Chapter 107: A shooting star
When I opened my eyes again, for a few moments I couldn’t understand where I was.
My vision was blurred, the world above me reduced to little more than a dim smear of fading light and dark branches swaying overhead.
I could feel bark digging into my back, damp earth beneath my hands, and a cold breeze slipping across my skin, but my mind was still sluggish enough so that none of it made sense at first.
I just lay there staring upward in a daze, trying to gather my thoughts while the last traces of sunlight bled weakly across the evening sky.
Then the pain arrived.
It didn’t creep in slowly or give me time to prepare for it.
It slammed into me all at once, so sudden and so violent that the breath tore from my throat before I could stop it.
My entire body felt as though it had been crushed and then stitched back together incorrectly.
There wasn’t a single place that didn’t hurt.
My ribs ached every time I tried to breathe, my shoulders burned, my back burned, and my arms felt as though they had been scraped raw by every branch in the forest.
Even the side of my face stung, and when I tried to move my hand I could feel the skin of my fingers trembling from the effort alone.
The cliff.
The memory struck me like another blow. Charles’s face, the hatred in his eyes, the feeling of his foot hitting me, and then the sensation of the world disappearing beneath me as I fell through the air.
My eyes widened and I forced myself to turn my head, and through the trees I could see it towering above me, dark and impossibly high, its jagged edge cutting into the evening sky like the blade of an axe.
It was so far above that the thought of having fallen from it made my stomach lurch.
"It hurts," I whispered.
The words slipped out before I could stop them.
My voice sounded weak and broken, as though it belonged to somebody else.
"It hurts... it hurts..."
I kept saying it because there was nothing else to say.
No thought in my head was stronger than the pain.
It was in my arms, in my chest, in my back, in my legs, in every breath I drew and every heartbeat that thudded inside me.
It felt as though my whole body had become one giant bruise, and I couldn’t even tell which injury was the worst because all of them screamed at me at once.
Somehow, after lying there for what felt like forever, I managed to force myself upright.
The movement was a mistake.
The moment I shifted my weight, agony shot through my lower body so sharply that my vision flashed white.
I let out a cry and instinctively looked down, and what I saw made something twist violently inside my stomach.
My clothes were torn and filthy, my skin was smeared with dirt and streaked with blood, and deep purple bruises had already begun blooming across my arms and legs.
But it wasn’t the bruising that made me freeze.
It was my ankle.
My right foot was bent at a sickening angle, twisted so far in the wrong direction that for a second I couldn’t understand what I was looking at.
It didn’t even seem real.
It looked like a doll’s limb after being snapped and forced back on incorrectly, something grotesque and wrong that couldn’t possibly belong to me.
I stared at it, unable to think, and then a violent wave of nausea surged through me.
I turned to the side and vomited onto the ground.
The force of it made my ribs spasm, and the pain was so intense that tears sprang to my eyes immediately.
I coughed, retched again, and then curled in on myself as tightly as I could, one arm wrapped around my stomach while the other clawed weakly at the dirt.
I didn’t care that the ground was cold or that stones were digging into my skin. I just wanted the pain to stop.
"It hurts..."
I sobbed, my voice dissolving into a wet, shaking mess.
"It hurts so much... it hurts..."
There was nobody to hear me.
Nobody to help me.
Nobody to even know where I was.
And so I stayed there on the forest floor, twisted around my own broken body like some wounded animal, crying until my throat ached almost as badly as everything else.
————————-
Hours passed.
The last of the light drained from the sky, and the forest slowly darkened until the trees around me became little more than black shapes pressing in from every direction.
Somewhere in the distance I could hear insects beginning their nightly chorus, and occasionally leaves would rustle in the undergrowth as something small moved through the brush.
I remained curled where I was, too frightened to move and too hurt to do much more than shake and cry quietly into my sleeve.
By the time the sun had fully set, I wasn’t even sure what hurt more anymore.
My body felt ruined, every inch of it throbbing and burning and screaming whenever I shifted even slightly, but my chest hurt too, and in some ways that pain was worse.
Charles’s words kept replaying in my head no matter how hard I tried to stop them.
The look on his face, the way his laughter had twisted into something cruel, the hatred in his voice when he told me what I’d done to him and his family.
Every memory of the past few days had turned against me.
The games, the laughter, the warmth I had felt around him—none of it had been real in the way I wanted it to be.
I had thought I had finally found a friend, only to learn that the person I had trusted most despised me more deeply than anyone ever had.
But
Maybe he was right...
The thought came quietly, almost gently, and that frightened me more than if it had come as a scream.
Maybe he was right to hate me.
Maybe he was right when he told me to die.
I rolled onto my back with a small cry, unable to stay curled any longer because my ribs were beginning to ache too badly.
The movement sent another wave of pain through my twisted ankle, and I had to bite down hard on my lip to keep from screaming, but eventually I managed it.
Once I was lying flat, I stared up through the gaps in the branches at the night sky above.
The stars had come out.
There were countless of them scattered across the darkness, but one shone brighter than the rest, suspended high above me with a cold sort of beauty that made it impossible to ignore.
I found myself staring at it, and after a while I laughed weakly through my tears.
"I envy you,"
I whispered to the star.
My voice sounded tiny beneath the vastness of the sky.
"Everyone loves stars like you. Farmers look up at you when they work late in the fields, and children point at you and smile, and kings build poems around your beauty. Soldiers marching home under the dark probably use you to guide themselves back to the people waiting for them, and wives and husbands stand together and admire how pretty you are."
My throat tightened, but I kept talking anyway because if I stopped then I would have to listen to my own thoughts again.
"You’re loved by everyone, and I’m hated by almost all of them. You’re praised for simply existing while people wish I had never been born at all."
I blinked, and more tears slipped down the sides of my face into my hair.
"But even so... we’re still a little alike, aren’t we?"
The star, of course, gave no answer.
"People look up at both of us from below, but , there’s nobody to stand beside us. You’re alone up there, and I’m alone down here. Everyone can see you, and everyone knows my name, but neither of us has anyone of our own."
My voice broke at the end of the sentence, and for a while I could only lie there crying quietly while the wind moved through the branches overhead.
"Why?" I whispered into the darkness.
"Why was I born just to live like this?"
The question left me in a rush, carrying years of loneliness with it.
"Why was I born only to hurt people? Why was I born only to be hated? I would do anything... anything at all... just to have one person who would stay. One person who wouldn’t leave me. One person I could call my own..."
And as if the night itself had been listening, a streak of light suddenly tore across the sky.
I froze.
A shooting star blazed overhead, brilliant and impossibly fast, carving a silver line through the darkness before vanishing beyond the trees.
For several seconds I could do nothing but stare at the place where it had been.
The pain was still there, the tears were still wet on my cheeks, and Charles’s betrayal still sat inside my chest like broken glass, but that single flash of light felt strangely hopeful.
Maybe it was childish.
Maybe it was stupid.
But as I watched the empty sky where the shooting star had passed, I found myself thinking that perhaps I wasn’t meant to give up yet.
Perhaps if I kept searching—if I endured just a little longer, if I reached just a little further—then one day I really would find someone who would stay beside me.
Someone who would see all the ugliness in me and still remain.
Someone who belonged to me as much as I belonged to them.
The thought was fragile and irrational and probably born from exhaustion, but I clung to it anyway.
Slowly, I rolled onto my side and reached for the tree beside me.
The bark scraped against my palm as I grabbed it, and the moment I tried to push myself up, pain exploded through my body so violently that my vision swam.
It felt as though every nerve in me had been set on fire.
My arms trembled uncontrollably under my own weight, my ribs screamed in protest, and the moment my twisted foot brushed the ground I nearly collapsed again from the agony of it.
I bit down so hard on my lip that I tasted blood, using the sharp sting to keep myself conscious as I dragged myself upright inch by inch.
By the time I finally managed to stand, I was shaking so badly that it felt like I might fall apart.
I leaned heavily against the tree, supporting almost all of my weight on my left leg while my right remained lifted awkwardly from the ground, still bent in that hideous direction.
My breathing came in ragged gasps, and I could feel sweat clinging to my skin despite the cool night air.
Every part of me wanted to sink back down and stay there forever.
Instead, I lifted my head and looked out into the darkness between the trees.
"If you really exist..."
I shouted, though my voice cracked from pain halfway through.
"If there’s somebody out there who’s meant to stay with me, then I’ll find you one day. I don’t care who you are or where you are—I’ll find you, and when I do..."
I swallowed hard, tears still slipping down my face.
"...I’ll make sure you never leave."
The forest swallowed my words without answering.
After a few seconds, I reached down and picked up a thick fallen branch from the ground.
It was heavy and uneven, but it was sturdy enough to lean on, and once I had it clutched in my hand I forced my shaking body to take a step forward.
Then another.
Then another.
Each movement sent pain racing up my broken leg and through the rest of my body, but I kept going anyway.
Limping through the dark forest with the branch digging into the earth beside me and tears still drying on my face, because I had nowhere else to go and no one who would come looking for me.
So I walked.
Alone beneath the trees, with only the stars above to witness it.
