This is my entry to The Sky's the Limit contest, Subround 3. Used prompts 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Wow, I can't believe I've made it so far already :O

I was originally going to post this as a teaser for Catching flames and then delete it after the contest ends, but, as I was writing both, they went off into different directions. So it has the same general storyline and themes, but presented in a different way xD

Story and poster by me :3 

Prompts

1. "To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget" ~Arundhati Roy

3. "The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led" ~From A Month of Summer by Lisa Wingate

5. "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all" ~Oscar Wilde

6. "The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room covered in five layers of foam, you'd be able to count your own heartbeats" ~Paul Ford

7. "Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page" ~Cornelia Funke

8. "Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart" ~Haruki Murakami