Fate: and other things that change

Chapter 4

Ruby was running. She couldn't quite explain why but she was and that was that. Maybe she was running from the never-ending days of training and monotony, or the colorless stone walls always surrounding her. Maybe she was. Or maybe it was the one thing she couldn't escape as she bolted through the single narrow hallway. Looking back at the unforgivingly dull building; she could almost make out a reason, and if it was, she thought with a sigh, then she was no further from her problems than she had ever been.

To say that Ruby chose to break the window would have been a lie. A lighting bolt in a storm does not choose to strike, a person does not choose to fall in love. Some things have nothing to do with planing or logic. No she did not choose to climb out into the outside world. She didn't even see the window. One moment of impulse had sent her into a new unexplored path one she wasn't sure she wanted, but she was there. Standing outside where the world looked exactly how she felt. It was barren and lonely stretching on forever in every direction as if it were lost and searching for a speck of beauty in itself. She stared at the rocks until tears came to her eyes, but she never looked towards the sky.

The sky that night was filled with stars that Ruby had never even heard of. That sky could have been the first beautiful sight Ruby had desperately wished for, but there was no one by her side to point up and say, "It's beautiful too isn't it?"