She taught me how to dance on a moonbeam. In her eyes that was possible. I never could see what she saw, but the day I came close I found myself thinking it could all be real. Maybe she had been right all along and I just never had enough imagination or patience to understand. Other times I wished I had never listened, never dared to look beyond the sky. The world became both brighter and blacker the moment she entered my life, like a gossamer thread woven on the edge by a poisonous shimmering spider. I shall never forgive myself for what I did.
This is not a tale of fantasy, but of a reality that preferred to be fantastical, because the reality of reality is cruel. It burns out the sun, its shadows dancing like a shrivelled carnation in the wind. She was a dreamer because people were unkind. She created a whole new world for herself because the world she was forced to live in was unforgiving. And I became a part of that world – which one, I’ll leave for you to decide. It had never been my choice, I knew I might fall too deeply into her web, but all the same I couldn’t pull away. I felt as though I were submerged in water, my body ebbing slowly up and down, side to side all at once. In a way, I think I needed her as much as she needed me.
Annalise Snow. The torn angel. The angel I eventually had to betray, but it was to save her, to heal her, to perfect my little damaged angel. She spoke often of the fairies that guided her through the night. She always smiled when she spoke of them, said they were little balls of sparkling light, like stars reflecting over the dark depths of the waters far below. She said they saved her. Only when she cried could I see her scars. Only when I grew frustrated with her did her mind seem to slip back into reality for the briefest of moments. I always knew when those moments occurred because her eyes would grow blank and dull and her fingers would begin their scratching, up and down the snowy white, leaving behind trails of red as thin as spiders’ legs. I wanted to pull her into my reality, because it was not healthy for her to run away from her own, but when those eyes, those blue blue eyes, grew black I lost my courage. All I wanted to do was help, but I fear I was making her worse. I would need the help of others to fix her.
The day I told her the others were ready was the day I lost her completely I think. She had begun to slip away from me already, being pulled further and further by her fairies (devil fairies they were, to come between me and my angel) and I grew very afraid. That was why I took her to the others. But my movement frightened her. I had only wanted them to help her. But they took her away from me instead. I will never forget the way she looked at me as they pulled her back into the dark. Her eyes, as big as the moon, bore into me, dull and sparkless as the world that had broken us.
Just before they came, she whispered her last story to me, in a flat dead tone:
“There once was a little girl whose tears turned bad into good. The smallest specs of sand became the most beautiful diamonds for her to give. People from all around the world came to her, begging for her help. She wept for each and every one of them because her heart was true. They would hold out their hands to catch her tears. She was such a fragile little thing. But they used her and soon her heart began to blacken until all she had left to give was pain, so they locked her in a tower where she lies weeping to this day.”
violetsams 