Reality is a cage, much like the ones birds are born into, never knowing they were meant for the sky. Some accept the bars; others spend a lifetime looking for the key, only to realize the lock was never on the outside. It was within.
Gazelle stood before the towering window of her study, her dark brown hair tangling in the draft that seeped through the glass. Outside, the world was gray, a reflection of the ink that stained her fingertips, but inside, the chaos was vibrant, loud, and consuming. It was a familiar chaos—a storm she had learned to weather, though tonight, the thunder seemed to roll directly beneath her ribs.
She looked down at the manuscript on her desk. The pages were filled with words she didn't remember writing, scenes of a forest she had never visited, and a man she had never met. Or so she told herself.
"I didn't create you," she whispered to the empty room, her voice trembling.
But the silence that answered her was heavy, pregnant with the accusation of a presence she couldn't see but could feel in every shadow. A pair of sharp brown eyes haunted the corners of her mind—eyes that held no warmth, only a depth that terrified her. They were the eyes of an enemy, yet they pulled at her soul with the force of a gravity she couldn't resist.
He was supposed to be a figment of ink and paper. A character. A shadow on a page. But shadows, she was learning, had a way of detaching themselves from the objects that cast them.
Gazelle turned away from the desk, her hand drifting to her neck, tracing the line of an old ache that throbbed whenever the rain approached. She needed to leave. The walls of this house, once her sanctuary, were closing in. They felt like the survival training grounds of her childhood—a place of relentless expectation.
A memory surfaced, unbidden and sharp as a blade. Her father's voice, rough like gravel, barking orders in the cold morning air. "Pull," he would demand, his hand heavy on her small shoulder. "Until your fingers bleed. Until you forget what pain is."
She looked at her hands now. They were smooth, the scars of childhood faded but not forgotten. She had loathed him then. Loathed the bow, the arrow, the senseless violence of hunting things that had done nothing but exist. She had sworn, with the hot, angry tears of a child, that she would never master the weapon. She would never be the daughter he shaped.
And yet, as she moved through the room, packing a small bag, her hand instinctively brushed against the recurve bow hanging on the wall. It was a beautiful, deadly thing. She hesitated, her fingers hovering over the wood. The chaos within her clawed deep, a wild animal seeking release. In this world of paper illusions, the bow was the only thing that felt real. It was a tether to a brutal truth: survival wasn't a choice; it was a necessity.
With a heavy sigh, she slung the bow across her back. She grabbed a quiver of arrows, the weight familiar and grounding. If she was going to find him—if she was going to hunt a ghost that had walked out of her dreams and into reality—she needed to be more than just a writer. She needed to be the hunter her father had forged.
She slipped out of the house under the cover of a gathering storm. The city was asleep, but in the distance, the lights of the Circus flickered like dying stars. Gazelle paused, watching the glow. She knew that place. She knew of the girl with the golden hair who worked there—Alice.
Gazelle had watched Alice from afar once, a girl who hid behind a veil of flowers, believing she could understand the whispers of every bloom. Alice, who had grown up thinking cages were homes because she had never seen a bird fly free. Gazelle felt a pang of kinship with the florist. Were they not the same? Alice wore the cage of the Circus; Gazelle wore the cage of her own fiction. Both of them pretending they didn't have wings, simply because they were terrified of the fall.
"We are all prisoners of something," Gazelle murmured, turning her back on the city lights.
She walked until the cobblestones turned to dirt, and the manicured gardens gave way to the wild, untamed embrace of the forest. This was where the story led. She knew it because she hadn't written it—she was living it.
The forest was dense, ancient, and indifferent to her presence. Cobwebs stretched like silver lace between the trees, dew clinging to them like jewels. Gazelle moved carefully, ducking beneath the strands. She never brushed them away. Unlike others who tore through the world demanding space, she understood nature's delicate balance. To disturb a web was to destroy a home, a labor of patience and survival. She refused to be another destructive force in a world already brimming with ruin.
Hunger would come later, she knew. The cold would try to seep into her bones. But she was ready. She had bathed in streams colder than this air; she had stood unfazed by downpours that sent stronger men running for cover. Her father's cruelty had given her armor she hadn't asked for, but would now use.
Deep in the woods, she found it. The hut.
It stood silent and abandoned, reclaimed by ivy and moss. The previous owner must have been an artist; even from the outside, the place smelled of turpentine and old dreams. Gazelle pushed the door open, the hinges groaning in protest.
Inside, the storage room was brimming with paintings—canvases stacked against walls, covered in dust sheets like sleeping ghosts. She ran a finger over a table, disturbing the layer of time. This would be her sanctuary. A place to keep herself sane. A place to silence the screams in her head that sounded suspiciously like a man telling her she had no place in her own story.
She set her bag down. The bow clattered against the wooden floor.
For the next few weeks, this hut would be her observatory, and the forest her hunting ground. Not for animals—though she would hunt them when the hunger gnawed too deep, apologizing to their lifeless forms, gripping their legs and pulling arrows free with the practiced ease of a killer she never wanted to be—but for him.
The Raven-haired man.
She walked to the window, staring out into the encroaching darkness. Why had he come? Why now?
"I was always there," his voice echoed in her memory, sharp as steel, soft as shadows. "You just never saw me."
A shiver ran down her spine, unrelated to the cold. She had spent a lifetime creating worlds, believing she was the god of her own little universe. But gods didn't bleed. Gods didn't feel the ache of old injuries when the rain drummed against the earth. And gods certainly didn't fall in love with the monsters they created to haunt their heroines.
Gazelle picked up a blank canvas from the corner and set it on the easel. She found a set of dried paints, adding water from her flask to revive them. She needed to see him. If he wouldn't show himself in the forest, she would drag him out of her mind and onto the canvas.
She began to paint.
She painted the chaos. She painted the storm. She painted the unbearable days when pain clawed too deeply, and the only way to soothe the ache was to uproot something beautiful—a daisy, a sunflower—just to feel control over life and death. A feeble attempt to ease the turmoil within.
But mostly, she painted eyes. Sharp, brown eyes that pinned her in place. Eyes that accused her of being a fraud in her own life.
Days turned into weeks. The search began.
Every morning, she would rise with the sun, wash in the stream, and walk the forest paths. She plucked daisies, cradling them gently, whispering to the wind. She questioned the trees, the wind, and the few terrified souls she encountered on the edge of the woods.
"Have you seen him?" she would beg, desperation clawing at her throat. "Tall. Raven hair. Eyes that see everything."
But the travelers would only look at her with pity and fear. They saw a woman with wild hair and mud on her hem, a bow slung over her back, talking of ghosts. They thought she was mad. They avoided her. They ran.
Let them run, Gazelle thought as she sat by the stream one evening, watching the water lap at her waist. Let them think she was crazy. They didn't know that madness was just another kind of awareness. They didn't know that the man she hunted had regained consciousness, breaking the fundamental law of their existence.
She looked up at the sky, watching the clouds part after a storm. The sun kissed her skin, and for a moment, the weight of her quest lifted. She smiled—a raw, unpracticed smile. It felt strange on her lips, foreign.
"I will find you," she whispered to the forest, to the "him" who was out there, watching, waiting. "I didn't create you, perhaps. But I will finish this story."
She stood up, water dripping from her clothes, unfazed. She was tough. She was the daughter of a man who broke fingers to build character. She was the writer who had fallen into her own fiction.
Gazelle turned back towards the hut, where a painting of a raven-haired man waited to be finished, and where a fury was building that would soon see that canvas flung across the room.
But that was a scene for tomorrow. For now, there was only the hunt, the silence of the flowers she refused to disturb, and the magnetic pull of a pair of brown eyes that had never, not once, looked at her with love.
Not yet.