Welp. Here's the last story I made. And uh, well... I dunno if it makes sense. But it's something from the deepest depths of my heart. If only a pin prick look into my life.

Write a story with the theme: Unraveling

The only image my head held onto was tears streaming down her face. I rubbed my eyes, a window opening from the darkness. I stepped closer to the mirror. A pair of puffy brown eyes stared back at me, asking “What now?”

I traced the words she branded across me. My fingers slowly traced a t then an e. I continued till every letter of terrible made my hands tremble. I moved onto friend beside it. Once I was finished they drifted down my neck to “disrespectful”. It stung.

There were a couple words on my arms I hadn't realized she wrote. I found Unloved Useless Annoying and Idiot. Mistake stood out on my forehead. I retreated back into the dark place, the images of those words burning in my mind.

There was a knock on the door. I wiped my face, and sniffed. I pressed the tears down. I don’t have time to fall apart. I took a few deep breaths until I looked a little better. “Come in.” My heart ached as I put on my mask.

Time to distance myself before I get hurt.

He stayed for a while. We caught up on life, laughed a little bit about memes, and then he left.

That’s how it always was.

They came. I lied. Life went on.

If I let it all out, told someone everything that happened just to get the pounding weight off my chest, then every part of me would crumble. And I don’t have time to clean up a giant mess. It’s just easier hiding it and shoving it down.

The same cycle went on for months. More of my friends visited me, and I let them in. The more they visited, the easier it was to let them in. I anticipated them. 

But the words never went away. They turned from a bright red to blending into my pale skin. I don’t know how my friends would react or care if they saw them. So I would hide them. Sometimes I would show one or two briefly. Not letting them know how much it hurt to do so.

One day, he came again.

“How’s life?” His body, slumping as he sat down beside me. A forced smile twitched across his face.

I pushed down the darkness and forced myself to return the smile. “Good. I’m just tired.”

He looked exhausted. In pain as we locked eyes. “I am too.”

For once, I saw the darkness surrounding him. How long had it been there? He was hurting as much as me. And that shattered my heart. 

I wrapped my arm around his back and side hugged him softly. “You don’t have to be okay all the time.” Was I trying to convince myself or him?

Silence filled the room as our souls cried together. I peeked at the mirror that held the image of our brokenness. I saw scars on him too. But they weren’t truths scrawled across our skin, they were memories of where we had been. Though we were broken, someone greater was holding our broken pieces to be put together in a better way that reflected who we used to be.

Right now, that someone greater put together the first piece.

-A.H. Bradbury

This story was based off the true, real life events that happened in the past 2 years of my life. 

Noam’s plan was simple—get in, get the dragon, get out. As soon as they got decently far out of the capital, he and Elis were free and clear. They could fly just beneath cloud cover straight off this island, lose the dragon at their buyers’ and head straight west with pockets full of cash.

That had been the plan three plans ago. Noam grumbled beneath his breath as he tightened his grip on the pommel of the saddle. Elis weaved in and out behind him, the smaller golden dragon twice as fast as the one Noam rode.

“I told you she was a good idea!” Elis shouted over the whistling of the wind. “She’ll sell for twice as much!”

A third volley of royal arrows flew between them. One whizzed past Noam’s shoulder, and he ducked as close to the saddle as he could. The guards wouldn’t risk hitting a royal dragon…but they would take him out without a second thought.

“See!” Elis’s golden dragon—his unplanned theft—swooshed by Noam again.

“You’re going to get us killed!” Noam shouted back. The royal guards bore down on them, evidenced by the roaring sounds of dragon and gryphon wings. Noam gripped the reins tightly, yanking them right, guiding the dragon directly into a massive gray storm cloud. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Elis follow.

Get in, get the dragon, get out. If Elis had just stayed in his lookout position, their plan would never have unraveled like this. But no, he had to wander through the stables, lay his eyes on the golden dragon, the king’s new acquisition from the east.

Noam bore to the right, narrowing his eyes as he searched through the dark gray cloud around him. No guards…no Elis. He was safe…for the moment. Silence clung to the air, the only sounds the flapping of the dragon’s wings, the low rumble beneath him…and a crackling in the air. Lightning. A storm was coming.

Escaping the guards was one thing. Escaping a storm was another.

Noam bore downward, pressing his heels to the dragon’s sides, holding his breath as the wind whipped through his lungs. Lightning sizzled around him, followed by the resounding crack of thunder. The dragon screamed in pain, swirling into a tornado of wings and scales and legs. Noam’s knuckles turned white and his vision spun as they plummeted toward the ground. His insides unraveled as a row of buildings came into sight…too close…too fast…

Crash.

Edmund’s bootsteps echoed in the dim hall. The muddy red carpet did little to dampen the sound–threadbare and mouse-gnawed as it was. The young man raised his sputtering torch, and shadows danced at the edges of his vision. His free hand rested on the pommel of the sword strapped at his hip. The search had been fruitless thus far, but he still felt some optimism. The maiden would be freed, and he would be the one to do it. No one had conquered and adventured more than this third-born prince of the North Berklands (much to his parents’ dismay).

Though he knew now that it would be futile, he could not resist calling out yet again–if only to break the quiet, more than anything else– “Lady Elowyn? I am here to break your curse. Speak up, if you can.”

The townsfolk south of this old, derelict manor had sworn up that the noble lady of the manor still resided inside, trapped by a curse. However, few of them had had the courage to go seek her out themselves–and those who had had wandered back out of the mansion under some confusion hours or days later.

Edmund sneezed as he ducked under a massive cobweb drooping from the ceiling.

The prince pushed against a door with a large stain on it, and the hinges creaked in a drawn-out protest. Likely, this room was as lacking in human life as all the others, but he was determined to be thorough. He stepped inside.

A great, four-poster bed stood caked in dust, and the curtains around it hung like forlorn ghosts. Against one wall there was an armoire that had seen better days, and to Edmund’s left stood a disgusting vanity with an ornate mirror that was coated in grime. He spied a glimpse of movement in one corner of the mirror, and Edmund grinned in triumph. The maiden was trapped in the mirror, then! That was a common enough curse. The young man drew close and peered at the spot. He could see a woman with long, fair hair tumbling over her shoulders. Her back was to him, and she appeared to be staring out a window.

The prince reached out and scrubbed at the grime with his filthy sleeve in order to see more, but all there was to see was a reflection of the room with the maiden in it. After a moment, he turned to survey the bedroom more closely, and there across from him Lady Elowyn stood at the window, just as he had seen her in the mirror. He had not initially noticed her presence, for as still as she stood, he had mistaken her long, dark gown for a part of the curtain.

He straightened and dusted uselessly at his sleeve. “Lady Elowyn, are you all right?”

The woman at the window turned slightly to look at him. Her face was fair; her eyes large and dark, and her lips the perfect shade of pink. She smiled faintly and glided across the room and out the door.

“Lady, wait! I am here to help you!” Edmund darted out into the hall. She continued to walk away, and he hurried after her. He reached out and grasped at her shoulder, but felt nothing. The woman began to unravel, like a colorful tapestry whose string had been pulled. The man gasped in horror. Had he killed her? All at once, he realized that the walls around him were sagging and crumbling. Dust billowed toward him in a great, smudgy cloud. Soon, the world was nothing but choking darkness.

Edmund blinked and squinted at the woman in the mirror. He had just wiped some of the grime away to better see the fair-haired lady staring out the window. Edmund turned to look at the rest of the room. He felt a little odd, as if he had done this very thing just recently. “Lady Elowyn?”

The woman at the window turned slightly to look at him with her large, dark eyes. Her lips pulled into a slight frown, and without a word she glided out of the room. Edmund followed after her, grabbed for her shoulder, and watched the woman unravel like so much loose string. Dread clutched at his chest. What kind of a curse was this?

The dust of the crumbling walls billowed up around him again.

After the 25th time of grabbing for Lady Elowyn’s shoulder and watching her come undone, Edmund finally seemed to feel the deja vu strongly enough to give him pause from calling out to the woman this time. Furrowing his brow in confusion, he looked about the room. Then he began to wonder why he had hesitated to speak to the lady. It was rather rude of him to intrude in her bedroom.

“Lady…?” Edmund faltered. Did he know her name? The woman turned and glided out into the hall. Edmund chased after her. He reached out to grab her shoulder, but that niggling feeling made him drop his hand and follow the woman instead. At last, she entered a large parlor and stopped before a shabby tapestry that was so gray that Edmund couldn’t discern details. She stared at the wall-hanging, then rested her hand upon it and stood as silent and still as stone.

Edmund’s thoughts tumbled uselessly for a while. What was going on? What was he supposed to do now? He was here to do something, wasn’t he? Finally, with no better ideas, he decided to mimic this strange woman and rest his hand on the tapestry also. The cloth grew warm, uncomfortably so, and he yanked his hand away. The tapestry disintegrated, and the dust flowed from it to cover the woman. Her pale hair darkened to a merry, polished brown and fresh color bloomed in her fair cheeks. She trembled as her gown brightened to a fine, dark green, and she turned to him, her eyes wet with unshed tears. “I am free at last.”

The Unraveling

By the time Eli Turner was thirteen, he had mastered the art of pretending things did not hurt.

Not physical hurt. He was used to that ache—the soreness in his shoulders from pushing his wheelchair too long, the stiffness in his legs that doctors spoke about in careful voices. No, the hurt Eli hid was quieter.

It lived in moments.

Like when his friends raced ahead to places he couldn’t follow.
Like when restaurants smiled apologetically and said, “We only have stairs.”
Like when strangers spoke to his mother instead of to him, as if his wheelchair had somehow rolled over his voice too.

Eli became good at smiling through all of it.

“Maybe next time,” he would say.

But there was always a next time.

And another.

And another.

His mother used to tell him he had an old soul. Eli thought maybe old souls were just people who learned disappointment early.

Still, he was easy to love.

He loved terrible jokes and strawberry milkshakes. He carried books everywhere and memorized strange facts about planets just to make people laugh at lunch.

“Did you know it rains diamonds on Neptune?” he’d ask casually.

“Eli, nobody knows why you know these things,” his best friend Nora would say.

“That’s what makes me mysterious.”

And he would grin like the world had never once broken his heart.

But every night, after homework and dinner, Eli rolled himself onto the roof of their apartment building. The roof was his favorite place because it was the only place where he didn’t feel smaller than everyone else.

The sky belonged to everybody equally.

Up there, wrapped in an old blanket beside his telescope, Eli could forget the narrow doorways and cracked sidewalks and signs that said inaccessible entrances around back.

Around back.

He hated those words.

As if people like him were supposed to enter life through hidden doors.

One autumn afternoon, Nora invited him to her birthday party at a lakeside cabin outside town. Eli spent days excited about it. He even bought her a tiny silver compass necklace because she once told him she wanted to travel everywhere someday.

The morning of the trip, his mother drove them two hours through falling orange leaves and cold rain.

But when they arrived, Eli saw it immediately.

Five wooden steps leading into the cabin.

No ramp.

No way inside.

Nora’s father looked devastated. “I thought there was another entrance,” he kept saying.

Someone offered to carry Eli.

Someone else said maybe they could all stay outside instead.

Eli looked at the warm glow through the cabin windows, at the laughter already beginning inside, at everyone trying so desperately to fix something they should never have forgotten in the first place.

“It’s okay,” Eli whispered.

But it wasn’t.

For the first time in years, embarrassment wrapped around him so tightly he could barely breathe.

Not because he was in a wheelchair.
Because he was tired of being the reason plans changed.

He handed Nora the necklace without meeting her eyes.

“Happy birthday.”

Then he asked his mother to take him home.

That night, Eli didn’t go to the rooftop.

He stayed in bed staring at the ceiling while rain tapped softly against the windows.

His mother sat beside him in the dark. “You don’t always have to pretend you’re okay,” she said quietly.

Eli swallowed hard.

“I just wanted one day,” he whispered. “One day where I didn’t feel different.”

His mother brushed hair from his forehead the way she had when he was little. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, her voice trembling, “you were never the problem.”

But Eli wasn’t sure anymore.

The next week at school, he grew quieter. He stopped making jokes. Stopped raising his hand in class. Even Nora noticed.

One afternoon she found him alone in the library.

“You disappeared,” she said softly.

Eli shrugged.

“I’m serious,” she said. “I miss you.”

He stared down at the chessboard between them. “Do you know what the worst part is?”

“What?”

“I spend my whole life trying not to inconvenience people.”

The words came out cracked and uneven.

“And no matter how hard I try, I still do.”

Nora’s eyes filled instantly.

“You think you’re an inconvenience?”

Eli laughed bitterly. “Aren’t I?”

“No.” She reached across the table. “The stairs are an inconvenience. The world is an inconvenience. Not you.”

Something inside Eli unraveled then.

Not loudly.

Not dramatically.

Just quietly, like a knot pulled loose after being tight too long.

For years, he had carried every closed door like it was his personal failure. Every missed invitation. Every awkward apology. Every place he could not go.

As if his existence required forgiveness.

But sitting there across from Nora, Eli realized something painful and beautiful at the same time:

He deserved to belong before people learned how to include him.

That night he returned to the rooftop.

The air was freezing, but the stars were sharp and bright above him. Eli tilted his telescope toward the sky and let himself cry—not out of shame this time, but grief for the boy who had spent so many years believing he had to earn space in the world.

Below him, the city glowed gold in the darkness.

A thousand windows.
A thousand lives.
A thousand doors.

And maybe not all of them were open yet.

But for the first time, Eli stopped blaming himself for the ones that stayed closed.

The candlelight flickered off the glass table in the eerie dark. Wax dripped down like the steady tick of a clock, onto the tattered letter.

The seal was still unbroken; she couldn’t bring herself to open it. Instead, numbness spread like frost over her heart.

The date on the cover sat unmoving, even though she tried to intimidate it with a glare. She traced her finger over the surface and sighed.

The grandfather clock struck ten. With one deep breath she tore it open. The bold, angry letters staring back at her made her throw it away.

She stood up harshly, wrapping her arms around her chest; the bold red thread of the knitted jacket suddenly felt very itchy. The urge to scream built as she passed the chair, unaware that the thread had snagged on the wood as she continued on.

Words slurred in her brain, but none were released. Tears pooled in her eyes, but none fell.

She crouched before the large oak door and slipped on a pair of running shoes. The pattern of rain warned her through the door, but she no longer cared. She flung the door open, not noticing the red thread slipping through on her way out.

She darted up and down the muddy streets, the thread mingling with dirt and grime.

It wasn’t until she reached the end of the street, standing before the Mountain View, that she broke.

Angry words were thrown into the sky like bullets, full of harm. She stood there for minutes that stretched into an hour, until a flutter of wings brushed her bare skin.

The breathtaking delicacy of two butterfly wings sputtered in the rain, seeking refuge with her. It stole her breath to see such a beautiful creature at the mercy of the world.

She watched it for a moment, slowly cupping her hands to shelter it. Only then did she notice the line of thread behind her and the chill in the air.