Eluned

Chapter 1 – Losing you

She stood at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the deep blue of the Aldonian Ocean. It would be so easy to just end it there and then, no more pain, no more worries, she would finally be happy. She took one step closer to the cliff's edge and peered precariously over the end. Should she go ahead with it? What good would it do in the long-run? She stepped away from the edge… resigned to the life she had chosen. One in which she’d be beaten and sold to men for the night. She felt worthless. She wished upon her star every night that she’d be taken, out of the hell house… out of the home she had grown up in and away from the man she’d grown so fearful of.

She swept her long dark hair out of her face. Her green eyes pierced the sky in front of her. She was badly bruised and scarred on her arms and wrists. The thick dark eyeliner and grey eye shadow she wore covered up the shameful black eye her step-mother had given her for trying to run away with her brother. She hadn’t left a note. No evidence to suggest she’d gone, other than the empty wardrobe her room now housed. That and the absence of Garrin and his clothes… she’d nearly gotten to the border on the money she earned from the men paying for her ‘company’ when her parents found her and dragged her back screaming to the house she’d come to loathe.

She sat down at the edge of the cliff and edged closer to the drop off, letting her legs dangle over the side. A chilly breeze blew her hair into her face again. Goosebumps climbed up her arms, a shiver shot down her spine. He’d noticed she wasn’t there. Slowly she shuffled back from the edge and stood up... a small tear trickling gently down her cheek. She had to go back. It would only be worse if she didn’t. She turned back towards the home she hated and the family she feared.

She got to the end of the road and froze… she saw him… waiting outside. A look of extreme anger on his face. There was a time he’d have been happy to see her, he never used to get angry. It only started when he’d lost her mother. She’d died in an accident on her way to see Eluned in her ballet recital. Her father had blamed her. Her brother had been born a few years afterwards, by her step-mother who adopted her father’s hate for her. Her brother had been killed by their father while he was in one of his drug fuelled moods at the age of three. She had never been able to get over that. She knew on that day what her father was capable of and her fear of the man grew.

He stood at the end of the drive, outside the dilapidated wreck that her parents could barely afford the rent for. His brow furrowed when he spotted her. His beady black eyes full of hate as he looked at her. “Where have you been!?” The father yelled. “Where have you been you skanky little b!?” “Out… By the cliff” Eluned replied, her voice cracked as she remembered the doting father he had once been. “Shoulda jumped!!” he shouted grabbing her by the wrist and dragging her inside.

The house looked worse on the inside than out, if that was possible. The windows were boarded up, the roof had a gaping hole above Eluned’s room and there was moss all the way up the wall. The inside left much to be desired. The wallpaper was peeling, the tiles in the kitchen and bathroom were chipped and cracked and the ceilings were moulded with damp. Eluned’s room however was the worst. The bed had been taken away when her brother had died as her ‘mother’ saw it as Eluned’s fault, there was a mattress on the floor which served as a bed and a rotting cupboard for her clothes.

Her ‘parents’ had stopped her going to school after her mother died and as a result her grades had dropped considerably. Instead she was paraded around town by her father in the hopes she’d be spotted and would be wanted by one of the men for the night. The clothes she wore spoke volumes of her home situation. The skirt and top she donned were moth eaten and worn, and the tights had ladders knee to seat. Her hair, once a back-combed wonder, was now a limp mess which had seemingly no purpose other than to hang there. Today was to be one of those days… Chapter 2 – Who have I become?