THERE IS A STORY THAT HAS BEEN TOLD A THOUSAND ways, a thousand times, in a thousand different tongues. A story of men and monsters, of Saints who were too proud and Gods who did not listen, of the thin, trembling thread that separates the holy from the damned.

There is a story of a girl who should have died and did not.

She was born into a cage of gold and fire, a name heavier than chains wrapped around her throat before she could even speak it. The stars had been unkind when they carved her fate, pressing their celestial hands into her bones until she ached with the weight of something greater, something unwanted.

She had tried to be small. She had tried to be still.

But small things are devoured in the dark, and still things are broken by hands that do not know how to hold without taking.

So she burned.

It should have been simple. The flames should have swallowed her whole. The river should have pulled her under. The knives should have kissed her ribs and found home in the spaces between them. But every time death reached for her, she slipped through its fingers like smoke.

Some called it luck. Some called it fate. Some said the Saints had turned their faces toward her, that the Gods had left the doors of their heavens cracked open just wide enough for her to slip through.

But the Saints do not listen. The Gods do not weep.

And she had learned long ago that the only ones who are saved are the ones willing to save themselves.

So she ran.

She ran through fire and salt, through night-blackened streets and nameless alleyways, through cold and hunger and the kind of fear that stains the soul. She ran until she had no name left, until she was only a whisper, a shadow, a story half-told and never finished.

She buried the past in places where no one would find it. In the breath between one heartbeat and the next. In the silence before a blade is drawn. In the quiet space between exile and escape, between forgetting and being forgotten.

But some things refuse to stay buried.

Because fate is patient. Fate is relentless. And fate has never been kind.

It found her in the tilt of the stars, in the hush of the tide pulling out to sea. It found her in the wind that carried voices not meant for mortal ears, in the heavy quiet of a night thick with waiting. It found her in the eyes of a boy who was not a boy at all, who wore a name like a blade and a smile like a lie, who laughed like he had never once been afraid of the dark.

He was not meant to see her.

And yet, he did.

Not as she had been. Not as she had tried to become. But as she was—something neither holy nor human, neither lost nor found.

And for the first time in a long, long while, she did not know whether she was still running—

Or whether she had simply been searching all along.

2025
© ADONYSIAC ― IZIA™