Light in Dawn

Chapter Fifteen - A Desolate Smile

What do you mean I can mention a user like @Amirelle is this working? If so I just wanted to tell you that this chapter is edited and Andriana's OOC-ness is gone, yup.

***

Damn him. A boy leaned over the railing of the city's second highest skyscraper, cursing over and over again. His vigilant eyes dissected every particle in the vicinity, reluctant to miss a single detail. How did he vanish into thin air like that?

The chase had lasted for but ten minutes. Was it even less? He had lost sight of Julyan for just three seconds over the turn of a building - and then there was literally no trace of him. As a precaution he had infused a third-level tracking charm in Julyan's blazer badge a few hours ago, but even that only functioned intermittently.

Functioning intermittently -

The boy gritted his teeth, tumultuous gloom churned in his charcoal eyes and deluged the space around him. He was born and bred in the shadows. There wouldn't - couldn't - shouldn't be anyone more elusive than he was. He was used to casting tracking charms as naturally as others eat and sleep, and he knew them. It simply defied the foundation laws of magic to disrupt the function of a third level charm - third level charms were by nature the highest order of incantations, irreversible by any disenchant in the book.

Rielan has always been a man of mysteries, but even if he is a Rare Elite, he is still human -

The tips of his fingers tingled. His eyes widened. A heartbeat later, there was more no sign of the raven-haired boy against the railing.

~~

There were no thoughts, no words; just an explosion of fierce emotions. No words in any human language could describe this moment.

No one would know how she used to pull her ice-blue hair so hard that her scalp ached. No one would know how yearned for and dreaded an explanation for her difference with equal ferocity. She feared with each passing day that her answer would arrive and confirm that she was cursed, as Josephina used to tell her years ago; a harbinger of misfortune.

She had lost count of the times her mind would conjure up pleasant dreams as a child - dreams about loving parents and smiling siblings. Those had faded from memory long ago. What she did remember was waking up, staring at the barren room with a hollow smile, and sinking to the ground as the faces of her imaginary family faded into reality.

And yet, it was never her reality. Andriana Crystal had always been an intruder, an onlooker, an outsider. She always stood on the sidelines and watched as others laughed with friends and fretted about school work. To her, exclusion was felt as keenly as her own existence.

And now?

It was as if a sudden start of light tore apart centuries of unalleviated darkness; somewhere, in a forgotten corner of her heart, a slumbering passion awakened, and all of the sounds of the world had transmuted into the cry of its renaissance.

"If I'm not cursed, then why am I here?"

He hesitated a moment, as if trying to collect his thoughts, "I heard that you ran away on the day that you were to be made heir of Rexia."

Andriana didn't interject.

His brows furrowed slightly as he helped her back up with one hand. "Judging by the fact that you have no recollection of Rexia at all despite having lived there for fourteen years, I'd say that intelligence must be partly, or entirely, false."

"Fourteen years?" Her voice held a little tremor - an almost negligent betrayal of her discomposure. The adrenaline from the previous revelation had not yet worn off, and the news sent her heart rate to another peak. "You mean that I've lived there for fourteen years?"