just me. Although..." he pondered, spinning a pair of keys around his index finger: the keys to the shed, "if it's so easy for me to get past all your traps without knowing about them beforehand, maybe think about trying something a little more complex?"

This boy was Ravi, another boy from the orphanage, one she had fully expected to catch her sneaking in this morning. Not that he would care if he did catch her, in fact, if he did, it usually meant he would drag her away and take her off to run loose in the town centre. She couldn't quite see it, with the only source of light being a far-off gas lamp from the street over, but she could tell he was wearing his usual outfit of grey overalls with the long sleeves from his undershirt rolled up and out over the arms. Everything about him reminded you of a ninja. By all intents and purposes, you likely wouldn't have never spoken to him. But a certain incident brought the two of you together.

"I would expect nothing less of you, Ravi. Except, refrain from deactivating them like that in future, it becomes a chore to set them all up again otherwise," she said.

"Alright, alright," he acquiesced. "There you are again with that stiff speech of yours. Sometimes I swear I can't understand a word you're saying, too."

He wafts his arms at me and plays catch with keys, doing little hops between each toss. "Hey, you've gotten better at least. A lot looser than when we first met."

When she met Ravi, she was face down in the dirt, her belongings thrown into a gutter and my face peppered with bruises. Two ruffians on the street had stolen from her, and the rags she had used as clothes were drenched from the night of rain. She foolishly misconstrued her own strength, but a small child with nothing to defend herself. That was until Ravi, a boy only one or two years her senior and, at least from appearance, not much more well-built than she was, happened upon her by accident while fleeing from a fruit salesman. She'd never seen such movements in her life, but Ravi leapt and spun into the air, delivering a kick to both of their faces, before landing on the ground with a stomp and continuing his run, throwing the apple had had taken over to her, which she ate soon after. Even with her bones creaking and skin prickling that night, she slept somewhat soundly for the first time since she had arrived in that world. Even the fire that would lick at her mind at night and stoke the flames of her nightmares was quenched somewhat by the sweet dew of that apple's juice.

"These traps are all too faffy, Cynthia," criticised Ravi, kicking one of the cables on the ground. "If you want to live comfortably, the best way is to just be practical about it. Hiding away like this... isn't it shameful?"

She drew herself in at hearing that, and shook her head silently.

"Eh, whatever. I'm going 'shopping' again tomorrow. You're coming too. Meet me at the end of the alleyway leading out into the market at 8 am."

Ravi, without going back through the traps that he had gone through the effort of deactivating, pushed off the nearby wall and vaulted the fence.

"See ya, Cynthia," he shouted back, disappeared into the night via the flimsy rooftops. Ravi's feet seemed to have the mysterious ability to be both extremely light and extremely heavy whenever he saw fit.

She, Cynthia, Cynthia Stormveil, if that's how she remembered the name poorly written on the note attached to her basket, slunk back into the shed and slumped onto her hay pile. For a long while it used to take quite some time before she could sleep, paralysed by what might be lying in wait if she closed her eyes for too long, but after all these years, the inevitability of it became so routine that she'd given up. So, once again, she went to sleep, and let the nightmare of a time and world past claim her, let her heavenly delusions chew her up and spit her back to the mortal plain.