Rule of Three Blog Fest: Part One

This is a bit of a rush job, I must admit, if only because I've just arrived back from Egypt this afternoon...and although I'd already written the first part of the story for this very post, once I got in my sister texted me and I ended up toddling back out into the wildlands of London to have dinner at one of my sister's beloved Michelin restaurants. Ha. Combined with the fact I haven't slept more than four hours a night save for one in the last nine, well...I apologise in advance for any dodginess in the story. And hopefully next week we'll get a more coherent entry out of me, too! ^_~

Salvage:

Part One

Flotsam

True love is not supposed to end like this, she thinks, and lays a hand upon the bore-riddled wood. It holds no answer for her. Nothing in this place does.

Yet I am here.

Rough gravel loosens her steps as she crosses what had been the main street, the midday sun as harsh upon her skin here as it would be far out into the Schiavona desert. When she tries to look up the light cuts through her hand yet stops at her eyes, blinding her; she is forced away with her head down.

When dawn had first broken, waking her from sleep, she had thought this perhaps a quiet kind of hell. It seemed only right, that the town where her passion had first flared would die, too, with the passing of her beloved. His presence had animated so much of the fading town, bringing hope to linger long in places where it had been thought to be lost forever.

There had been hope for her, too. Her father had come from beyond Assart to seek his fortune in a town nearly bled dry, but Renaissance had not been kind to him. She remembered well the day she had buried him. The sun had shone then. It always shone in Renaissance, even now, even when there was no-one left to see it.

I’m here. Then her eyes catch another fluttering broadsheet, the date half-erased by dust and sand, and she shakes her head.

I’m no-where.

Making another circle of the main street does not take long. Renaissance had never flourished, not even at the height of its mining glory. That glory had seemed a long time ago, even when she had first arrived; it is even longer now, if the grainy dates hold true. Which they do. She can pretend all she likes that they are too faded to read, but her daddy had always ensured his little girl learned her numbers and letters.

For all the good it did me. But she cannot resent him. He hadn’t meant to die, leaving her alone. He hadn’t meant for the magistrate’s son to fall in love with her. Above all, he hadn’t wanted the mine to fail and for Ferdinand to leave her here.

“Alone.” She forms the word, the first she has spoken aloud, with care. It carries no weight nor sound. If only she could have said the same for her own body when she had cast herself into the hollow womb of the closed-down mine.

It is unfair. She had thought it would end there. But she is here, again. The town has collapsed. There should be a sense of relief, revenge. It had ended her life, but in the end its own life had gone out too.

But it is still here. And so is she.

And something has changed.

She begins another circuit of the main street, adrift and alone. In this state she can do nothing but watch. And wait.

She does not think she need wait long.

*****

This entry is part of the Rule of Three Blog Fest; please see this page for details and to read the entries of the other talented authors taking part!