Chapter 10 #2
I hadn’t felt my soul crack or shift, I hadn’t for a moment regretted taking his life, because my soul was destroyed when he stole my sister from me.
So sacrificing my purity had been nothing at all in payment for his end.
And when the guards came running to his aid, it was far too late.
I was dressed head to toe in an outfit of his blood.
Red as the dawn and calling out my sister’s name as I offered her his tarnished soul in sacrifice.
Herdat’s power had flared brighter then, the urge to kill rising in me once more as she offered me the power I would have needed to do it, to become her creature and rip the lives from every guard who came to arrest me.
But I’d refused her, some small part of me remembering the girl my sweet sister had loved and knowing it would be no tribute to her to become a monster. Perhaps that was why I had ended up cursed this way. For turning my back on the gifts of a god when they’d been offered to me.
I’d expected the guards to kill me. I hadn’t cared. I’d gotten justice for my sister, and I had nothing left to live for without her anyway. Of course, fate had a much crueller destiny in mind for me in the end.
I’d been placed into the hands of the painted man, his skin so covered in ink that his features were lost within the magnitude of colours.
Some claimed he was a true diviner of the will of the gods.
Others that he worked only for the darkest of powers and most selfish of desires.
I didn’t know. But once he got his hands on me, everything I had once been was soon stripped away.
I was shackled and chained and bound to this life, this curse.
A slave to the masters of my prison whether I wanted to be or not.
They called me The Blessing . But what did that even mean?
I might have known once, but not anymore.
Now, I was all powerful and all nothing. No one. Forgotten. Forever.
There was a time that I’d been a treasure coveted above all others, but I’d long since fallen into the legends lost to time itself. I doubted anyone remained who remembered me now or who knew how to make use of my curse.
“Oh, how I miss the rain,” I murmured but as my voice echoed back to me it sounded like a weird question instead of a statement. Perhaps silence was better than hearing my own despair so often and yet the silence grew so suffocating that sometimes I had to scream if only to break it.
Shut up.
I couldn’t just tell me to shut up. It was so rude. I was going to tell me where to stick my lack of manners...but I was kind of afraid of myself...so I just did as I was told and shut my mouth. For a few hours. Or days. Hard to say.
Eventually the lights went out and the monsters returned.
I’d stayed quiet, but I didn’t care. I wanted to punish me for thinking about that time again.
About the murder I’d committed and how much I’d enjoyed it despite the cost it had eventually come at.
And about the fact that no matter how long I’d been in here, no matter how much I forgot, I’d never, ever feel bad about what I did to that bastard.
I actually felt pretty damn good about it.
It was the one thing that never faded, the one truth I could always rely on entirely.
He was dead and gone and cast to dirt, and the blade I had used to do it had ripped his rotten soul from his corpse and made sure it fractured and split into nothing but ash and ruin, never to reach the afterlife, never to find peace.
He would forever be nothing and I felt really fucking good about that.
You’re such a damn psychopath. No wonder they locked us in here and forgot about us. Who would want you anyway? Not me, not that I get a choice in the matter.
I was a psychopath. But I didn’t mind because there was power in death, and I had owned that once.
And at least since I’d lost my mind in here, I had someone to talk to.
That fractured, bitter piece of my own soul which had split away from the rest of me out of nothing but self-loathing.
Even if she did hate me. And was suicidal.
And insulted me all of the damn time. That was okay.
Because at least I wasn’t alone. I still had myself.
Or was that what alone meant? Shit, now words were starting to lose their meaning. What would I be left with then? Just burbling nonsense in a pool of tears which could never wash me clean of my sins.
A deep growl echoed from the darkness on the far side of the coin and my heart started pounding as glimmering red eyes appeared before me.
I swallowed a lump in my throat, knowing I had created this creature from the darkest, most damaged pieces of my own psyche, and yet I was still unable to banish it.
Unable to run in the prison that held me.
Unable to fight despite my eternal strength.
Because this beast was born of my own fears and imbued with the strength and endless bloodlust that it found in me.
Perhaps if I had repented for the life I’d taken, then these creatures wouldn’t hold such power.
But I wasn’t sorry, and I never would be.
So as the beast advanced on me across the pool of tears, its scaly body slithering into the water and sending ripples racing across it which sounded like a thunderclap to my ears. All I could do was remain there and wait for it to come for me.
There had been a time when I used to fight the monsters which lived within my own mind.
I’d created powerful weapons and duelled against them, cutting them down and screaming my refusal to fall prey to their hunger.
But those endless days of fighting seemed pointless to me now.
I’d never won against them. It always ended in my demise.
So I waited in the dark and held my breath, wondering if it might stop the creature from finding me, but as a low and deadly growl sounded from a few feet away, I knew it would never work.
And as its weight crashed down on me and huge fangs punctured my flesh, I let myself scream.
I screamed and screamed until my agony was colouring the walls and blood was filling the pool of tears as I was ripped apart piece by piece, feeling every chomp and bite, living on in torment throughout it all.
My heart pumped and thrashed, and adrenaline crashed through my veins as my body begged me to save it from this fate despite my mind already knowing how useless that fight was.
I was right though. Fear really did make me feel alive.
But I still wished I was dead instead.