AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT - LOONA.

6.

Tehran, 1808

"Stop with your secrecy, your deception." Chaewon yelled, the tears not yet soaking from her eyes but they leaked through her voice. She had had it, being filled with cryptic nonsense and blindly following it because she thought it would keep her alive, but then monstrosities like this would befall her and her faith just sank. She needed answers.

Choerry stayed silent.

"I've spent my life as if I'm reading the stories, but someone else keeps turning the pages and doesn't let me catch up, just putting me in where it starts!"

Her eyes flickered over to the side of the room, where Sooyoung was, her arms desperately trying to pressurise away the everloving flow of liquid that rushed from her neck. It meandered through the room soaking the floors and drenching the bottom of her skirts. It ran down the walls, staining them such a deep shade of red it felt like Lucifer himself was ready to spring from it.

Beware of the wolf.

It was probably the first words Chaewon could remember hearing, inside her nursery. She would huddle against Sooyoung and Jinsol as they curled up in the bed, listening to matron tell her stories. She cared not for the thieves, the dragons, the pirates or the knights, they were simply a bedtime story for her, forgotten by morning, but the wolf never left.

It's what the strange girl with the funny clothes had said to her as she kicked off her shoes one day in frustration at her loneliness. Eight year old Chaewon didn't have much of an attention span without her friends, and with Sooyoung ailed with influenza and Jinsol away at sea for at least another week, she just wished for company. And there she was, the girl who smiled as sweetly as the fruit she was named for.

"Beware the wolf! She will hunt you and she will taunt you! But you must run, you must fly away!" Chaewon chanted as her cheeks reddened and she continued to scream. "All of this fabled nonsense! I've spent my whole life being tossed around a story I don't understand! I have to ru, do I? How do I fight?"

You don't.

She was almost ready to lunge at Choerry when she realised that hadn't been her voice, but her own, from somewhere plunged deep into her. It felt- felt like instinct.

You fly away. That familiar pang stabbed her again. Fly away. She had known it all her life, she'd felt it as she ran along the docks when she was a toddler, as she ran into her father's warm arms screaming about the wolf coming to eat her, and it didn't go away even when he soothed her hair and told her there were no wolves in Port Royal.

She'd felt it in the middle of the night, last year she'd screamed so loudly in her sleep she awoke the whole household, begging her to answer their questions of concern but she pushed out of the way, running and running and running until it didn't feel like the earth was quite beneath her legs anymore.

Fly away, You all have to fly away.

She didn't even know where she was going until she realised she was in front of Jinsol's house, and she was not alone.

A girl stood at the doorway, her back turned away. There was a strange abrupt moment of tranquility as she watched the girls chest rise and fall, a small urge to reach out and-

But then the girl began to turn,just twisting her body slightly and it came back again all at once. Fly away, fly away from the wolf. She was long gone before the girl would have had a chance to see her.

And then the morning came, she was found wondering around the docks in the early hours, clutching the newspaper that headlined the murder of Jung Jinsol, her throat slit in her bed as she slept. Choerry had appeared to her for the second time then, and she'd held her hand and promised her that she would see her friend again.