Rusty Hearts

1. The Furious Sea

There's a sea, large and empty and not on any maps.

The waves rise as high as a giraffe's neck, on a good day. The sea creatures except the fish that live in small cracks in the ocean floor have evaded the depths of it and sailors are smart to avoid it. Everyone is smart to avoid it, everyone, except Sapphire Green.

She is the only known resident of The Furious Sea. Taking shelter on a patch of land that waves avoid and not much water lands on. She lives in a long wooden house that smells of oils, rust, and the pages of aged books. Hidden away from man kind in a sea that she can only pass.

The house was built by her father. A smart sailor with a kind heart who wanted to live a peaceful life with Sapphire's mother. A beautiful and wealthy woman with a strict father who'd turn green with disgust at the sight of his daughters low class fiancée.

So the old lad did what he thought best, he ran away with her. They sailed through ocean after ocean searching for a place to hunker down, where the woman's father could not reach.

One night her father was hungry for sleep and with blurry vision sailed right into The Furious Sea. The boat tumbled and broke in half with the fury of the waves, the lovers hitting their heads on different parts of the boat. Succumbed to sleep.

They awoke hour's later on a patch of land the size of a football field with waves furiously crashing around them.

Though they were beaten and bruised the moment their gazes collided they couldn't help but grin. For they knew this would be where they settled down.

He built the house out of pieces of the boat they traveled on, with just the right amount left to make a caneo and paddle. The man taught himself how to sail through the angry waves and running winds.

Years later he would teach his daughter how to as well, whilst telling her the story on how they got there.

He taught her a few other nifty things, such as how to fish and how to negotiate with a angry sails person on the mainland.

She remembers those things as she trudges into the house with unruly hair and drenched boots. A bucket full of fish in hand.

The girl never used the social skills her father taught her, for she only left the sanctuary of The Furious Sea when she needed new parts for a new machine. And that, was very rare.

She drops the bucket on the kitchen counter to be cooked later. If her mother was still around she would scold her for her messiness.

But her mother and father were no longer around, they had left to the mainland on her sixteenth birthday to retrieve a gift. Sapphire never saw the gift, or her parents after that day.

At first she had thought the sea had taken them, for they had over stayed their welcome.

But Sapphire knew her father well. She knew he was better at her than sailing through the waves and withstanding the winds that could knock a two hundred pound man down.

So that only left one last option, they had left her. At first she tried to reason with herself. Perhaps they had gotten robbed of their caneo or kidnapped, perhaps even arrested. But she also knew her mother knew the mainland like no other.

Her heart squeezed inside her chest with pain at the thought that the two people who were meant to love her the most, had just left. If her own parents were like that imagine the rest of the world.