Mark Austine
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Mark Austine's Book and Story
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The Price of Unrequited Love
Shearwater Eighteen days after giving up on Brendan Maynard, Jayde Rosario cut off her waist-length hair and called her father, announcing her decision to move to California and attend UC Berkeley.
Her father, surprised, asked about the sudden change, reminding her how she' d always insisted on staying with Brendan. Jayde forced a laugh, revealing the painful truth: Brendan was getting married, and she, his stepsister, could no longer cling to him.
That night, she tried to tell Brendan about her college acceptance, but his fiancée, Chloie Ellis, interrupted with a bubbly call, and Brendan' s tender words to Chloie twisted a knife in Jayde' s heart. She remembered how his tenderness used to be hers alone, how he had protected her, and how she had poured out her heart to him in a diary and a love letter, only for him to explode, tearing the letter and yelling, "I'm your brother!"
He had stormed out, leaving her to painstakingly tape the shredded pieces back together. Her love, however, didn't die, not even when he brought Chloie home and told her to call her "sister-in-law."
Now, she understood. She had to put that fire out herself. She had to dig Brendan out of her heart. My Best Friends, My Worst Enemies
Ming Yue The last thing I remembered was Chloe's voice, sharp and gleeful, slicing through the haze of my headache: "They never loved you, Ava. Not Liam, not Noah. It was always me."
Her words were a hammer blow, each one a nail in the coffin of my life, a searing supernova of agony that exploded behind my eyes before everything faded to black.
I gasped, sitting bolt upright in my childhood bed, my unlined hands proof of a terrifying truth: I was back, the calendar on my desk screaming September 5th, senior year, before the nightmare truly began.
The reel of my first life rewound in fast-forward: Stanford, the calculated betrayals by Liam and Noah, Chloe's venomous strings, the engineered vasectomies, my promising career systematically destroyed, and the aneurysm that ended it all.
This was impossible, a future I'd already lived, a death I'd already died, yet the worn duvet felt real, the scent of my mother's pancakes too vibrant—a second chance, if I dared to seize it, to change everything.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, deleting Stanford from my early college applications and replacing it with MIT—my true dream, the one they had ruthlessly crushed.
Just then, the doorbell rang, and through the frosted glass, I saw them: Liam Walker, Noah Chen, and Chloe Jenkins, the architects of my past ruin, their bright smiles and feigned innocence an instant surge of cold dread. Works, V1
Lucian of Samosata It is not to be understood that all statements here made are either ascertained facts or universally admitted conjectures. The introduction is intended merely to put those who are not scholars, and probably have not books of reference at hand, in a position to approach the translation at as little disadvantage as may be. Accordingly, we give the account that commends itself to us, without discussion or reference to authorities. Those who would like a more complete idea of Lucian should read Croiset's Essai sur la vie et les oeuvres de Lucien, on which the first two sections of this introduction are very largely based. The only objections to the book (if they are objections) are that it is in French, and of 400 octavo pages. It is eminently readable. With the exception of a very small number of statements, of which the truth is by no means certain, all that we know of Lucian is derived from his own writings. And any reader who prefers to have his facts at first rather than at second hand can consequently get them by reading certain of his pieces, and making the natural deductions from them. Those that contain biographical matter are, in the order corresponding to the periods of his life on which they throw light, The Vision, Demosthenes, Nigrinus, The Portrait-study and Defence (in which Lucian is Lycinus), The Way to write History, The double ndictment (in which he is The Syrian), The Fisher (Parrhesiades), Swans and Amber, Alexander, Hermotimus_ (Lycinus), Menippus and Icaromenippus (in which Menippus represents him), A literary Prometheus, Herodotus, Zeuxis, Harmonides, The Scythian, The Death of Peregrine, The Book-fancier, Demonax, The Rhetorician's Vade mecum, Dionysus, Heracles, A Slip of the Tongue, Apology for 'The dependent Scholar.'_ Of these The Vision is a direct piece of autobiography; there is intentional but veiled autobiography in several of the other pieces; in others again conclusions can be drawn from comparison of his statements with facts known from external sources. Lucian lived from about 125 to about 200 A.D., under the Roman Emperors Antoninus Pius, M. Aurelius and Lucius Verus, Commodus, and perhaps Pertinax. He was a Syrian, born at Samosata on the Euphrates, of parents to whom it was of importance that he should earn his living without spending much time or money on education. His maternal uncle being a statuary, he was apprenticed to him, having shown an aptitude for modelling in the wax that he surreptitiously scraped from his school writing-tablets. The apprenticeship lasted one day. It is clear that he was impulsive all through life; and when his uncle corrected him with a stick for breaking a piece of marble, he ran off home, disposed already to think he had had enough of statuary. His mother took his part, and he made up his mind by the aid of a vision that came to him the same night. I Kissed My Bestfriend's Brother. Now What?
Blue berry Kaida thought forever was the deal with her boyfriend, Liam, the captain of the Runners Hockey Team, until he broke up with her and reunited with his childhood lover, who had returned after several years of being away.
Heartbroken and angry, Kaida decided to make her ex-boyfriend jealous by kissing her best friend's older brother, Maverick.
Unfortunately, she reignited the flame he'd been trying to quench for years.
Now, there was no turning back and no quenching the obsessive flame burning inside Maverick for her.
After some time, Liam realized he truly loved Kaida and wanted her back, but Maverick wasn't letting her go.
Kaida was his now, and he would go to the end of the earth for her sake.
What began as revenge against her ex turned into something twisted and dark: something beyond words and certainly beyond obsession.
Betrayed by Blood
Jing Jing Thanksgiving weekend was just around the corner, and as an intern ranger, I was preparing for what my supervisor, Mark Thorne, called a "mandatory exploratory survey" to Devil's Gulch.
But this seemingly routine assignment was a meticulously planned death trap, set by the man I worked for and the sister I loved.
The rock bit into my back, a sharp pain, then nothing as my climbing rope went slack, sabotaged, as I plummeted into the cold darkness of the crevasse.
Mark's chilling, empty smile was the last thing I saw above me on the narrow ledge, my sister Emily looking away, silent, complicit, as I fought for air.
Killed.
By my own supervisor and the only family I had left, betrayed for reasons I couldn't comprehend as my life vanished in an instant.
Then I jolted awake, not in a freezing abyss, but in my familiar bunk, the comforting scent of pine from my cheap park-issued mattress filling the air.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I touched my face, my arms, realizing there were no broken bones, no blood.
The calendar on the wall screamed at me: three days before that fateful Thanksgiving trip to Devil's Gulch.
I was alive.
It was a memory, vivid, terrifying, but now it was also a warning.
A second chance.
This time, I wouldn't be the naive one; I would protect myself first, and if I could, protect my sister from him and from herself.
I could still stop this.
And I would. A Daughter's Defense: They Were Heroes
Alexis My deskmate, Elara Vance, was a walking contradiction: weaving grand tales of designer clothes and exotic family trips to Zurich, yet she dressed in rags and carried the undeniable scent of neglect.
I' d silently endured her outlandish fantasies and the awkward pity they stirred, until one tension-filled day, my patience completely snapped, and I brutally screamed across the crowded school hallway, "What is it, Elara? Are your parents dead or something?"
The raw grief that instantly crumpled her face, followed by the shock of her fist connecting with my jaw, silenced the entire room, but the real storm was yet to come.
Weeks later, news tore through our high school: Elara Vance, the girl everyone mocked, had mysteriously secured a full-ride scholarship to Yale, a feat that struck everyone, especially the popular clique, as utterly impossible.
The internet exploded, fueled by vicious social media posts from school bullies, rapidly branding her a "Yale Scammer" and launching a horrifying campaign of doxxing and vile harassment that escalated far beyond high school cruelty, becoming a public digital execution.
But as the online mob screamed for her digital demise, I was haunted by the memory of her tear-streaked face and that primal, anguished cry that day in the hallway: "They're heroes!"
That desperate, defiant plea didn't fit the narrative of the pathetic liar I believed her to be, leaving me with a chilling, unsettling confusion.
A sickening wave of guilt began to consume me, the realization hitting hard that I had played a part in unleashing this brutal, unprovoked attack on her.
I knew then, with a desperate urgency that superseded everything else, that I had to find Elara Vance and finally unearth the true, devastating story behind her lies and the mysterious heroism of her parents. 
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