Making her way through the alleys and rooftops, Stella didn't know whether or not the water running through her body was from her sweat or the water puddle she had fallen onto seconds ago. Either way, it wasn't enough to stop the burning sensation of her body which seemed to exhale steam from everywhere.
How long has it been since she started running? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour?
Jumping from roof to roof, she could only barely hear the shouts of the city's guards chasing her down, with every sound being drowned by her own heartbeat. With a laugh that left visible steam, she turned around to see the barely visible guards' enraged expressions.
Stella gave them a middle finger, taking out a bottle from her pouch and throwing a yellowish liquid towards them.
With a single swing, her blade seemed to light up as it grazed the liquid and set it ablaze. The guards giving chase soon stopped out of fear.
"It's the demon! The demon's power!"
"It's the Sun, not a demon you jerks!" Stella yelled back at the guards, making an angry face before jumping off the roof and running away with a chuckle.
Soon, her heartbeat started to fasten as she looked at the border of the city. After all the years she spent running away, making plans, practicing routes and being imprisoned 37 times, she was finally going to be able to get outside..!
It only felt like a second to her before she got within 50 meters of the border's wall. Only then did she realize she was surrounded by guards from every direction.
It was fine. She had prepared long for this. She crouched down as all the heat from her body swirled around and concentrated into her legs, jumping as hard as she could in the direction of the wall.
The walls were 30 meters tall. There was no way a normal person could jump over it, but Stella was different.
As soon as all the heat got into her legs, she sent out a torrent of fire from her feet, shooting up like a rocket. All the guards below her were watching in horror as they ran away to not get incinerated.
As she surpassed 15 meters in height, she felt her fingertips grow cold and feel like freezing, lifting her hand up to the wall. Going up another 5 meters, she felt her entire arms freezing, trembling from the cold.
With every meter she went up, she felt her body heat being drained more and more as even her legs started to feel cold. Her face only seemed to grow more hopeful, with a wide smile and red eyes shining brightly.
But as soon as she felt her fingertips touch the top of the border, the torrent of fire shot its last ember, stopping completely.
"Ah… I ran out of heat…"
The grasp on the wall soon slipped as she started falling onto the ground, looking up with bitterness filling her heart.
"So close…"
Was the last thing she thought of before being knocked unconscious by a guard.
…
"..Uh. Ah?"
Slowly opening up her eyes, the still drowsy Stella could just barely make out the hazy figure of the city leader's body towering over her. He was taller than any other person in the city, had long black hair shooting out of his head and a cold stare which gave Stella chills. He had thunder patterns engraved on his cheek that every other citizen had, the patterns representing the people of Antares.
His kind and passionate demeanor made him a leader admired by the whole city, but Stella knew that his cold expression meant she had messed up.
"How many times do I have to tell you to stay put?! Are you a goddamn child? I put you in jail, like, 30 different times!"
"You mean, 37…" She directed her face to the side while being yelled at, frowning. She had heard the same thing several times just this year.
As soon as she said that, she could hear one of the guards spitting next to her as he whispered to the others. "The Shaulacity of this bitch…"
"Be careful, or the demon's going to burn you alive! Hehe."
"Shut up!" The leader yelled to the guards, making them stop talking before turning back to Stella. "The point is, I'm telling you to give up on trying to leave to the outside. There's nothing there, no matter what anyone tells you."
"You're lying! I've seen it! A sky that was blue and a giant sun that illuminated everything you could see!" Stella screamed, her eyes burning with a fiery gaze.
"I'm telling you, that was just a hallucination." The leader waved it off like it was nothing. "Listen, Stella. That ability of yours is special. It wasn't made for you to waste your time and life trying to reach for the impossible. It was made for greater purposes."
"I'm not going to war, you dumbass. With these kinds of people on my side, it's easier for me to get shot by one of your people than an enemy." Stella said, with her eyes avoiding the leader's face.
He sighed with a disappointed face. "Talking to you is just useless, huh. Take her back." He said, as the guards soon carried the girl away. "Also, watch your language. It's uncouth for a young lady like you to use vulgar words."
Stella was soon thrown into a small cell, which seemed to have been cleaned recently. She was very familiar with this cell. She had been here dozens of times before, and this was just one of them.
She sighed lightly as the guards walked away. "If it were any other minor, at most you would have talked to their parents and let them go home with a warning.
Do you also think of me as a demon child, Aston?"
Ever since she could remember, the city leader Aston was the only one who ever treated her like a fellow Antares. Everyone else thought of her as the child of a demon, only made to bring destruction to them.
She stared at the cell's small window. Everytime she looked up, all she could see was a pitch black sky with small dots of purple spread everywhere. It was nothing like the sky she had seen from her visions.
A sky filled with an endless light blue, with everything shining under the Sun's radiance.
Ever since she started to awaken the special abilities she had, she had these visions of a place above everything she knew, a place she could only reach if she climbed through the very ends of the world.
But no one would believe her, even when she showed the powers of the Sun to them. All it did was terrify everyone around her, thinking it was a demon trying to coerce them into leaving the city and facing the dangers of the outside.
"I just want to see that beautiful place, where we don't have to fear the darkness anymore…" She could feel tears falling from her eyes, before wiping them off hurriedly. "If they think so lowly of me, at least they should let me leave this place.
I don't even belong here, anyways…"
She stood back up, staring at that window. Her eyes seemed to have reignited with passion as she clutched her fist tightly.
She pointed to the sky through the window, and started yelling at it.
"No matter how many times I fail, no matter how many times they lock me down, I'll just rise again like the sun and try once again. No matter how long it takes, no matter how long this sun inside my heart sets and rises, I'll definitely get out of here and reach the surface!
Be it Antaresian, Shaulan, or Graffin, brace yourselves, because Stella Antares will come flying to you and explode like fireworks!"
And then, as she finished talking, she saw a man from the window.
A man falling down at terminal velocity to the ground, making a huge booming sound from the impact.
"..???"
She quickly lifted herself at the window to look at the man who just fell. He was grunting lightly from the pain, unable to stand up.
His hair was long, messy and black. He wore a mask that covered his nose and mouth, looking like it was made of hard material. His clothes seemed rather heavy and ragged, with some light armor that was broken from the fall. He had a backpack that made clinking noises every time he moved.
"Ugh… What the hell was with that bug… I probably fell way beyond what the rescue team can reach." He sighed lightly, looking up.
"Are you okay?" Stella asked, trying to lift herself so that he could see him better.
The man suddenly shot up and frantically looked around, until he found Stella inside the building. "A human here? How can someone even survive in the Abyss?" He muttered to himself, looking at her with a cautious expression.
"No marks…" When Stella saw the man, she noticed he had no markings on his face, which represented what city he was from.
"Where are you from?" She asked him. "I don't see any markings on your face."
He hesitated for a second, before responding to her reluctantly. "I'm from the surface." He pointed upwards with his finger. "Honestly, I didn't know there were any people around here. Just the corruption alone should be enough to kill you."
Stella's eyes seemed to light up as she jumped excitedly, ignoring the latter half of what he said. "Really? You're really from the surface? I knew it! I knew it!"
"Take that, Aston!" Getting confirmation for the first time in so many years made her feel so happy that she started shadow boxing the air, imagining she was beating up all the people who doubted her in the past.
"Uh…" The man approached the window, putting his face close to it. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Ah, ignore what just happened.." Stella came back to her senses as she heard his voice again, turning around and getting closer to him. "I'm just happy to know there's actually people on the surface."
When she got close to him, the man made a surprised expression as he took a closer look at her face. "What are these marks on your cheeks?"
"Everyone in Antares is born with these marks on their cheeks. It helps you identify people from other cities. Does the surface not have any of these?"
He shook his head. "No, not at all. Also, they kinda remind me of lightning bolts."
Stella made a confused face. "What's a lightning bolt?"
"Well…" He put his fingers on his cheek, deep in thought. "When it rains on the surface, the electrical charge in the clouds gets attracted to the charges in the ground, making lightning bolts."
As soon as he finished talking, he looked back at Stella, who looked at him excitedly. "Tell me more! I want to know everything about the surface!"
…
Several hours had passed until they had met.
"Oh, you can also see rainbows after it rains. They're huge, huge multicolored arcs you can see in the sky. Haha, when I was little, I used to believe you would find gold if you reached the end of a rainbow."
"Aah… I wish I was there…" Stella said, sighing.
"..Me too." The man, too, seemed down. "I wish I hadn't come in here. I took on a job to explore the Abyss to pay for my daughter's college tuition, but I didn't expect to fall so deep inside." He sighed, looking at the sky as he reached his hands upwards.
"My parents, wife and daughter are still there waiting for me to come back. If they knew my current situation, they'd probably cry and mourn for my loss before I even died."
Stella stared at him in silence for a while. She seemed deep in thought, before asking him with a serious tone.
"Do you want to escape together?"
"..How could I even trust you?" He answered, though his tone of voice seemed to have sorrow on it. "The Abyss has so many terrifying dangers that I can barely even start talking about. You've been locked up in there for a reason, what if you're just a shapeshifter taking the appearance of a human?"
Before he could keep talking, he felt the temperature rise as the insides of the cell started glowing. The wall separating the two of them was quickly blown up, fragments of stone flying everywhere.
All he saw was a girl surrounded by flames. From within her eyes he could see the image of the sun burning away.
"This is why I'm locked up. See, I've been born with this kind of power that terrifies everyone around me. They think I'm a demon, so they chastise me and lock me up away from everyone. Are you also one of these people, who think I'm nothing but a child of the demon?"
He stared at her in shock for a good few seconds. It wasn't simply because she had this ability, but more so because he knew exactly what he had felt when she used her ability.
It was Divinity. That wasn't just an ability, it was a blessing from a deity.
"..Say, what's your name?" The man asked her.
"Stella. Stella Antares. What about yours?"
"Rigel Osmon."
He raised his hand in her direction, with her taking it and shaking hands.
"I'll believe in you. No, I'll believe in the sun inside you."