Bonds of the Fallen
Chapter 1

“Mother, where are you going?” The question hung heavy in the stifling air of the dimly lit corridor, the stone floor cold and unyielding beneath the girl’s bare feet. Rain lashed against the paneled windows with the fury of a thousand fists as if the heavens sought entry to their humble home.

Her mother, a silhouette shrouded in the shadows, halted in her retreat, her face obscured by the gaping hood of her cloak. The child’s heart stuttered as she noted the tremble in her mother’s fingers as they grazed her lips, a silent plea for silence.

“The Norns of fate are angry,” her mother’s voice, barely a whisper, rose above the crescendo of the storm. “I must leave for the market immediately.” The child’s gaze was drawn to the billowing hem of her mother’s cloak; the pooling water at her feet tinged a deep crimson from the cuts marring her bare feet.

A force she couldn’t comprehend compelled the girl to fly down the grand staircase, her small limbs inelegant in their haste. She grasped at the fabric of her mother’s cloak, her tiny voice breaking as she pleaded, “But it is dark. The market is closed at night.”

Her mother’s only response was a stubborn shake of her head, her gaze an impenetrable fortress that mirrored the storm outside. As the girl continued to pull at her mother’s cloak, her mother reached down to her little hands. “I must go now,” she said, prying the girl’s fingers from her cloak. Emotions she barely understood warred within the child, but before she could give voice to her fears, her mother had dissolved into the violent night, the door slamming shut in her wake.

A profound sense of loss engulfed the girl as she stood at the threshold of the dimly lit home, the emptiness of the foyer amplifying the storm’s rage. Her small hand hovered above the cool brass of the doorknob, indecision marring her innocent face. She folded her tiny frame upon the threshold, her gaze unflinchingly fixed upon the old wooden door and the world that lay just outside.

Time seemed to stretch into infinity, each moment an eternity of solitude. Enveloped in a cocoon of blankets, with only the gnaw of hunger an ever-present companion, the girl remained by the door, every rustle of wind, every groan of the timeworn house, a harbinger of her mother’s return. But as the hours melded into days, hope withered within her, much like a flower needing sunlight and water.

When the neighbor, Mrs. Higgins, discovered the girl, she was a ghost of her former self. The vitality that once sparkled in her eyes was now extinguished, leaving behind hollow pools of despair. She had become one with the threshold, her essence intertwining with the very foundations of the house, her sole tether in an ocean of desolation.

Time did little to erode the scars etched upon the little girl’s soul. Even as an adult, Batilde would replace herself shrouded in darkness, the abyss of loneliness threatening to consume her. A fragment of her soul, forever imprisoned in that shadowed corridor, eternally awaited the return of her mother.