- They were servants of the darkness and for the longest time, Harlow Alden was reasonably content with being peculiar... Though that was until the day she met the boy who made her feel less peculiar...
The Alden family was atypical, gifted with po...
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The world beyond the window was stunning, a mirage of green ferns, moss-covered trees and blue-grey skies. But to her startling sapphire eyes- It reeked of one thing that she was detached from; it was the epitome of life, something that hadn't flourished through her body in months. Harlow Alden, to all the world, seemed to be nothing more than an ordinary girl- Perhaps she was skinnier than the average, her limbs seeming oddly detached from her as she walked, her hair limp around her as if it had no energy to do anything but lie in its mourning locks. To the eyes of the human, Harlow was just a girl who had little care in the world for the impression she gave others- But one undeniable factor that soaked the air around her... Was her detachment.
They never understood, never recognised the oddity about her, the peculiar strangeness that naturally averted them instantly... Unconsciously, they knew that Harlow wasn't quite right, their minds just failed to compute what was so blatantly obvious that even their subconsciousness knew.
She was dead. And she had been since August, her rebirth could never change the utterly irreversible state that she was now a part of. On the fourteenth of August, at seven forty-three, she had been killed and she would remain in this permanent, unaging, unchanging nor thriving state for the remainder of time if never they could find a way to return her mortality. On occasion, in the most private quarters of her mind- Harlow wished they'd left her to rest, allowed her to sleep in the earth among the bugs and the dirt, allowed her to pass on to the world beyond the veil, the world she had always had one foot wedged in the door of.
The thump of the car door against her temple as they went over a bump in the road brought her back to her senses, an absence of the sting she should've felt- Instead, a hollow thud as the sound of her skull clicking resonated against the plastic ledge beneath the window. It would leave no mark, despite the power behind the hit-- Dead bodies did not bruise. Catching her own reflection through the glass in the wing mirror startled her for a fraction of a moment. Her face was haunting, lifeless and distinctly... Ill looking. Her jaw and cheekbones had the skin drawn so tight you could very nearly see the milky bone below- they flushed with no colour now, nor would they ever. The crevice of her cheek was plunged so deep, it was as if a young child had applied her contour darkly. Beneath her once-shimmering sapphire eyes, bags punctured her face. She'd been pretty once, a long time ago.
The night in mid-August had completely and utterly shattered whatever pretty attractiveness she'd possessed. Her bones bore little muscle, withered and gangly, disconnected and slouchy in motion. Her death had not been pretty, nor were the autopsy scars or what the authorities did. Laying dormant in her veins, no blood remained- she'd been handled roughly, drained and filled back up, embalming liquid sloshing like a poison inside her otherwise agonisingly hollow body. It was cold, poison to her flesh purely because her mother and auntie had not managed to reach her before the authorities had. They had wanted to know the cause of death, the reason why a seemingly healthy seventeen-year-old girl had been found by a dog-walker dead in the forest with seemingly no wounds.
