Amara
Imagine darkness.
An inexorable void stretching beyond a simple four-walled cellar at the foot of a cottage, shadowy tendrils flexing their feelers around the corners of the room and into the mind of the child that lay on the damp, piss-stained mattress at its center. A foreign object. Born of light.
This child’s name was Amara.
Amara’s eyes wake to the cold, unfeeling roof of the cellar again and her small form, quivering with the chill in the air, feels the ropes tied round her body, the blood rushing to her head as she comes to the unimaginative realization that, yes, once again her dreams have betrayed her. She is here on the mattress again, her legs shaking as she struggles with futile, childish effort against her shackles. She can still feel the heat radiating from between her legs at the spot where he puts himself, thrusting into her and grunting with every movement of his slimy fat hips.
Amara remembers the first time daddy led her down here. She had just turned eleven, and he had bought her a new pristine red dress – the kind of crimson all the girls in the marketplace loved at the time. She’d paraded it in front of her friends, even the boys, showing off her chestnut ponytails trailing down her shoulders to rest on the carmine sea of the fabric. She told daddy it was the most wonderful gift ever.
He had smiled and told her there was something he wanted her to do tonight. She said, of course! How could she refuse?
Her mind wandered back, for now memory was her only real companion. That, and the voice.
The voice told her to remember, sometimes.
He had opened the door to the cellar and told her to go down. He wanted to show her mama’s old dresses down there, where he kept them. She had ambled down the dark passage, keeping steady on the skittering wooden steps, and paid no mind to the door when it had closed behind daddy.
She’d been too excited to hear him bolt the lock.
At the bottom she’d looked around in confusion and saw the mattress and the ropes.
And at that moment, she looked upon her new world.
Because daddy pushed her down and held her by her throat, he told her to be a good girl or she’d die. He tied the ropes round her arms and her legs, and they cut into the skin at her joints. He tied them tight. Once, twice, three times. She struggled, and he smacked her face. Then he showed her the knife – its edge rusty and gleaming in the dark. She tried begging him to stop. She cried out, screaming that she was sorry. She was sorry for whatever she did. She’d be a good girl, honest. But he didn’t listen. The knife came down, and he cut her dress open, and then his fingers went down there. She felt it. She could still feel it even when he wasn’t there.
Pain.
If she was bad – if she didn’t open her legs – she got the belt. She went without food. The first time was full of panic and shock and rage that had mixed together and blurred the world. Blood congealed on the floor under her legs as he did the thing that he wanted to do with her, cupping his hand over her mouth, letting the tears stream from her eyes and telling her that this is what daddies did to bad girls – girls that paraded round and teased the boys. He had to teach her respect. He would teach her how to be his good girl.
After the first time, she had tried to be obedient. She had opened her legs every time he came. But daddy didn’t stop. He kept coming back, grabbing her throat, pushing himself down on her and grunting like a pig. So then she started fighting back. And that was why he was keeping her here, now. She had not seen sunlight stream through the sky for months. She was bad, and she needed the lesson.
Her meals were the slop he poured down her throat that he said would make her more obedient. After a while – maybe days, weeks, or months, starvation would have been a mercy. She no longer paid any mind to the grumbling in her stomach, or thoughts that maybe someone would come and help. Nobody cared that she was gone. She was a bad girl. She was a dirty girl. She would feel this pain for the rest of her life.
Then, one day, she heard it.
It had happened the fifth week she was down here, waiting for daddy to come in what must have been the nighttime. She had been listening to the dark, and then she had heard it. She’d heard the voice for the first time.
Concentrate, it had said.
And there was a little bit of her brain that obeyed, having no alternative. Like it was destiny.
She lay there on the mattress, bound by the ropes, and concentrated.
Breathe, the voice said.
She breathed. Deep and full. And she smelled something new coming from somewhere close by. It was like smoke, but tasty. Like a freshly grilled chicken wing or a piece of pork being spit fried on a hearth.
Except that the smell was coming from inside her.
Reach out, the voice said, hissing in her eardrums like a snake coiled round her in the dark. Flick.
She didn’t know how, but she knew what the voice meant. She extended her fingers once, twice, and then continuously till she felt the smell begin to emanate from the tips of her flea-bitten nails.
She looked down and her eyes went wide. Smoke was sailing out from her fingertips.
Good, the voice said, and it said it in a way that Amara knew it was pleased. Good girl.
Since that night, she’d practiced whenever she woke up in the dark, her mind ringing and body still aching from daddy’s visits. She’d breathed, extended, and flicked just like the voice had said. And every day she did so she felt the sense that something was cruising through her body that had always been there but had never been able to move. It had been blocked – there had been big walls in its way stopping it from traveling through her to all the right places. Within her there was a river of smoke that had to reach the ocean. The voice was the lathe that had opened to let it through.
She started to learn how she could let out a little more. One time a rat had come by to nibble on her unkept, grease-streaked hair and the voice had murmured, Go on, try it, and she’d flicked her right hand in its direction and a little spark had danced through the air off the nail of her forefinger and singed the rodent’s tail clean through. It scurried off back into the dark from whence it had come.
The voice had chuckled.
Oh, you’re a strong one.
She looked at her hand and she knew something, then. There was more of that in her. That was nothing. That was just the tip of the power that was coursing through her restrained body. She couldn’t move right now, but inside her things were moving alright. Things were shaking up like they never had before.
Each day for the past month she had felt that same power rise within her as daddy slapped his wet, stiff thing inside her. Something inside her pushed back, and she clenched her hands tight, bloodying her palms as her nails dug into the soft flesh there. Because the voice was telling her that she needed more time. She needed to wait.
But it was hearing her pleas. It was liking where her mind was at. Every night, she would ask it, when? And every night it would say, Soon, kid. Soon.
Then came tonight.
Amara had been practicing all day. She’d gotten to the point where she barely had to flick at all, now. Sometimes tiny embers would run across her hand like giggling children playing tag in the alleys of the town above. She’d watch them jump into each other’s arms and grow into a bigger flame, each one adding itself to the bonfire that burned just above her shaking palm. The light of the flame filled her eyes, and then the voice told her from inside, Baby, you got this.
So, when she heard all the locks come undone, and the door creaked open tonight, she opened her eyes and breathed. Deep. She smelled the growing conflagration that was building within. Bubbling through her blood and running clear in her veins.
Daddy had been drinking. She could smell it. The ember within reacted to that, too. Attracted by the liquid that would take it in. Her heart was racing, out of fear, and out of excitement.
Daddy mounted her, put himself in her, and bit her ear – saying she was a miserable little creature. She was a bad girl for making him do this to her. Didn’t she know he was doing this because he loved her? If she was gonna be a bad girl, then he was going to have to put a new child in her one day. He’d make a better daughter. Then he’d have his good girl. Or if she was bad too, he’d do the same to her.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
While his saliva trailed down her neck, and his grunts started getting more forceful, she tensed up her insides and extended her fingers from beneath his sweaty body.
Now? She asked. She had to be sure.
Now, honey, the voice said, clear and crystalline in her mind even through daddy’s whimpers and shouts. Cup the flame in your hand.
She breathed again, allowing the anger and fear and thrill and terror of the moment fill her nostrils and travel down through her body till it reached the tips of her fingers.
Sparks began to jump from her nails. Little smoke trails spiraled up passed her daddy’s side.
He took her head in his hands. He thrust deeper, gritting his teeth, grunting like a pig. He didn’t notice a thing.
Put your hand on his leg, the voice said, and all at once the charge in her mind and the room came to a crashing climax as she obeyed, gripping her daddy’s thigh as hard as she could.
Flick.
The smell of crisping flesh assailed her nostrils. Daddy’s eyes bulged and his mouth fell open in a scream that she couldn’t believe came from his lungs. She squeezed more as he tried to roll away from her, pieces of the melting spot on his leg coming away as he kicked out, squealing maniacally, clutching the exposed muscle gyrating where his skin was blistered and dripping.
Her hands clenched the ends of the ropes around her quickly. Everything had to be quick now. Daddy’s screams filled the air. Screams that had once been hers – back in the days when she would still scream down here, begging for help. Wailing at him that she was good. She didn’t hear the words that yelped from his lips, instead she focused on flicking each length of rope till finally the embers trickled down the binds and they came away.
She started, almost tumbling back to the ground as she attempted to center herself. Her legs wouldn’t work. She tried crawling towards the stairs. She dug her nails into the ground and clawed forward. He hadn’t locked the door behind him. There was light up there.
Suddenly she felt his gnarled hand grab her right leg and pull her back, her naked breasts catching on brickwork and tearing her skin. She let out a yelp – tiny, like a stuttering rat’s – as he turned her round and beat her across the face with his hand, pieces of the flesh from his leg still stuck there. His face was rabid, foam dribbling from his matted beard, growling like a feral ghoul. He was thinking that he’d fucked up. He’d left some matches down here and she’d got him. But he’d teach her. The little bitch. He’d teach her now good and proper.
Another smack to her face and she tasted blood in her mouth. Her legs scrambled on the floor under him, skinned knees smacking into his backside while he started cackling, and cupped his hand round her mouth. He positioned himself on top of her and bore down on her hard. His hand clenched round her throat.
She knew. She knew as she looked into his eyes. This time he was going to kill her.
His disheveled face began to fade from her sight. Everything did. But even as her head began to die, still the fire within her did not stutter. It was red-hot. Searing. It was ready.
C’mon honey! the voice bellowed inside her. You can do this.
She summoned her feeble strength and both her hands clamped down on the sides of his face. It took only a second – just a fraction of an instant. She felt the flames travel up her arm. She felt her fingers bulge and twist as the torrent of energy swept through them. Then she pressed down, hard.
GLANCE channel: Firebite (Unleveled)
Fire damage 10pts/Sec (Touch)
She looked at his face as it changed. The sizzling sound dominated the air again and a blanket of smoke filled his head, spewing from her hands. Then fire – a real, burning, yellow flower wreathed in billowing crimson flowed from the palms of her hands over his eyes, his nose, inside his mouth. His scream was that of a creature surprised by its prey, both feeling the most intense pain and reeling from the corruption of the natural order it believed in. The scream wouldn’t stop. She didn’t want it to. He tried gripping her arms with his shaking hands. He bit into the finger closest to his mouth but to no avail. He was growing weak. All he could do was scream as his flesh crisped and he smelled the rotting, oozing aroma of his head being baked, his brain sizzling inside his burning skull. She kept her hands there. She kept her fingers digging into his cranium and let the flame consume him, traveling through his nostrils and gripping his insides like a sinuous red vice. The whites of his eyes dripped down on her face, first dangling out his sockets and then falling completely – just a mess of goo and crisp tendon. She ignored them. She looked at his face as it transformed under her hands. The fat, blushed rouge of his cheeks changed to the color of charcoal, and the skeleton that was beneath the skin began to expose itself. The bones rotted. They changed from grey-white to charcoal black in seconds as the flames licked them and stole their color. His hands fell from her throat, limp and useless, and only then did he slump down on top of her, nearly suffocating her with his weight.
She pushed him back, rolled him over onto his side. She stayed there for a while, bleeding from lacerations on her torso, but basking in the cold air coming from above. His still smoking head was looking at her. But there was no life left in the dead, empty sockets of his blackened skull. The whole thing had been over in about a minute.
How d’you feel, honey?
She didn’t answer the voice. She stared at the eyeless, smoke-filled sockets of her father, the look of terror and anguish still painted on his charred features.
You did good. Now, you have to get up.
She knew that. She knew that outside light was streaming through the windows waiting for her. There was a world out there.
She started rising carefully, still never taking her eyes off daddy’s burned body. The pulsing, blood-pounding excitement of the kill had dissipated in her mind. Now, more base instincts took over. The need for food. The desire for warmth. Curiosity.
It was that final thought that led her to stretch her shaking, scarred legs and stand like a newborn calf, skittering around without a sense of balance and with no mother to steady it. Nothing except the voice that echoed faintly in her head.
Take your time, it whispered. One foot, then the other.
She listened, only managing to turn away from her father’s expired form with great effort. He was dead. She had killed him. She had killed her father. The thought began to boom like a siren’s wail in her mind as she shakily ascended towards the light heralded by the slightly open door at the basement’s peak. She’d killed him with her own hands. She’d watched him burn.
Her daddy, who had once smiled and called her his princess. He’d wanted her to be good. He’d tried to train her to be obedient. Wasn’t that what daddies were supposed to do? Punish their little girls when they stepped out of line?
She paused on the steps. Maybe she should go back. Maybe she belonged down here.
Sweetheart, the voice echoed, soothing like honey running through her ears and wrapping her brain in golden, silky threads. Don’t be scared. You don’t have to be scared, anymore.
How could she not be scared? Her bulging eyes asked the question that her mouth moved to try and form. She didn’t know what was out there. She didn’t know what she had just done.
But you know how it felt.
Amara’s arms fell to her sides, and she felt the urge to vomit rise in her gullet. Because she did know how it felt. She had never felt anything like it in her life.
Take that feeling, baby, the voice whispered. Take it and go.
She steadily began to move again, letting small droplets of stomach acid dribble from her mouth. She wasn’t sure if she had thrown up or not. She did not understand the heaving and retching that was happening down in her stomach. The only thing she heard was the voice telling her to go on. She could make it.
At the top of the stairs she pushed open the door and collapsed onto the stone floor of the kitchen.
It was warm.
A fire was burning in the hearth. Full and bright.
There was some roast chicken spread on the table. A meal for one, but with enough left over for a whole household of servants, and once she’d flung herself at the table and torn ravenously into the food she ransacked the larder for milk and eggs. She gobbled them down without stopping, and then with a retching cough she truly did vomit across the kitchen table, covering the remaining leftovers in the sticky residue of her rotted insides.
Go to the front room, baby, the voice said to her as she wiped her mouth on her pallid arm. There’s something you need to see.
She obeyed, rising slowly on skittish legs, and shambled through the kitchen towards the foyer. She felt the power of the fire in the hearth wash over her like the purest wind – but it was weak. It was nothing compared to what she had felt down there emanate from her tiny fingers.
The walls around her blurred in her vision. Her world began to shrink until she saw only a tunnel – darkness creeping into the sides of her eyes – that led towards the wooden door of the house with its gilded handle. This house – her house – it felt alien. Unreal. She could smell daddy’s scent on the chair she threw out of her way. She wanted to take it within her grasp and watch it shrink beneath the broiling flames that were running through her blood. Her hand shook as it touched the handle of the door. She knew his fingers had been there before. She felt them streaking along her thighs again.
As the thought melted through her mind, she felt vomit rise into her throat again. She was a monster. She had let something out of her that should never have seen the light of day.
Baby, the voice whispered like a caring guardian stroking her mangled hair. Open the door.
She did as she was bid.
She nudged the door open and felt the chill winds of the outside buffet her naked body. She held up a hand to shield herself from the blazing ball of fire that hung in the sky and lighted on her immediately – obliterating everything from her sight while it bathed her in its radiance. Eventually her vision – though clouded by tears – resolved into vaguely familiar settings: a cobblestone path, rolling hills, a gateway set between two stony ridges that led to the village in the distance. Smoking chimneys signaled burning embers within each decrepit hovel. The voices of singing children and merchants plying their trade in the marketplace filled her ears. This picture – this audio-visual assault on her senses – finally brought her to her knees, clutching her heaving chest.
Then her mind flew back to the hollowed-out skull of her daddy, down there, beneath her feet.
There’s a whole world out there for you now, honey, the voice said.
‘W-who are you?’ she asked. The sound of her own voice startled her. It was something dull and dead, a spark that turned to dust in her own ears.
I’m the thing that’s woken up inside you, the Voice replied. You called to me down there in the dark, and I came. I’ve always been there. You just didn’t need me before. But now, things have changed, haven’t they? Now you’ve grown, and I’m telling you: the world out there isn’t ready for you. With those hands of yours, you can reach out and grab anything you want out there. Anything.
She felt it within her again – that piece of herself that was aching to be released even now. To breathe. To live. To burn.
Tell me, the voice said. What do you want?
Through tear-filled eyes, her parched throat scratched out an answer:
"To die."
And from deep within her bosom, she felt the thing within her chuckle, like a spattering of tiny embers tickling the top of a warmed hearth.
We all do.