Broken Chains

Life was all about taking leaps of faith.

Whether you take a leap and talk with somebody over things that are dear to you or whether you try to make a dream come true, everything is a leap, a challenge to overcome.

Sadly, many people always took the easiest way out, avoiding any and all situations where they would have to do something that bore risks.

More than once Scarlet too had taken the easier way out, more than once she had shied away from trying to make her dream come true because of all the potential disasters such an action could invite.

But not today.

As the dim light of the gleaming moose the Gremlins used slowly started shining through the window of her stone house, Scarlet began her last day at home.

Her father had already left the house, but her mother only needed to go to work later and as such she found her in the kitchen.

As young as she was, Scarlet still knew about the consequences of what she would do. She knew how she would hurt her father and make her mother despair, but still, she needed to do this. Her young heart demanded it.

For over half a year she had prepared, had smuggled all the things she thought she could need out of the Gremlin village and stored it in a hidden cave. The preparation for her trip had been finished about a week ago, but still Scarlet had felt something was missing.

She would need to make her parents understand what had happened. But she couldn’t tell them directly as they wouldn’t let her go in that case.

And as Scarlet couldn’t write, not only because of her age, but because in the whole Gremlin village there were not more than five people that could write, she had started to paint and draw.

First, she had painted the sky, or at least as she imagined the sky, and tried to transfer all her longing and desperate need into that picture. Then she had made a map, on which she was climbing upwards through the eternal ice. These two pictures were meant to show where she was going.

After that she painted one last picture of her parents back in their small house, where they lived their life as happy and safe as could possibly be. She drew them happy and safe, but without their daughter.

But now, after drawing all these things, throwing away one messed up picture after another. It was time to go, and as Scarlet got ready to leave, she did not know what to feel.

Adventure, freedom and the sky awaited, but her family would be left behind.

A foolish trade, as many without family would tell her about any day in the week, but a trade Scarlet was willing to enact nothing less. Here, in the stagnating Gremlin village, where day in day out nothing new, nothing interesting happened, she would wither away before even reaching the prime of her life.

She was not willing to do that.

As such, Scarlet now slowly got up from her bed and tried to do the same things she did every other morning. But still, she couldn’t completely hide the fact that something was amiss.

She was fidgety all the time and even though she knew it could be a reason to suspect something she tried to take more time for her family.

It was only around the middle of the day, that it was finally time. As was the normal habit, Scarlet would have about three hours for herself around that time and nobody would suspect anything for some time.

After hugging her parents one final time as they went to work again after having been home for lunch Scarlet hid the pictures under her bed sheet and left her home for the last nine years.

Without looking back, she started walking out of the village, treading the path to her hideout she had walked so many times already. Many times, she looked back, expecting to see someone following her, but there was nobody.

She was alone.

Then finally she reached her hideout, squeezing through a narrow gap and removing a few stones she always used to block the way.

It was a small cavern, not more than five by five Gremlin feet, but it was more than enough for Scarlet’s pursues. Sometime ago, the cavern still had been stuffed full of many different things she wanted to bring on her journey, but not anymore.

Now there were only three things.

A stack of clothes, fitting for a journey like this. A backpack, seemingly much too big for her small form and a lonely picture lying on a small podesta of dried moose.

Soon Scarlet had changed her clothes and with a well-trained effort she managed to swing the backpack onto her small form. After that, she bent over and carefully took the picture, looked at it for a while, removed a lonely tear from her left cheek and stored it in a pocket right over her heart made specially for it.

It was finally time, she was leaving.

Straightening her back and straining her legs under the already draining wight of the backpack, she slowly started squeezing through the gap in the cave. Or at least she tried, after some time she needed to concede that she would not be able to squeeze through with the backpack on her back.

Soon, some twenty minutes later it was finally truly time to leave. Now, standing before the cave Scarlet was ready.

Slowly, taking one step after another, she started to walk into the dark tunnels of the eternal ice of Pandora.

In those dark tunnels untold secrets awaited, whether it where the ruins of ancient societies or the treasure chests of great wars, the eternal ice had it all. Of course, there were not only treasures hidden in the eternal ice though, sealed in caverns that had not seen a living soul for eons upon eons horrors beyond imagination awaited to be found and released.

Most important of all though, these tunnels lead to a place no Gremlin in known history had ever tread, the surface.