Accursed

Chapter 1 - The Stranger

Years had passed since I last touched my brother's hand. I hadn't felt him squeeze my hand like that since, even though I tried just about every evening after my parents had gone off to bed. However, I was no longer that young, naive kid and it was my most recent birthday—my nineteenth. I was beginning to lose hope after all this time.

In those years, my brother aged the same, his cheeks shedding that baby fat, becoming more chiseled even though he still lay sleeping in that same position. Mother began to let his hair grow out more, refusing to cut it every three months anymore. The cottage, over the years and as I began to understand more of my brother's predicament, became depressing, so I tried my best to leave as early and stay out as late as I possibly could. When I was younger, I believed I was just sad because I didn't know how to be anything else concerning my brother.

Today, instead of going to the forest, I decided to take the path from the cottage to the town square, even though it was just as secluded as everything else nearby was. Our entire world revolved in this large woodland area that had sporadic areas of clearings for dwellings.

Our town, rightfully named after the Welsh word Cyfuniad, housed just about everyone who moved out to the woods to live in peace. The name fit pretty well due to our culturally diversified town of different races. Still, our folk had to make a living, and establishing a central town was exactly what was needed for us all to be able to keep living around here.

Most of Cyfuniad's buildings pointed east, just to watch the sun rise and ignore the sunset. Each dwelling, while more technologically advanced than the cottage where I lived, still resembled old stone blocks with sticks and leaves for roofs.

There wasn't much to complain about—Cyfuniad had just about everything everyone ever needed. There was the rather large bakery, the tailor's shop, the library where even the oldest tales of our people lived and aged, the town hall, and a few miscellaneous stores dotted here and there to make the town seem even livelier.

I wandered into town wearing a golden and white florally patterned sundress, my bare feet touching the soft, slightly cold earth below. I had curled my hair this morning, and the breeze fluttered each curl in a separate direction.

I wasn't expecting any company on my walk, so when Lorelei Driscoll appeared in my field of vision, I kept my eyes down and tried to stride past her. My relationship with Lorelei was rather—complicated.

It didn't seem that I had a choice in the matter when her freckled face and dark, piercing eyes cut right through me. Her dark, disobedient hair that was larger than life seemed to bounce awake with each step she took as she sauntered up to me. As always, she was wearing a revealing, tight dress that made me sharply inhale in a way that I couldn't really control.

"Hey, good-lookin'," she drawled as she wrapped her arm around my shoulders, bringing me as close as humanly possible. She smelled strongly of red campion, a flower that frequented the village due to an ancestor from the Wales area migrating and breeding the flowers here.

Over time, our village developed the scent of the flower into a perfume that lots of girls in the village wore. The flowers were so beautiful, their scent intoxicating, and they weren't hard to find in and around Cyfuniad.

I cleared my throat horribly and it was obvious that I was nervous, but that type of energy was what she thrived off—especially from me. "Good morning, Lorelei," I replied to her evenly, or at least as evenly as I could manage around her. "I didn't expect to see you out this early."

Lorelei was the type of girl to sleep from morning to evening since she loved night the best and preferred to be awake only then. However, I tended to blossom in the sunlight; I loved how the warmth felt bathed over my skin. It confused me that Lorelei would rather be out in the moonlight alone than in the sun where the rest of us usually preferred to be.