The Solstice Daughters

chapter 3

TRIAL 1

day two

PAN was exhausted.

Which shouldn't have come as much of a surprise, considering the body of the unconscious girl resting between his two arms. He didn't bother checking whether she had woken up or not, he could care less.

The boy had just taken his first bite of homemade dinner when the others ran into his courters to inform him and Ashe that they'd found a damp body pressed against the clumpy sand of the beach.

A dead body- that was his first assumption. Much to his disappointment, he was wrong.

In the least disturbing way possible, Pan found it intriguing. To him, it wasn't a dead body, it was a body. It was someone new. It was someone.

Despite the rare sighting of a strange creature, or irregular weather patterns, life was simply boring. Days on the island were interchangeable, and Pan was sick of it. He wasn't an extrovert, nor was he a person of outgoing nature but he needed some form of stimulation to keep him moving.

During baths, he played tunes from the half deceased headphones connected into the jack of a finger-sized mp3 player that had washed up on the beach over three years ago. How the minuscule electronic device had survived the water or how it was still functional, were questions he had yet to find the answers to.

When he cooked, he found his hips swaying and his head bouncing.

He slept earlier than the boys, unable to drift off properly unless sound surrounded him.

On days where he found himself unproductive, the grass was his laying ground. He narrowed his senses, zoning into the squawks of birds, or the rush of water as it traveled down the lake.

It was obvious that if he didn't run from his thoughts, they would fog his brain, make him remember. He couldn't have that.

Pan's arms began to ache from the weight of his captive, as he and the others trudged across a path leading home. He sighed lowly, disappointed that the girl was in fact alive. At first, he'd felt guilt for the emotions that had plagued him once her pulse was found.

What kind of horrible person are you that you wish death upon others to avoid your own demons? He'd asked himself.

Truthfully, he wasn't wishing death upon anyone.  Pieces of his sanity were shattering achingly slow and he wanted- no he craved emotion. To feel angry, to grieve, to cry. Anything.

  He was avoiding his problems though, that he could admit as much.

"What are you planning on doing with her, once  we arrive?" Pan asked, without taking his eyes off the path ahead.

"Tie her up, roast her over a fire, and eat her for dinner-  which I haven't had yet, by the way." One of the boys replied from behind.

Pan rolled his eyes. "That's on you, I'm not the one who decided to play the role of kidnapper, tonight."

Willa had been awake for most of it. The moment her eyes had fluttered with the slightest movement, she squeezed them shut again, refusing to provide her captors with any indication that she had gained consciousness.

The constant bouncing of her limp body being carried did nothing to aid the feeling of needles being wedged into her skull. She urged to pressed her fingertips to her agonized temples and ease the pain.

"You're just mad she wasn't a decomposing corpse." A voice chuckled from beside her resting head.

Where the girl's hand stayed pressed between her ribcage and another chest, she felt the rapid increase of a significantly loud heart beat. "Yeah, I am." A pause. "Do you think a Hykflin sent her?"