[TWWM] Those Connected by Fate

Location: India

For hours she lie in the street, unable to wrap her mind around everything. Her father was gone. Her fiancé couldn't see her. Her classmates thought she'd been kidnapped, or worse... Her home was gone, her ... self was gone... she had nothing. Long past tears, she remained, curled up in the middle of the street. Life carried on around her. Merchants and students traveled the road with ease, stepping right through her, as if she didn't exist. She felt numb. She felt empty, except for a strange throbbing feeling deep within her. It seemed to tug, stir her to action. But what? It felt like homesick, but home was gone. Just an empty ache remained.

She ignored it for a while, until by either boredom or having nothing else to do really, she appeased it. Climbing to her feet, head hung low, she followed the pull blindly. Her tears were spent, but she didn't care to focus. Her eyes seemed foggy and unfocused, she absentmindedly noticed she was unable to blink. It felt strange, but she was too numb to investigate further. She found herself slowly trodding back through the town, back past the dorm building, and across the courtyard. The tables sat untouched, grapes and leaves, wilted from a day baking in the sun, unexamined, unsketched. The sun was setting now, casting long eerie shadows across the silent courtyard. Her feet carried her back into the vineyard, back towards that awful spot she'd been changed. Realizing this, she paused for a moment, balking at the idea of returning.

"Why should I go back there?" she argued with herself, "Why should you stay here though...?"
"Maybe Kaito will see me..." but she knew better. "You know he won't. He didn't even notice you in the street."
"I could stay at the dorm and wait." she thought, "but...wait for what..."
The pull wouldn't leave, it tugged at her, drew her up the hill and down the next. As she trudged deeper into the vines, the overgrown trees began to loom above her. She kept walking, too tired and drained to fight the pull. It led her deeper. As she passed the trees, a familiar, yet strange weight hung from her again, and she knew the grapevines had returned. She felt foolish to have thought she was changing back earlier... they had only left her because she was far from... this?... far from this pull. Without even trying, it led her back, to the exact spot where she'd been transformed. The moon was rising by now, her long and sullen trek having burned the last of the daylight, and left only the silver wash once more. Pale moonlight to coat the surface of this world, a world that seemed intensely hollow and lonely now. Even more so when she realized the tiny pink esk was gone. She had shooed her away earlier, banished for transforming her, for turning her into this... but now, sitting in the darkness, she stared at where the esk had sat, and cried again. 

--

That night, she slept fitfully, tortured by nightmares and memories that she'd long since forgotten. She imagined what it must of been like for the mask, having been thrust into being a spirit as well, just as she had. Had she hurt the same? Hurt without her there? That dance felt eons away... the mask had just been a trinket to her, something she'd never even thought twice about, given the intensity of the other issues in her life. As her mind began to wander from her own plight, to the similar situation she'd left the mask to, she felt even more pain. She curled up into a ball, tightly willing the world to leave her alone, wishing the pain would go away. It was thus that the sun found her the next morning, coiled tightly, like the grape vines she'd become part of. As the warm rays trailed across her fur, she pulled herself up into consciousness again, and stretched. 

--

She rose her head and turned to look at the large plump grapes that tumbled from her back. She sat, pondering them, unmoving, soaking in the warmth of the sun luxuriously. The long night seemed to have exhausted all the overflowing emotions she'd struggled against, leaving her feeling calm, but empty. The sun's rays changed angle, slowly but surely, tracing their dappled pools of gold across her body, lighting her shoulders, then her back, trailing down her new form. She lay there for hours, just watching, seeming to have fallen into meditation. Finally though, she roused herself from the daydream, climbing slowly to her feet. The way her grapes had disappeared the day before is what she'd been thinking of, and she decided to test the limits.

Slowly, as she had nowhere else to be, she walked back towards town. 

--

Dusk came and went again, and she found herself thinking that perhaps she'd transcended time itself. In the silver moonlight she reached the edge of the trees that had overgrown the abandoned rows of vines. As she left their cover, she watched the grapes carefully. The further she went from the forested area, they began to fade into nonexistence, first becoming translucent and ghostly, before finally disappearing entirely. She turned back and went the other direction. Hours later, she found herself deep in the forest, the vineyard's edge having long been past, and yet the grapes remained. 'It must be the trees...' she thought, thinking back to what the small pink esk had said before, that she was now a... spirit of the forest?
'That must be it then, its not the vineyard, its the forest.' she looked upward at the shadowy trees, silver and milky white at the edges where the moonlight danced. Insects hummed and she could hear frogs in the distance.
'Have I ever really....' she thought, a quiet amazement washing over her. 'Have I ever been in a forest like this?'
She thought back to her childhood in France, the hustle and bustle of town life, and then onward to her teenage and adult life, swept up in the currents of wealth and status, and even with the joy of the vineyards, she'd never really been in a forest like this. This was something new, but it felt right. It felt, deep... she padded slowly through the towering trees, evergreen and ones she'd never even heard of before. It was warm and mossy, the smell of the earth rose to greet her as she tiptoed through her new realm.

Deeper and deeper she trekked, fading in and out of consciousness as she allowed herself to drift into meditation. At one point, she awoke to discover she'd been floating, a fact that gave her a bit of a fright at first, until she realized she could control it entirely. This calmed her further, and she spent the next hours practicing the act, swimming gracefully through the canopy, or floating just above the forest floor, her tail floating gently below her, twirling in the breeze. As the sun began to rise once more, a cycle that seemed shorter than it had been as a human, she found herself at another edge of the forest, this time overlooking a wide field of green grains, rolling and rippling in the wind. She floated out across the field, and once more, felt the grapes fade away. She dipped a bit towards the earth, finding it harder to float out here. 

'Hmm,' she thought, 'it appears that the forest is where i am strongest.'

She turned back, returning to the safty of their shadows. The wave of relief she felt when her vines returned seemed strange to her. She looked them over for a moment, puzzled why their departure seemed to upset her. 'I'm..." she struggled to put her thoughts in order. "I think I'll stay in the forest..."
Additionally, the homesick pull was but a whisper here. It only got irritating when she left the forest. It all seemed complex and strange to her, but all she knew was that the forest felt like her home now, no matter what she wanted before. As the moon dipped down below the horizon, the sky began to turn pink, the sunlight breaking across the edge of the sky, creating deep shadows that cut across everything. She sighed, turning to drift back into the forest, letting it wrap her in its mossy embrace.