Part 1

I found my way into this world, even when darkness surrounded me like the air we breathe.

Eleanor

When I was very young, my mother told me her greatest ambition was to witness a miracle. Because her work ethics influenced me more than a bunch, that became my greatest ambition as well. I didn't even know what it meant, witnessing a miracle, and when I asked her one day she explained that witnessing a miracle is like witnessing a life become new again. My lack of reason at the age didn't help me fully comprehend what such an event could be, but nevertheless I still prayed every night to whoever would listen. If my mother wanted to do it, so did I.

It became hard to believe in vain fantasies such as these after my parents and older brother, James, vanished in a fire that managed to destroy almost everything we had. My younger sister, Sophia, and I were sent away from our home on the coast to a redoubtable orphanage in northern London. The younger I was, the easier it was to pray to the stars and still wish a miracle would occur, and I would be there to witness it. But as I grew older, not only did that seem too far-fetched, but also remembering the life I had before me.

With the event of my sister being taken away to live with new family, far away from London, I forgot miracles. As far as I was concerned, they were nonexistent. I planned to stay in London until I could be released on my own accord on my eighteenth birthday, the day that no one could be held responsible for me. Now sixteen, Sophia four years younger, and what felt like a universe apart from me, my case has not changed.

"Ma?" my nine year old self called to the kitchen, through a doorway across the rectangular living room. My feet were bent underneath me as I played lightly with the trimming of my favorite knit blanket, hanging in an elegant mess off the top of the couch.

My mother appeared in the doorway, framed by dark wood leading to an aromatic kitchen behind her.

"Yes, dear?"

"When do you know a miracle is coming?"

A fated grin crossed my mother's face, sitting beside me on the couch as the pale blue apron around her waist draped itself over her legs.

"The problem with miracles," she began, taking a piece of my hair and sticking it behind my ear in its place, "is that they are unpredictable. That being said, trying to find a miracle is very frustrating. You can't really go looking for them. They come to you."

I scrunched my nose in confusion. "But if they're so miraculous, wouldn't you feel it coming?"

"I'm sure you would."

"So when is it going to come?" I asked curiously, as my mother reached and held the silver key around my small neck in her palm for a long moment.

She sighed, scanning my widened hazel eyes that were eagerly expecting an answer. There was something in the way she looked at me that made me capable of understanding she was sad. Yet, her mouth managed a smile.

"Probably when you least expect it."

It was when things didn't go to plan that the first miracle began to unwind in front of me.

A lump was beginning to form in my throat, sweet like honey, but sour like a lemon. I tried to swallow my own saliva in hopes it would diminish this taste, but the combination of the two held the dominant taste, sour, which created another flavor: something bittersweet. It was like the flavor that arose within me before I was to cry or when I knew something bad was going to happen.

The lump felt as though it was growing larger and larger, cutting off any chance I had at saying cohesive words and then, eventually, forcing me to choke on its presence in my throat.

I knew now that I was imagining. My fears were causing such fantastical things to seem like reality.

One thing, however, that was absolutely positively real was that I wasn't in London anymore, and perhaps I was going crazy.

The first indicator of my insanity was that I went from air-polluted, dark, London streets to a freshly-scented, light, forest in seconds. Unless there was a city forest, and I just hadn't come out of the other side yet, and my fears had warped night into day and moonlight into sun, this explanation seemed plausible.

But I wasn't completely entitled to try to believe this scenario either, with my mind questioning my sanity's constancy.

The second indicator was, as I was running, I began to notice some trees moving. Why this even began to cross my vision as I ran rapidly through a forest, I wasn't sure of that either, and then there were whispers, too. I couldn't tell if they had just appeared on their own, but after a while I began to hear them like I could hear the wind. They were subtle and quiet, but still very much alive.

The third indicator, probably the strongest, was as I was running, regarding the trees and wondering what had become of the world, I had met up with a pack of wolves. As a looked past the trees on my left side, I could see them through the low umbrage. And then one yelled,

"What do you think you're doing here?"

I didn't have the time in that moment to try to process what I had just heard, so I did what I would have done if any large pack of wolves was in my radar, chasing me into what seemed an endless world of soaring trees and overgrowing groundcover.

More and more people had been taken away from that orphanage, and for me, that meant being taken away farther from Sophia, and that couldn't happen. If it did, I'd never see my sister's face again, so my plan to leave that place was set prematurely by nearly two years.

Looking down now from the top branches of the tree I held onto for my life, the lump was still present in my throat. The wolves were at the bottom of the tree, circling, their voices and occasional barks pressing into me as I leaned against the tree's rough trunk.

Either I had gone mad, or the rest of the world had.

Author's Note: I can't tell you how many times I have tried to write this story. Please review if you wished I would continue and tell me what you think!