Valeria ran. She was old enough to know that she was dying, but couldn’t understand how or why. She wasn’t afraid. She’d felt the emptiness as long as she could remember. The fact that it had bubbled to the surface seemed inevitable. It had been a companion that weighted her soul until she couldn’t hide it anymore. The twinge of starvation had grown into a clawing need. Her body screamed for warmth and nourishment. No matter how many skinned rabbits she ate, or how close to Father’s fires she’d huddled, it’d only made it worse to be denied what her body truly craved.

She couldn’t stand the way Mother and Father had looked at her. She’d search their eyes for hope, and had only found pain, sorrow, and fear.

She was the source of that sorrow, she realized. She knew she wouldn’t get better, not clutching to Mama in the cottage, so there was only one thing she could do.

She hadn’t bolted out the door to escape them. She’d felt what she needed, but hadn’t been brave enough to disobey her mother’s orders to never leave the small patches of green around their home. But now she had no choice. Her death threatened like an icy dagger at her neck and she had to stop it, if only to banish the grief in her parents’ eyes. She didn’t fear leaving her withering body behind, that thought was almost a relief to escape the pain, but she couldn’t imagine breaking her mother’s heart and never seeing her or Father again. She knew, somehow, she wasn’t like them. When they died, they wouldn’t go to the same place as her. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye, not when it meant forever.

And so she had to face her body’s pressing need and run, even though she knew her parents wouldn’t understand. What she craved was foreign and mystical… and that need called to her. What she needed was somewhere close and a place only she could get to, if she could reach it in time.

She couldn’t describe what it was that called to her that promised to fill the clawing, empty void in her soul, but it was a voice that sang without words. It drifted in-between a realm of the physical, and something beyond she’d only known in her dreams. There was a place that was free of the obsidian and ash, and held life itself, if only she were brave enough to go out and find it.

So Valeria ran, her feet gliding over the Dark shards that infested the lands that nicked against her skin. Each cut burned as if she’d dipped her toes into shards of ice. It was a demonic power that speared through the ground, something her mother had warned her not to go near. But she had to brave the black sea. If she wanted to banish the sadness in her mother’s eyes, avoid the splitting of her father’s heart, she had to disobey their plea and run into the night like a whisper on the breeze.

* * *

Her feet burned and pain slithered up her legs like steaming oil. She bit her tongue to keep in her cry as she slowed to a wobbly stagger towards the eerie voice that sang louder every step she took.

The Dark shards littered the ground until she couldn’t even see the festered soil anymore and the ache in her feet was the only echo of their plague on the world. The pain was worse now that she’d suffered the unforgiving, demonic malice her mother had warned her of, but she was close to the promise of reprieve.

A fog drifted around her ankles and a sheen of rainbow hues obscured the source that called to her. The world broke in a vertical wall, hiding something that was meant to be secret and safe.

She reached out and grazed the thick film that hung in the air. A moment’s resistance, and then her nails shred through the rainbow-black mist. Sucking in a deep breath, she plunged through to the other side.

A world of Light and warmth sprang to life before her eyes. A sea of flowers made her vision explode with vivid purples and reds that contrasted so fiercely with the black she’d grown so accustomed to in a world of onyx shards. But a few blinks told her this place was real, that color and delight could exist when she’d known only dreary shadow.

Her gaze locked on the magnificent tree in the middle of the grove that burst with pink petals. It soared into the sky and she couldn’t fathom how she’d never seen it before. Its flakey bark unfurled from its sides and a golden liquid seeped down the long length of its limbs, streaming into the fresh browns of the soil that was nothing like the dead land that normally surrounded her home. Each droplet of sap brought forth a new flower from the ground, a burst of petals and a center of yellow whiskers that filled her senses with pungent, sweet aromas of its pollen.

She shuffled through the flowers, no longer feeling the bite of bone-deep cold so fiercely. Silken blossoms grazed against her ankles, banishing the burn and sending the ground sizzling with the liquid Dark that seeped from her wounds as if this place extracted the poison to cleanse her soul.

She smiled, realizing this place was healing her, accepting her into its fold.

The tree, it seemed alive and bowed its limps towards her in greeting.

Drink, it said, not with words but with sweeping emotion that said that she must survive. Come, child, and drink from my nectar.

She made her way to the tree, cupping her hands beneath a shred of bark to catch the glistening gold that drizzled down its sides. She admired the liquid, the way it glittered and seeped a tingling warmth into her skin, before she brought it to her lips and drank her fill.

* * *

Valeria survived that night, and would thrive for many nights to come. She curled into a ball at the tree’s roots until she tangled with the vines and blossoms as if she’d become one of them.

She wasn’t sure how long she stayed there. It could have been a single night, or a hundred. But one day she woke feeling refreshed and warm, the warmest she’d ever been. It was a relief that sank deep into her bones and made her skin glow as if she’d become the nectar of life itself that now coursed through her veins.

The only thing that could have pulled her from that place of magic and safety was the knowledge that Mother and Father worried for her. She’d run from the cottage without any explanation, and now she wasn’t even sure how much time had passed while she’d slept in the tree’s comforting roots.

She pulled away the layer of saffron petals that kissed her cheeks, the long stems of their nectar leaving a golden, glowing powder on her skin.

Before she left, she gathered the stems and peeled away a layer of the bark, a gift for her mother. The grove twisted at her ripping and tearing, but she hushed it, assuring it that there was another that needed its Light and love.

The mother tree didn’t approve, but proudly said that it would make a fine gift and the human mother would enjoy its boon. Beneath the pride was a warning: this place was not meant for their kind.

It was difficult to face the fact that she was not the same as her mother. She’d always known it, but had ignored the glaring clarity that her mother wasn’t her mother in flesh. They were different, and now she painfully knew that she wasn’t human without a doubt.

She’d never bring her human mother here, as much as she wanted to. She knew that this place didn’t belong to anyone else. She’d been allowed into the sanctum, but it would be blasphemy to bring another soul.

And so she gathered her treasures and stepped out into the cold, cruel world again.

The glowing whiskers of the saffron nectar tingled in her veins, and the bark warmed her chest as she clutched it. She made her way carefully towards home, following the faint broken shards where she’d scrambled through what had seemed like another life ago.

The path was clean, but the shards still were sharp and icy cold against her bare feet. She hadn’t had time to slip on the protective leathers her mother had crafted for her, a rare blessing from the few animals that could survive in the wilderness.

She crested a hill and found the emerald green patch of life waiting for her return, the small cottage puffing smoke into the sky as if in determination to live on in the desolate world it was trapped in.

The horizon dotted with such specks of oasis, places where the shards couldn’t grow. She wound through the paths that swept through stubborn grasses until she reached her door, coddled her treasures to the side, and knocked.

It felt silly to knock at her own door, but she felt like she was a stranger now, like everything had somehow changed and would never be the same. She couldn’t say how long she’d been gone, and she couldn’t imagine how worried they’d been. Perhaps they’d thought her dead and gone, and had already slipped into mourning.

The door opened, and her mother’s dead eyes sprang to life. “Fallen star!” she cried, reverting to the pet name with ease.

Valeria managed a smile, looking around her mother’s hunched frame to see Father scrambling to his feet.

He rushed to her and didn’t rage or chide. He simply swept her up in his arms, nearly tumbling her treasures of bark and pollen to the doorstep as she was flung into the air. His unshaven cheek rubbed rough against her skin, but she endured his happiness as he cried with joy. “Valeria, my daughter,” he said, his voice breaking with relief. “You’re alive.”

Her mother offered a short laugh and affirmed the statement. “She’s alive.”