“Mei!”

His loud, sharp cry sliced through the distance, but she had already disappeared into the woods.

Sehun his heels and rushed out of the library, emotions and passing corridors all an incomprehensible blur. His quick footsteps echoed hauntingly across the empty building as he ran down the staircase and burst out into the courtyard. The sudden sunlight blinded him, but he didn’t give a thought about it; all that registered in his brain was to reach the gates and go after Mei.

But just as he thought he reached the gates, he ran into a body and stumbled backwards. Irritated, he glared up at the sudden obstacle and recognized the woman as the head maidservant.

Eula gazed at the boy, his young, handsome face contorted in confusion and agitation. She knew what Mei had gone through and had seen her take off into the woods. She knew she could not let Sehun go after her, and she knew that Mei would come back; it was her instinct as a mother she never was.

“I’m sorry, Master Sehun,” she apologized out of courtesy.

“Move.” His voice was cold and demanding, so much as it was unfit to his ten year old exterior.

“I’m afraid I can't, Master.”

“I command you to move.”

“I cannot allow you to go after her.”

Eula could see how his jaw clenched in anger, and she almost felt thankful towards him for worrying about Mei so much; he was the only one besides her that acknowledged her existence for more than just a mere Slave. Nevertheless, she stood her ground.

“I, the youngest true son of the Manor, command you to move,” he seethed.

Little monsters, Eula thought. Sehun saw the small spark of sympathy disappear in the old woman’s eyes.

“I will report you to Father for your disobedience if you don’t let me go,” he pressed.

“The Lord would be highly displeased to find out you tried to leave the Manor without any guards, putting yourself in danger for a Slave.”

Sehun cringed; he hated it how Mei was only referred to as the Slave. To hear the only other person who called her by her real name use that derogatory title, something cracked inside of him, and he surrendered helplessly to the crushing weight of reality.

With pain stricken eyes, he looked up at Eula with a sincerity that she had only seen in Mei before. “Then will you at least tell me what happened? Why she just ran into the woods like that…?” Away from me, Sehun added in his mind.

Eula scrutinized him with mistrustful eyes, but decided to tell him, because he would hear the rumors sooner or later---no, soon. “Master Kris took her,” she deadpanned.

Sehun’s mind reeled at the sudden disclosure, desperately trying to grasp the true meaning of her vague words.

“She is badly scarred, both physically and emotionally; she needs her time alone,” Eula explained further. The truth was gruesome, that Mei had to be abused in such a depraved way, and she wondered for a moment if the boy fully understood what she meant. She figured he did though, for he was borne into this wicked Manor afterall, where virtuous nobility was just a façade and was actually built upon a foundation of atrocious sins.

Sehun’s face had turned an angry red, and Eula braced herself for the explosion that would follow. But he only glared at the dark forest expanse with such brooding orbs that she found hard to believe they belonged to a youth, and after a crestfallen silence, stated, “She ran into the woods.”

Hesitating at his pointlessly obvious remark, Eula replied, “Yes, Master, she did.”

“There are wolves in the woods. It is dangerous. She can get hurt.”

The real wolf is in the Manor and so are the most destructive dangers; she’s already hurt beyond what you can ever imagine, she thought, but silently watched the boy struggle not to drown in his emotions.

“I can send a search party.”

Eula gently shook her head, defeated herself, by their helplessness and the cruel fate that had been forced upon the girl they cared so much about. “Time will heal her.”

It was a lie, they both knew.

The thick fog had seeped into the woodland, dulling the greenness that the trees had started to regain after the long winter. Spring marked the beginning of new life, but for Mei, it marked the beginning of an end, far more authoritative than death itself.

She sat on the dirt at the base of a tree, gazing blankly at the surrounding wildlife in its earthy tones that made her screaming redness contrast sickeningly against it. The branches had mercilessly scratched at her bare arms and feet, but she felt the tiniest bit of relief that they camouflaged the bruises underneath. She didn’t mind the pain much anymore; the overwhelming agony had embedded itself so deep within her that it was now a part of her existence; but the visible wounds made her feel so ugly and dirty, surrounded by the beauty of nature.

She was a fool. She was such an ignorant, gullible, brainless fool, that she couldn’t even muster up enough energy to harbor hate or anger.

Sehun was interested in books about past revolutions or leaders of change, and never picked the same book twice. But Mei, she liked to read fairy tales, and after every couple of books, she would drift back to her favorite, the Little Mermaid. She shared similarities with the mermaid in the story, and couldn’t help to hope her course of fate would parallel to the happy ending of the fairy tale. Both she and the mermaid fell in love with the prince they had once saved and they both did not have a voice in the new world they had entered. She had sometimes fantasized that her prince would break society’s curse on her, as the mermaid’s love had freed her from the ocean.

It wasn’t until her naïve dream had infected all parts of her brain that she realized she had been reading the remake of the original story. She would never forget how shocked she was when she discovered how different the ending was in the authentic one; the ‘happily ever after’ she had adored in the tale was only a fabrication of the gruesome truth. Mei had cried when she found out that the mermaid threw herself into the sea and turned into foam because she could never be with the prince. Sehun had consoled her that it was only a fairy tale.

But now, swimming in the debris of destruction, she had never been so similar to that mermaid.

Mei was drowning. Drowning pathetically on dry land, drowning hopelessly in her own thoughts. The pain was too familiar to her senses to induce tears but her soul had been eaten away by it. It hurt to cry, it hurt to think, it hurt to breathe; so she sat there like an empty shell, letting the wisps of random memories float aimlessly through her mind.

She remembered how her mother had given her the pearl necklace on her fifth birthday. “This is a heirloom that started from your great great great great grandmother, Mei. Did you know, a pearl represents purity and loyalty?” Mei had ogled at the beautiful gem in her small hands and shaken her head, eyes wide in admiration. Her father had chuckled behind them, and her mother had turned around to share a loving smile with him.

She remembered how Sehun said that in a country named Japan, pearls were believed to be the teardrops of mermaids.

She remembered how her tears stung her bruised cheeks while she struggled frantically to escape from Kris.

Red.

Red of her blood, red of his lips, red of this sin.

Trembling fingers dug into her scalp as a strangled sob escaped her parched throat. From a hollow husk of a human being, she was back into a chaotic rage of emotions, so blinding and painful and unbearable that she just wanted everything to stop; her heartbeat, her breath, this prolonged nightmare.

Her terrible cries cut through the deathly stillness of the forest. Not a single breeze combed through the trees, as if Mother Nature was too afraid that any miniscule movement would shatter her to even smaller pieces.

She had been robbed of her childhood, her innocence, her dignity; and now she couldn’t see anything past the flood of tears, just couldn’t see the tomorrow waiting loyally behind the curtain of dusk. The sun had submerged under the obscure horizon, and Mei consigned the remaining fragments of her soul to the disappearing rays of sunlight, allowing the settling night darkness to seal the deal eternally.

With her head buried in her arms and knees, she continued to weep, letting the dropping temperature assist the creation of an ice barrier around her heart; if she were to drown in the sea of her tears, at least the heart of ice would float in the water and maybe the angel of death would find it and kindly deliver it to heaven instead of hell.

She cried.