Chapter 1
Watch the stars. They are burning bright. The god rays cast a glow across the girl's eyes. The only light she sees. Across the plain lie withering trees and dying plants glistening under the glow of the Orion sky. She glares at the pale moon, reflecting a life that does not exist in her eyes. The flicker of humanity is long extinguished within her and only a dimly lit vessel remains wandering across a starlit landscape. A hollow shell banished by the moon, majesty of the night sky.
Your ill-starred genesis. 1931. Oh how the stars did brim the sky that night. The gods celebrated Orion's fall with the curse that was you. Heaven's golden chorus played that symphony of the night.
Seventeen years later she is at a bar drinking. She drinks her life away. One gulp at a time each one reminding her that she has never amounted to anything that in the cosmos of life she was as insignificant as a dying star consumed within an infinite void.
Two years later, she sits in her room and looks out her single broad window standing in the centre of the two opposite walls where the red paint begins to drip down the glass . There are children playing amidst the vast grasslands climbing on the trees. Bright yellow starlight envelops the children in a transcendent brightness that exists only in distant memories now shrouded in darkness. She gets up and walks out of her dark room into her reality. Her mother is sitting at the other end of the oak lined table, the light from the fireplace illuminating her face in a sulphur haze which has started to brim with anger. She sits down opposite her mother.
'It was you wasn't it?'
'It wasn't me mama.'
'Don't bullshit me, You're all hat no cattle only you would break a vase that expensive.'
'It ain't me that did it mama.'
'You ruined my fucking life.'
'I'm sorry mama.'
Her mother gets up from her chair and leaves the room. The last time she'll ever see her.
She awoke that night to a sky decorated with stars projecting their lives down to the planet. She stared at them through her window half covered with blinds. Every stars' existence seemed so much brighter than hers, she thought it was a taunt from the heavens. To stare at each star as it was millions of years into the past and see that every second of those millions of years burned with more fire than she ever had in her tiny speck of existence. Oenopion had blinded her, but there was no Lemnos to flee to. No escape from the harmony of dissonance or Artemis's symphony of destruction, burning her world past all reckoning.
Her mother hated her from the moment of her accursed conception where she was ripped out of her flesh like a monster. A siren that lured her in with the sweet song of life and cursed her with the eternal want for death. The emptiness that followed after her mother ceased to exist chased the girl into a life ruled by the drink. That reality existed before but now it governed her entire life. She ran away from her home and the days were filled with rain. Her thin and ragged dark blue shirt that was originally her mothers, slowly wilted away as she wandered the raging plain. She had arrived at a tavern stood in the centre of the forest Scorpius. She hobbled forward and pushed the door half broken from its hinges to a sea of faces all turning back to stare at her with that look of indignation she had known all her life telling her you do not belong here. That now didn't stop her from moving forward. Each awkward, jittery step she took creaked the half broken floorboards beneath her which stuck up until she stuck them back down. She took a seat at the front, opposite the bartender and reached into what could hardly be classified as a pocket anymore but rather a tear in her trousers and handed him almost all the money she had.
'How much booze will this get me.'
'About 12 bottles.'
'Give me it all.'
'That'll get you tipsy for about a week miss you'll be nauseous as all hell.'
'I don't care.'
'You don't wanna ruin that pretty face of yours now do ya?'
As he spoke the edges of his lips wrinkled and stretched into a wide smile revealing a golden tooth glistening amongst the crooked rotten teeth that lay beside it, forming a dilapidated bridge leading into a chasm of filth. She looked at the man with eyes that contained nothing inside. Soulless. The man's smile faded with haste and he turned and brought the woman what she desired and she drank the whole night and awoke three days later upon a hard torn bed within a room that contained no windows. Shards of glass lay scattered along the alcohol stained carpet that now yellowed with age. The shapeless dark consumed all the light that could exist and she now lay gazing into this endless night. A man opened the door which awakened a dormant light revealing the wretched contours of his face. His mouth moved and the golden teeth shone and the light had begun to eat away at the dark as the door creaked open. He spoke into the abyss.
'You owe your life to me.'
'I don't owe you shit you ruined my clothes.'
'April is the cruellest month, the men here are ravenous and around this time they become beasts.'
'All humans are beasts.'
'That's about right but the men here are farmers and it's too cold for crops to grow so it seems they just come by my place instead.'
'Better they'd all just die, bet there's loads of crops to grow on the other side.'
'The other side is full, the dead have no place to go.'
The man upon opening the door carried with him a blistering cold that pushed the girls hair over her eyes which gleamed an ocean blue hue within the reflection of the glass adjacent to her. Her hair, whilst seemingly tattered and withered, still struggled for it's golden colour despite her weak and pale appearance.
'Do you have a name?' The man spoke with a reverberation that echoed throughout the damp and dingy room.
'Vespertine'. She replied with a growing softness, gazing into the blackness of the days end.
'The evening flower'. His tone expressing a higher intonation upon the last spoken word. This girl carried with her, in spite of her wretched condition, a radiance that mocked the heavens that blighted her. Even if the light within her is dim, only illuminating the hollow the depths of her soul.
She would burn.