Forbidden Loves & Battered Stories. [Another Original Story]

This tale begins with a story of forbidden love. Love between a simple, though admittedly beautiful human woman, and one of the great angels of lore, Arham. Whether by chance or by fate, the two crossed paths just as Gracea was attempting to flee from an enraged ex-lover. Arham’s inhuman beauty, charm, and seemingly boundless kindness enraptured Gracea’s heart like no mortal could. If ever the term, ‘love at first sight’ applied, it was then. The two were smitten with one another and never wanted to be parted. For a time, life for Gracea, Arham, and their newborn daughter was more perfect than either of them could have dare hoped. The daughter’s name was Enora Louell, and she possessed every bit of unearthly beauty, grace, and kindness as her father, though she favored her mother’s features. The two loved their daughter every bit as much as they loved each other. Arham especially doted on the girl, every night before she slept, he’d read her stories from a curiously locked book he kept. Fanciful tales of angels and heroes and other such wondrous things. Neither Gracea, nor the young child had any clue about Arham’s true origins, as it was quite a taboo among the angels to become involved in the affairs of humans. Unfortunately, the seemingly boundless happiness of the family was not something that would last. Right around the young girl’s fifth birthday, Arham seemed to vanish, never to return. His things were gone, and the only trace that he had been there was a small, curiously shaped locket that he’d left for his daughter that contained a picture of Enora and a princely looking angel, who appeared rather like her father. In time, Gracea went all but mad with grief, and somehow landed herself with another man, something that her child had never quite understood, nor forgiven her for. The man was rough, loud, and a drunkard. As the years past, he got worse, and Gracea somehow managed to turn a blind eye to what was going on, no matter how her daughter pleaded. He would scream, and even beat her if he were angry or drunk enough. Unsurprisingly he didn’t like how she reacted to his actions, between crying and screaming and just about anything else she did. He resorted to locking her away in her room, only letting her out to go to school. For Enora, who spent years locked away in that room, it was a very dark time. One day, seemingly at random, she found her father’s book under her bed. She tried for hours to unlock it, and right as she was about to give up, she noticed that the lock had the same curious shape as the locket. It was as if the locket were the key all along. She spent months and years reading that book, but every time she opened it, there was always something new, as though it’d never run out of stories for her. As she grew and matured, so did the stories, and those stories became the best thing in her life. One day, when she was sixteen, she read a story about a girl with a horrible step-father who’d beat her and lock her away in her room. And one day, unknowingly, the father had left the door unlocked and had taken her mother away for the night, allowing her to escape. After reading it, the girl was shocked, and checked her door. It was unlocked, and just as the book described, she escaped into the night. Within the years that passed, that girl grew into a woman her past haunted her. Some nights she’d wake in a cold sweat thinking of the abuse and because of it, her heart and soul were scarred she was never able to trust a man and stopped believing in love for because of her step-father’s abuse she didn’t believe it truly existed. As the years past, the trauma of her childhood faded. She survived, barely, on the occasional stories the book gave to her, though they were few and far between. Oftentimes, she'd wake in a cold sweat, forgetting that she'd ever managed to leave that one fateful night. That man had left her with the sort of scars that even time couldn't heal. No matter how much time past, she was never able to really trust a man, and always felt uncomfortable around them, especially when they were loud or drank. Her mother had also shattered the concept of love, as she in her memories she'd been the one to drive her loving father away, and usher in that sick bastard of a step father. If love was such a frail thing, surely it couldn't exist.