Don't Let Them Catch You

31• Hello Again

It was traumatic. She was a child.

She allowed herself to acknowledge the widely known facts. But never the details. The experience. Being too naive to understand what was happening, but knowing that it was really bad.

The sudden reemergence of the villain of her life story forced it all back into her consciousness with the force of a falling boulder.

And it makes it all the more terrible now that she's old enough to understand.

Even now as she tore through the forest like a wraith, running faster than she ever thought possible, a wild array of emotion threatened to consume her. With her vision blurred, she raced through the undergrowth through splotches of green and blurred shadows. Her limbs threatened to fold in, her chest ached with a pain that cut so deep her insides felt hollow.

But it was the rage that pushed her onwards.

Sheer fury that pumped through her veins and clouded her mind. But it almost wasn't enough. The flashing started.

In her mind, she was living it all over again. She was that same little girl being told to run in the opposite direction, to save her own life in the guise of a game. She could hear the cries of her people, shrill and screeching, see the helpless run, the futile attempts to escape the vein covered monsters with angel blood dripping from their mouths. She remembered seeing a scholar claw at the ground as two vampire tore the wings from his back and severed his eyeballs. A simple local being eaten alive from her stomach upwards, paralysed, her intestines splayed on the ground. Warriors that dropped like flies, trying to develop a border by the gates and failing. The shattered instruments broken and battered on the street of souls, dying trees and violet fields swarming with silver blood.

Those soulless eyes that chased after her in pursuit.

Her father attempting to protect her from it all, tried to keep her eyes covered as he flew her away from the carnage that would become of her estate. But she was a child that had never heard screaming like that before. She had taken a peak.

She had opened her eyes and taken a peak at the massacre. The peak turned to a bulging gaze that couldn't look away, couldn't process it. She didn't know why a four winged angel fell from the skies with his jaw unhinged. She didn't understand why there was so much blood, who these new people were, why she even had to leave. All her life up to that point she had known nothing but peace, chaos wasn't something she was familiar with.

But now? It had met her at every corner, greeting her like an old friend.

She knew exactly what was going on.

The realisation triggered an oncoming panic attack. She kept seeing the blood.

Aura had to come to a stop because she couldn't breathe.

She doubled over by the nearest tree, uncaring of her vulnerability as her palms dug into her knees. The angel tried to swallow deep breathes, her curls falling in front of her to curtain her face. Her pulse rate was increasing, she dug a shaky fist into her chest.

Amos would have known what to do. She thought desperately, tempted to claw through her chest.

That was when she felt her skull split.