I wake on the cold forest ground, covered in snow.
Again.
I remember the pain I felt in my neck and feel for a difference.
Nothing, as expected.
What a classic way to kill someone, crush them with a tree and break their neck. It's still one of the more painful ones, thanks.
I sit up from my spot on the ground and observe this frosted-over forest I know all too well.
Darn, that was a nice dress too!
I'm back in my dark blue dress I've been in all too many times, and I'm growing very tired of it indeed.
"Well, mother should have already started supper by now. Better get home."
This dress really is uncomfortable when it's frozen over like this. Not like the beautiful rose colored one I was wearing right before I was killed in broad daylight by a blasted tree. Again.
Though, it's not always a tree that manages to bring me to my unfortunate end. Let's see, the time before this one a spooked horse pulling a carriage managed to completely crush me whilst I was on my way home from the Herbarium with father's medicine. That was surely not a pleasant one. You don't immediately die when several vital parts of your body get crushed, so you have a rather morbid demise.
I would know by now anyways. But I don't have to stop there.
I have died in many horrible ways many different times throughout the last, what, seventy years.
I'm still 19.
This is all his fault.
I don't know who. All I know is it is a man. It's harder to recognize faces when you're bleeding out on the ground and said person appears out of the corner of your blurring vision. All I could recall was this person looming over me, muttering under his breath. Then I saw light, and then…nothing.
He started all of this for me. He must have.
This endless cycle of death and resurrection. Only, I wouldn't even count it as ressurection considering that I just go back to when it all started. Back to 1832.
Last time I lasted— or rather survived until 1837. That's one of my better times at least. One time I only lasted a week because of some hunter who somehow mistook me for some animal. I don't even know how, but then again, a lot of my deaths don't really make sense, but the universe has to get rid of me somehow. I broke the cycle.
I was meant to die.
It's always the universe that's killing me, whether it's making nature or other humans kill me, it doesn't matter.
What matters to me is stopping it. Completely.
And to do that I must find this rescuer of mine.
I reach the edge of the forest and vaguely see my home from here. On the end of Westenderson street resides my father's rather large mansion.
"Lizzie!"
Ah, there she is. My little sister Melody waves at me from across the bridge that connects our town to this vast mass of snowy trees.
I have nearly memorized this part by heart as I have done this so many times. Melody comes to look for me every time. Always after the snow and the slippery forest takes me out. Never a minute earlier. I wonder if this would have happened back then, had she just come an hour earlier.
As I reach her, she chuckles.
"What were you doing in there? Gosh, you're cold Lizzie! Mother told me to go get you. It's getting very late and it's not safe beyond our town, you know that."
She is persistent as ever, considering her young age.
"I'm sorry Melody. I needed some fresh air."
"All the way out here?" she retorts back with a smile stretching across her face.
No one knows that I died. That I ever died.
To everyone but me it's just 1832. I've gotten used to it. Besides, I would hate it if I was ever mourned. I get to love them more this way anyways.
I grab her hand and walk her towards our street, which resides near the edge of our neighborhood, by the forests and lakes.
"Come on, I'm hungry! What's for supper today? Carrot stew?"
I'm getting tired of carrot stew, but there's not much you can change about the past when you've just come back to it. But even just buying bread at the baker's at a different time can change everything. Until I go back to repeat it all again.
"Yes! My favorite!"
Melody and Jack always adore mother's cooking.
"Sounds good to me." I respond with a smile that only her and I share. Jack and Elena get their looks and that cold smile of theirs from father. Not like the warm, soft one that Melody and I got from our mother.
We make it to our street and head towards the Crooney household.
Crooney is our proud family name. It stands for "someone of companion".
Doesn't really match us, in that case.
Our family is very reserved. We are known as the foxes of our town. Always getting around without being noticed.
I know that when I get home, I'll be scolded once again for going out in such weather and for this long. If only they knew that I actually got lost that day trying to catch the blasted child who stole my bag. I never found him, so I hope he enjoyed the yarn and fabric I had just acquired. I ended up wandering into a whole new area. Somehow that got me near the other side of the forest. I could vaguely see the school building that Jack and Melody attended at the outskirts of our town, which resided three streets down from my home, on the other side of the large mass of trees. I didn't know that entering that forest would result in me running through that darkening maze of pine trees while fighting to see through the falling snow producing from the dimming sky above me. I was also not anticipating how slippery the forest ground was going to be that night.
I've memorized the whole place by now, of course.
We reach my large front door and I prepare for a scolding and a warm bowl of carrot stew.