Zahralan

First Breath: Buried Rose

The first thing Leah noticed was a woman crouched at the side of the house, tending to a garden of weeds. Her hands worked in the absent, hasty way of a worried mother who knows she can't save her dying child but can't bear to do nothing, so she tends to her garden. Only this woman grew weeds.

Leah stepped into the yard. Immediately, she could feel the whispered, tainted presence inside the house - the sick child.

The first thing the woman noticed as she looked up with tired, tired eyes was that Leah had wings. Her hands let the gardening tools drop and she trembled in front of the young woman.

Why are they taking my child? her eyes asked. Leah felt a part of her slip away with the breeze. Her wings folded in on themselves and she walked into the house, unable to look at the broken woman tending to weeds like they were flowers.

Shivering, the child was curled up on a mat in front of the fire. Pale green eyes stared through Leah and into the gloomy darkness of the dying.

"Are you a Zahralan?" The girl's voice was a whisper, cutting through Leah like icy daggers.

Why didn't you save me?

"Yes," Leah said and placed her hand on the girl's head. How could she have missed the Perditan so completely?

"I'm afraid," the girl whispered. In her hand she clutched a dead rose. "I don't want the darkness to take me."

Why didn't you save me?

Leah shook slightly and kept her hand on the little child, trying to break the shadowy bonds clutching her life. She could see them in her mind's eye but they were so strong already but she couldn't just let the child die so cold and her wings wrapped around them both and she wept. She cried and held the girl wrapped in darkness in her pure white wings because Leah wasn't strong enough.

Why didn't you save me?

Because the Perditan was so strong and Leah's light was too weak to see it before it took someone this time. Because Leah remembered the girl's father was taken by the darkness too and maybe he was buried in the garden of weeds.

"What's your name?" Leah asked and her voice was soft with grief.

"Rosalind," the girl said and her voice was just as soft with death.

Beautiful rose.

Why didn't you save me?

The girl gasped and her weakened hand let go of the dead rose, which fell to the floor like so many broken dreams.

Later the woman who'd lost everything buried her daughter. Rosalind was buried with the dead rose of dead dreams in the garden of weeds. Leah left, wondering what sort of Zahralan she was if she couldn't stop the darkness in the town she was supposed to guard.

Why didn't you save me?

She flew to the top of her guardian's tower and slept on the roof, above a town she could feel living and breathing in the back of her mind.

When Leah woke up, she had no wings.

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A/N: Yes, all chapters are going to be this short, but don't worry, I'll update pretty often. They're going to be more like vignettes than anything else. I hope it wasn't too confusing, and yes, I'm using the term "breath" instead of "chapter," since you can hardly call these little things chapters.

This is a project I'm going to be working on. I hope it works out. This is my first time writing things mostly by hand before typing them up.