Chrome: Chapter 2

The Ballad of Cage & Smoke

The Ballad Continues…

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CHAPTER 2

Her name was Smoke.

They spoke of her in twilight songs, around roaring bonfires, under milky skies bloated with clouds. She was more wind than witch, more witch than woman. Her name was a sword oiled with blood, salt, and tears.

But before she was more, she was just a girl.

A girl, and a ghost.

A storm most of all.

She had arrived before her brother, on wings of hate and fear. Her advent was quiet, fierce, a gurgle in a mountain stream, a pebble beneath a river’s wrath. The schoolyard was empty when she landed, the fragile humans tucked in for sleep. She had twitched left and right, an animal, a predator, and the security cameras had burst at her sight.

Her glaring beauty didn’t belong in this world. Eyes like black pearls, turbulent, seething, a thousand generations of ancient secrets hidden in their squall. Starlight hair, glossy and glittering, an unspooled scarf of silver-white fog. And her skin, slate gray, a dancing shimmer of gemstone flesh—it was unearthly.

Unnatural.

The girl moved like the sea, fluid, liquid, the ocean given form. A riptide of reckoning. A ballerina of death. Every horror of every underworld carbonized into diamonds and coal.

She understood at once. How odd she was. How different. How strange. She cradled her anomaly, fueling mystery with hide-and-seek sorcery. A spell here. A charm, a hex. She knew what she was and savored the breach. Volatile. Volcanic. Fire and ashes, soil and dirt. The beginning, the end, and everything in between.

But she was just a girl.

A girl, and a ghost.

A storm most of all.

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We Await Your Return…

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