[OLD] Cursed

Chapter 19

     Caroline opened her eyes wearily, rubbing them with the back of her hand. Where am I? Then she remembered. The Monster House. She opened the door to the small room she was hiding in. A faint light had trickled into the building, and she could clearly see everything. Three battered looking chairs stood in front of the wall, and two hallways that led into darkness on either side. She didn't intend to go down there and explore. There wasn't enough time.

     The room would have been empty if there were no chairs. The creatures that she had seen the previous night were nowhere to be seen. Caroline looked down, seeing the tiny ledges sticking out of the wall. She used them to climb down, feeling relieved when her feet touched the ground. She pushed open the door that led outside and stepped out. Light was slowly returning to the skies, which meant that she didn't have much time left. Hurry!

     She frantically scanned the brightening horizon, shielding her eyes against the glare of the rising Sun. "Thomas!" There was silence. Then she heard him. "Caroline?" She ran towards the voice, spotting him standing in the middle of the plains, gazing up at the Sun.

     "There is not much time!" Thomas turned around, expression confused. "For the meeting?" "For all of them! It is the third dawn! The barrier will be destroyed and I will not be able to come back!" "Oh." Thomas cast his eyes downward and sighed. "I guess it's for the best then." "For the best? What are you talking about?"

     Thomas looked up at her, then sighed again. "I would rather you live in a memory than knowing that I can only talk to you once a month, breaking the ancient laws by doing so. I enjoyed the meetings that we had, I really did. But my mother... my mother said that the things in life that are the closest to you the most are the things you must let go. I will forever be stuck in my own world, and I will have to let the fact go that there is another world out there. But I was lucky to be able to cross to it. This will always live in my memory."

     "No. You are wrong. I cannot stay in my world, I cannot return!" "Caroline... There's more to your world than the mountains. It's your job to discover that." "More... more than the mountains?" "The barrier isn't the end. It was just the beginning." Caroline glanced down at her hands, which were beginning to fade. "I do not want to leave." "I know you don't. But you have to face it." "I will never see you again." "You'll see me every time you look in the stars. And I will see you in them too."

     Caroline nodded. "Promise me that you will never forget me." "I promise." She was almost transparent now, like a ghost. "Caroline?" She looked up at him. "What was the end of the story you told me last meeting? The one that you never got to finish?" Caroline felt the corners of her mouth twitch upwards. "Light chasing away the shadows for all of eternity. The creation of the brightness in the dark. The stars." Caroline smiled, one last time, before fading completely.

Five years later...

     The small brown object pricked her hand as she picked it up. A pinecone. "How unique." Caroline murmured to herself. She stuffed it in her backpack and hiked back to the Village of Stone, a human village she had discovered a few years ago, after the barrier was destroyed. She entered the iron gates, immediately getting ambushed by a crowd of eager children. "Caroline! Tell us a story!" Caroline laughed and ruffled a younger child's hair with her free hand. "What would you like to hear about?" "The end of the curse and the barrier!" Someone shouted.

     The children sat down, creating a semicircle around her. "Well let's see..." Caroline said with a small smile.

Flashback

Caroline opened her eyes. The cold mountain wind attacked her from all sides, nipping at her teasingly. This couldn't be right. She never appeared in the mountain after fading. She turned around in all directions, but all she saw was the horizon on all sides. All sides. She faced the forest, then looked past it. She didn't see a wall. She didn't see a barrier. She saw a river, a mix of turquoise and aqua, shimmering in the early morning light. And past the river, a meadow. An endless carpet of lush green grass. And past the meadow... that was for her to find out herself. But the new landscape was only there because it was replacing something else. "The barrier's gone." The sentence felt strange on her tongue. The words 'barrier' and 'gone' didn't belong together in the same sentence. Caroline walked down the mountain, soaking in everything that she saw, for it would be the last time she would see it. She told the mountains goodbye. She told the trees goodbye. She told the birds and the squirrels and all of the other creatures goodbye. Caroline ducked under a branch and stepped away from the mountains, the forest, her home. She walked towards the river, towards the meadow, and she didn't look back.

End of flashback

     All of the children stared at her, eyes wide and mouths hanging open. "So you never went back?" One child ventured. Caroline shook her head. "No. That place is just a place from the past." One child raised their hand, as if they were in school. "Yes Eleanor?" "How did you learn to speak human?" Eleanor asked shyly. "Books. I taught myself to read in secret, in a hidden room under a blue tree, deep within the mountains."

     Another child, Lynn, looked up at her with wide eyes. "Did you ever see Thomas again?" The corners of Caroline's mouth tugged upwards. "Yes. I see him every day." "Can we meet him?" Will, the most enthusiastic of the children, said eagerly. "Shh... wait and see." The children sat there, waiting.

     The sky started to darken, draining the light from the sky. "Is he coming yet?" "In a moment." The first stars started to appear, shining brightly overhead. "There." Caroline pointed up at the stars. "But that's just the stars." One child protested. Caroline just smiled. "It's much more than that. He told me that I would see him every time I looked at them. But I don't just see him. I see the past. I see the people who I have left behind. I see the present. I see the light shining down on the people around me. And I see the future. All the generations to come. And they will gaze at these stars. And the generation after them will gaze at these stars. People pass, people change, but the stars are always there, always the same." Caroline gazed at the shimmering light up above, closing her eyes. Hello Thomas.