When Silver Met River

This is the prologue, it will improve you insight into Silver's life. However I know many people don't like introductions so please feel free to skip to chapter two ( when it's uploaded).

I cried my heart out that night, alone in a crevice of my room, choking on my tears and the thick fog of fear that condensed in my room enveloping me with monumental pressure and not letting me see anything hope of the end being near. I did not move for hours – the worn out heart of stone, battered by the constant pounding waves of insults, hate and beatings that I had received especially hard this night, inside me cracked. My body when numb finally catching with my brain that had become detached a long time ago.

Why was it so hard?

The moon cleared and burst past a heavy storm cloud and illuminated my room with its effulgence, penetrating my dark corner, it sang to me and halted my tears. And like every night for the past two years I sang back my wish;

Oh send me lover,
One like no other,
With shinny strong armor
That will last forever,
And make everything better.

This is my ritual, wishful thinking, prayer for the day. A song my mother had sang to me, and told me that all the princesses from my fairytale books sang when waiting in their towers. She sang it to me every night promising me that I too will one day find someone to love like she had loved my late father. She had spoken with such conviction that even I, at barely four, felt the radiation rays of emotions that resonated in her hushed voice and it lit my eyes alight. With giggles and whispers of love and kisses she and my father tucked my in together every evening.

My father would bend low and caress my pale blond hair tenderly while my mother narrated to me my cherished fairytales. Then he kissed my forehead and said ‘Goodnight Princess Silver, I hope this prince doesn’t whisk you away too soon.’ My mother would kiss the tip of my noise in turn say,

‘Goodnight Sylvia, we love you very much,’ and then before they left my room my parents would give each other their own love filled kiss lathered up with every good and pure thing imaginable.

My parents were the symbol of true love and seeing this growing up made me want it more than anything else. I grew up a romantic like my mother with the certitude that when my time came I too will be swept of my feet and love forever. Growing up I looked down on the other unlucky girls that had shouting parents and two homes and had to be shared like an item. Little did I know all high and mighty that I’ll be suffering a fate much worse than theirs.

I wonder when my mother stopped believing it herself, this idea of a soul mate, prince charming dashing and sophisticated, and chose to settle for Luke- the polar opposite. Not long after my father died probably. Definitely.

At ten my father died, and after three long painful grief filled years, my mother married Luke. She married him after accidently getting pregnant and had my half sister the day after their wedding. She claimed that she had to be with him now, this man desperate for her attention that hassled her tirelessly until she relented and went out with him. This was the pinnacle change in my life. My father’s death didn’t condemn me completely to a miserable life but my mother’s remarriage did.

It all accelerated after that, I was thirteen and with three other siblings already ten, eight and six. Girl, boy, girl, and this new little girl was the sweetest thing, but her father Luke was the devil himself. When my mother died of what I deeply believe was a long term effect of heart break from my father’s death, I was fifteen and now an orphan.

And that’s when the abuse started.

I imagine that Luke, Luke Greit, had only been, if even that, in love with my mother, and not her four children plus the one he had with her. He snapped like a dry brittle twig when he heard the news, packed his back and left for a hastily planned international business trip with only a couple of hundred dollars left behind to support us for the month he was gone. He came back, he always comes back.

He came back change; angry and mad at the burden he had been given. Five kids were too much for him to handle, he who had been a bachelor before my mother met him. So he gave me the responsibility. This responsibility came accompanied with stinging slaps when I failed in whatever he ordered me to do. They escalated to rough handling, and then the punches came along with the passing months- each with increasing frequency.

My father’s original multi-million pound company came crashing down when he passed, much like everything else in my life, and it was quickly consumed by a rivaling company who left nothing but crumbs for my mother. Our luxurious life style disappeared and in its place was an excessive amount of debts that my father had collected over the years. Now I live on the outskirts of town in Luke’s shabby converted barn.

Yes, my life had changed but what could I do? I was responsible for my siblings and no five children would be taken into the same foster home. If we didn’t want to split up we had to stay with Luke. Actually the little ones didn’t know about the abuse he gave me, only the verbal. He hid the physical as he knew there was a higher chance they’d blab to their teachers as little kids do. Only my sister Elsie knows about it, and she’s only fifteen, the age I was when I mother died two years ago.

This isn’t the story though. It’s not about how miserable we were under Luke’s tyranny. It was about how happy I became when I met River, two years after being certain my only purpose would be to try and survive my daily torture and live for Luke’s absences.