Celine never knows why she’s the one who survives.
Celine wonders if she was created to be some sort of harbinger or omen. A warning to say, be careful, tragedy happened here.
She was a twin, not that many knew. She was a fraternal twin to a boy who had her long face and black eyes but she remembers he always laughed more than her. Then again laughter was easy when you weren’t alone.
She ended up alone. A car accident when she was twelve. She was stuck in the car for hours afterwards crying for her brother. The only person who made everything okay. She never got a response.
Celine was twelve in the orphanage but wasn’t there long. The hunters found her. The ancient organization gave her a place and it wasn’t a home and she didn’t want it to be. She wanted to be busy. To do something important to explain why she’d been the only one in that car to wake up.
Eventually came Tae-hee and oh, she sparkled like a firecracker and fought like there was a tornado tied to her feet.
Then came Mi-Yeong and if Tae-hee was sparking well, she shined.
Celine wasn’t really magical, not comparatively. She didn’t shine or sparkle under the stage lights. She didn’t wield the Honmoon with the ‘deftest touch any of us have ever seen’. She didn’t need to though. She was part of a set. Three bound in a bushel. She was the one who was steady. The one that figuratively and literally covered their asses. The one who made things a little easier. That was enough.
Then things fell apart because grief brushes her shoulder like a shadow, like a cape. Because death chose her for a cruel game.
Celine stands before the council of hunters. Honmoon blade in one hand and regular steel in the other and thinks.
Why am I the one who lived? Why am I the only one able to accept what now is?
Mi-Yeong would have died for any of them. In the end she died for a crying babe that everyone else said was a demon. An abomination. It looked like a baby to Celine.
She was already injured and broken and exhausted but Celine was a survivor, not because she wanted to be but because she was presented no other option.
So she wiped the blood from her nose, spat it out of her mouth and said, cold as a gravestone.
“Let’s get this over with.”
That night Celine became the last hunter and a guardian to something the world had never seen.
Mi-yeong, as constant as the North Star, would have been a better mom. Tae-Hee, so bright and vibrant there was nothing in nature she could compare it to, would have been a better aunt. Rumi didn’t get either of them.
Zoey and Mira deserved a mentor who wasn’t drowning in guilt and blood. One who was able to say the right thing about parents. Zoey would have loved songwriting with Mi-yeong. Mira and Tae-hee would have danced together for hours.
They didn’t get that but they had each other and Celine prayed she’d had her fill of tragedies. That she wasn’t going to outlive her family a third time.
By the grace of the Honmoon. Please. Let her be the next one who goes next.
