Chương 31: “How She Lived"

Drip. Seven days… no. Six left? Celestia lay on the stone floor of the cell, her body curled on its side with one arm tucked beneath her head. Her golden hair, once immaculate, had dulled into a tangled curtain across the ground. Her crimson eyes were open but unfocused, fixed on nothing. She had stopped moving two days ago. Maybe three. In the beginning, she had been methodical. The dripping sound that had once grated on her nerves turned out to be the only thing keeping her alive.

She traced it to a crack in the far corner of the ceiling where condensation gathered and fell in a slow, rhythmic beat. By leaning her spear's scabbard between the corner of the wall, she fashioned a crude collector. It staved off the worst of the dehydration. Hunger, however, was a different beast. Water could trick her stomach, but eventually the emptiness and pain from hunger returned two-fold. She had kept track of time initially.

Each morning, weak light filtered through the barred window, and each evening it dimmed to the pale glow of the moon outside. After each sunset, she used her spear to make a small scratch on her dress-armor. A notch for each day survived. On the sixth morning, Celestia stopped moving. She had been sitting against the wall when the dizziness suddenly assailed her. It was as though the floor had tilted sideways and the ceiling had swapped places with the ground.

The next time she woke up, the light from the window had changed. A few hours had probably passed. Maybe even more. She didn't bother sitting up this time. Celestia had never missed a meal. Not in this world, and before this world? In her previous life? She almost laughed. She had never missed a meal there either. But this, this hollow, gnawing absence that she felt in her bones and made her limbs feel as though they had been filled with wet sand, this was new. Her body was cannibalizing itself.

She could feel it in the tremor of her fingers; her thoughts moved slower than they should, as though her brain was rationing its own energy. Drip. She stared at the ceiling. The stone was dark and featureless. In the absence of anything else, her mind wandered backward. Back to her life before. * Slap! Her earliest and strongest memory of her mother was from kindergarten. She had been five, standing in the doorway of their lavish mansion with a worksheet in her small hands.

The paper had red marks on it; there were a few mistakes here and there, but her mother's face had already made its judgment the moment she saw anything less than perfection.

"What is this?" Her mother's voice sounded angry.

"You got six wrong. Is that acceptable to you?"

"M-mom?" Slap! The second slap made her head turn sideways as she felt her cheek burn.

"Is this your best?" Her mother's voice climbed half a register.

"If this is your best, then what are we raising you in this family for?" Even at five, she understood instinctively that crying would only make it worse. So she resolved to do better. And she did. Grade after grade, she climbed her year's ranks. She started studying longer, she slept less, asked more questions in class, and brought home papers with fewer and fewer red marks until, one day, there were none at all.

"Mom! Mom, look!" Seven, maybe eight years old, she held the paper out with both hands, her face bright with the hope that she would finally get the approval and praise she had always wanted. Her mother sat on the couch, legs crossed, flipping through a magazine. She glanced up.

"Hm?" A brief flicker of her eyes toward the paper.

"Yeah. Yeah, good." She turned the page.

"But Mom, I got everything right this time! Every single—""I saw." A wave of the hand, a gesture one uses to shoo a fly.

"Go do your homework for tomorrow." ████████ stood there for a while longer, the paper still extended, before lowering it to her side.

'Maybe it's not good enough.' She carried that thought through elementary school, where she became top of her class. Through middle school, where she maintained that a studious habit that caused her to be alienated from most of her peers. Excellence was the baseline. Anything below it was met with her mother's hand. Her father on the other hand… he was more like a ghost in her life. That was the most honest way to describe him. He worked late and slept at the office.

On the rare nights he came home, he would disappear into the bedroom without a word. She could count on one hand the number of full conversations they'd shared before she turned thirteen. He had simply opted out of the role of fatherhood entirely. Her life moved normally until the last day of middle school. She had been in one of the stalls in the girls' restroom, checking her phone after doing her business. The restroom was empty and quiet, until the door swung open and a cluster of familiar voices spilled in.

She recognized them immediately. Marianna, Hazel, Yuni, and her best friend, Rachel. She almost pushed the stall door open to greet them. Her hand was already about to unlock the stall door when Marianna's voice cut through the ambient noise of running faucets and shuffling shoes.

"So, are you guys still going to keep in touch with ████████ in high school?" There was a pause. Hazel was the first to respond.

"Oh, yeah, definitely. She's such a sucker."

"Right?" Marianna's voice came again.

"Like, last month for my birthday? That skincare set she got me? I looked it up. It's super expensive and a limited edition."

"She got me that JC bag," Yuni added.

"Only a few days after I posted about it; I didn't even ask her directly, I just mentioned it once and she showed up with it the next week."

"That's what I'm saying. You just have to drop a hint and she buys it." Then there was laughter. The bright and cheery kind found in a group of bantering friends. But to ████████, she wanted to vomit.

"Honestly though," Hazel continued, "hanging out with her is exhausting. She's so intense about everything. Like, we'll be at lunch and she's reviewing flashcards. And if you try to talk to her about anything that isn't school, she just gets this look on her face like you're wasting her time."

"She literally corrected my grammar in a text message once," Yuni said flatly.

"Who does that?"

"Her highness thinks she's better than us normies," Marianna replied. More laughter. Then Rachel's voice.

"I mean… she's not that bad." Was her best friend going to protect her?

"But yeah, she's a lot. I just smile and nod most of the time. She got me tickets to that new band the other week. You just need to tolerate her." She stood in the stall. Her fingers had tightened around the handle.

'This was how they thought of me? This whole time? Just a walking wallet? A rich weirdo they put up with because I bought them things?' Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. The faucet turned off, paper towels were pulled from the dispenser, and the girls left, their voices fading down the hallway, still laughing about something she couldn't hear anymore. She didn't come out of that stall for a long time, disillusioned by the relationships she thought was real.

This was why she became a different girl in high school entirely. She stopped studying and shoved her textbooks to the bottom of her shelf, and never opened them again. She cut her hair, started skipping class, and fell in with the group that smoked behind the gymnasium and talked back to teachers. This gave her courage to talk back to her mother for the first time in her life, the slap came as expected. But this time, she didn't look away.

She stared directly into her mother's eyes, and from then on, the slap never came again. And the strangest part? None of it mattered. Even when she stopped trying, with her grades at the bottom of the barrel, she still passed without effort. Even when she caused problems, no one could touch her. After she shoved a girl in the hallway once, hard enough to send her stumbling into a row of lockers, the girl reported it.

The school called her in, looked at the name on her file, looked at the donation records attached to that name, and sent her back to class with a just a light warning. Soon after, she slapped a girl across the face in front of a dozen witnesses because the girl had accidentally spilled juice on her blouse. The girl's cheek had gone red instantly and the teachers saw it happen. The same again. There was no suspension or a formal reprimand.

Just a short conversation in an office where she was told to "be more mindful." Her family's wealth and status was a wall. She could do anything and the consequences would simply bounce off. It wasn't until her final year that an incident happened that the school couldn't just gloss over. There was a transfer student who looked like Rachel. It was enough to make something twist inside her chest every time she saw her.

So she started bullying her; exclusion from group activities, trash stuffed insider her shoe locker, wet gym clothes, and graffiti on her desk. She didn't mean to take it as far as it went. How was she supposed to know? The school counselor's office was small. She sat in one of two chairs facing the desk. Her father sat in the other. He had arrived twenty minutes earlier in a black car, wearing a suit she'd never seen before. It had occurred to her that she didn't even know what he usually wore to work.

The counselor, a thin man with glasses and a receding hairline, held a letter in both hands. His fingers were trembling.

"In this letter," he began talking, "████████ was named." He set the letter down.

"The student survived, thankfully. She jumped from the fifth floor. She's currently in intensive care." Her father did not look at her. Instead, he looked at the counselor.

"I sincerely apologize for the trouble my daughter has caused," he said, "I'd like to cover the full cost of the young lady's medical treatment." He reached into his jacket and produced a business card, placing it on the desk between them.

"Please pass this along to her parents. I'd like to speak with them personally." The counselor nodded. Her father reached into his jacket once more and set a thick envelope beside the business card.

"I trust," her father said, "that this matter can be handled with the appropriate discretion. News of this would be damaging to all parties involved." The counselor's head bobbed up and down.

"Of course. Of course, absolutely. You have my word." They both stood and the counselor bowed. Her father buttoned his jacket and walked to the door. She followed after him. In the hallway, he did not turn around or slow down walking. Without looking at her, he spoke, "Make sure you don't waste my time again." She stopped following him but his footsteps continued forward, each one growing quieter as the distance between them widened. She listened until the sound disappeared entirely.

Then she walked back to class as if nothing had happened. The next part of her life she remembered was standing alone in a gymnasium full of people. Graduation day. Hundreds of students in matching gowns filed across the stage one by one while families clapped and cried, holding up phones to capture the moment. Bouquets of flowers dotted the audience like patches of color in a grey field. Fathers stood proudly, looking at their now-grown children.

Mothers dabbed their eyes with tissues and whispered to one another about how fast the years had gone. She walked across the stage, received her diploma, and walked off. No one clapped for her specifically. No one was waiting in the crowd with a bouquet or a camera. Her mother or father hadn't come. She wasn't surprised by either absence; her mother had a luncheon she deemed more important, and her father, well, she had already stopped expecting him to show up to anything in her life.

She stood outside the gymnasium afterward, diploma in hand, watching other graduates embrace their families. A girl nearby was crying into her mother's shoulder, overwhelmed by the occasion. She looked down at the diploma in her hands. Then she folded it, slipped it into her bag, and left. On the car ride home, she stared out the window and allowed herself to think clearly about the shape of her life. Money. That was the axis around which everything turned. It always had been.

Her mother had never seen her as a daughter; she was an investment, a vessel for the family name, something to be polished and positioned until the right suitor from the right conglomerate came along to make the merger worthwhile. Her father had never seen her at all. His time was currency, and she had never generated enough return to justify the expenditure. Her so-called friends in middle school had tolerated her because she was generous with her wallet.

The school had tolerated her violence because her family was generous with theirs. Even the counselor's trembling hands had steadied remarkably fast once that envelope appeared. Every single relationship she had ever known could be reduced to a transaction.

'Fine,' she thought, watching the city blur past the window.

'Then I'll stop expecting anything else.' The moment she accepted that, something inside her stopped hurting. Next in her life was college. She enrolled in business administration and finance, and she approached it with the same intensity she had once reserved for perfect grades, except this time, the motivation was different.

Her grades returned, but they were a byproduct; the real work happened outside the classroom at networking events disguised as charity galas, at retreats marketed as educational workshops, at after-parties where handshakes with the right people could net you more than hard work. Acquaintances accumulated.

"Friends" materialized around her again, people who laughed at her jokes and never once suspected that she had already discerned their value. Suitors appeared too, sons of executives and heirs of regional firms, each one extending an arm at a banquet with one eye on her face and the other on her family's portfolio. She smiled at all of them. She entertained all of them. And she trusted none of them.

She graduated near the top of her class and immediately leveraged her familial connections to secure a position as CEO of a small, struggling company. While running it, she enrolled in a master's program in business administration. Within just a few years, she had turned that small company into something unrecognizable. Revenue multiplied and the workforce expanded. By the time she was twenty-five, she had built a reputation in the corporate world that existed entirely independent of her family's name.

And then, her parents appeared in her life again. Her father suddenly had time in his schedule. He called her and suggested they have dinner. His voice sounded pleasant, as though they had always been close and this was simply the next in a long line of meals together. Her mother was worse. During dinners that had previously been silent or hostile, she now overflowed with warmth. She complimented the dress she wore. She asked about her work with bright, eager curiosity.

She even grabbed her hand and said, "I always knew you'd do something remarkable." But ████████ had simply smiled and thanked her. And felt nothing. Because she saw them clearly now. Her mother wanted credit for the flower without having watered the soil. Her father's sudden interest was an investor finally noticing a stock he'd forgotten he owned had skyrocketed in value. They were materialistic, opportunistic, and artificial. Her life eventually changed direction.

She didn't remember how, when, and where it was, exactly. Somewhere in Southeast Asia, maybe, or South America. A country where the roads were unpaved and the children wore ripped clothes that had been washed so many times the colors had bled away. She had gone for a corporate event, some philanthropic showcase tied to her company's outreach initiative. But there had been a moment. A food distribution line, organized as part of a public event.

She had handed a meal to a child, a boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, with dirt on his knees and mismatched slippers. He had looked up at her and smiled. It was a pure smile, one filled with joy. She felt something in her chest, a warmth she couldn't exactly describe. She thought about that smile and those of many others who had been happy to receive food that day for weeks afterward. And then she started her first nonprofit organization, focused on food supply and basic necessities for communities that had neither.

Then a second. Then a third. She personally oversaw supply chains, hired local staff, and visited distribution sites whenever her schedule allowed. For the first time in her life, she wanted to make something genuine. And then she died the next year, at the age of 26. Was it karma? After taking everything for granted, when she was on the cusp of something genuine… she was transmigrated into this world. A world of platitudes; a world created with the disingenuity for money. Was she going to die again? Here?

In this empty cell? Drip. Her eyes moved. Slowly, with labored effort, Celestia turned her head toward the corner of the cell. The spear sheath was still there collecting water. She tried to stand, but couldn't. What her only choice left was something more primitive than walking, an ugly, graceless crawl across cold stone. Even though the distance was short. It felt like miles. When she reached the sheath, her hands were shaking.

She reached for the scabbard with both hands, trying to steady it, trying to bring it to her lips. Her fingers slipped and the makeshift container tipped. The water, her water, the small, precious pool she had spent hours collecting drop by drop by drop, spilled across the stone floor. She stared at the wet stone...... For a moment, it was just the silence of a girl lying on a floor watching the only thing keeping her alive spill on the ground. I… I… I won't die here.

'I won't die here. Not like this. Not before I—' Before she what? Before she found something genuine again? Before she earned a life worth more than the one she'd wasted? Before she proved that this second chance, this absurd, impossible second life inside a story she once mocked, meant something? She didn't finish the thought, she lowered her face to the ground and licked the water off the hard floor. On her stomach, tongue against the floor, lapping like an animal.