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The Séraph of Delirium
Virescent Malison

Virescent Malison

𝐕𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐌𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐍.

.ೃ࿐ᴴⁱˢ ᵛᵒⁱᶜᵉ ʷᵃˢ ᵒⁿᵉ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ˢᵘⁿᵍ ᵒᶠ ᵇʳᵒᵏᵉⁿ ᵇᵒⁿᵉˢ.

He prowled her borders to saintliness, her horizon of professed needs to naked untruths—all for a posted core that came with the fee of her virgin heart. By the rise of her second sun, he contained her impure nature in his precarious palms, trickling blood of flames swatting in pulse with her sagging cage as it hummed mutiny on the sagas of her cataclysmic crown. -A Palace of Ulric Labyrinths, Elvira Crest.

|??|

“LOOK AT ME,” the man's whisper fizzed through the cold. The young woman stood before him and did as she was told, watching as if the clash of their eyes was the fuel to her living, as if without it, oxygen would fail to rejoice in her lungs. "At me."

She was so still, expression lost and frozen like a victim of ice. "Please," her words were so silent, so torrent with sorrow's pity. Outside of their collision, one would've assumed that her appeal was for the insensible man before her, tears billowing through the farm dirt in which eras laid to rest. But she wasn't begging him, oh no, she was praying to them; everywhere and nowhere forever, watching from wherever prolonged magnificence lounged, shelving as the man tore away the last of her being, the blueprint of their mistakes.

"Please, please don't." She could feel it. She could feel him. Grace. Nipping at the significant nerves of her brain, gnawing away her person. "I want to live." But he did not care. " I want to...I want to feel." As her eyes bled transparent, some treacherous chunk of her supposed that if she were him, endowed with the potency to not mind, she would not have cared for herself too. "Please."

"I'm a man of clemency," his voice reverberated in her thinning ears. "My duty of seeing through your lies is generous likened to any form of inquisition at the hands of your people." He stood some steps away from her, an arm's length that put out the illusion that he was unduly far away while also being extremely close. "Do you know what is worse than a rife murderer who is paid to take lives?"

She could not answer. No answer she could ever give him would do her good.

"An apostate, traitors of their own land." Pins and burns, touring vehemently through the cords of her thoughts and memories. "There are reasons for taking a life, but never legible reasons for renouncing your own."

Her eyes turned to the ground below them, tracing the cracks of the earth as her fears dazed her conspicuous mislaying. Voices nipped at the tips of her ears, whining and yelling at her to betray her mindlessness with the burning of her anger. But at the instance red arose, a bite of his grace was all it took to stifle whatever reluctance her mind could muster.

"Do you suppose that someone will mourn you?" He murmured as if he was inviting something harmless. It was sickly childlike in its tone. "Will you parch the tear ducts of a loved one? Tire their remembrance into a spiralling erosion?"

"Please." And now she was begging him. A non-believer grasping onto the hooves of evil because no longer did their creators attend to their cries of despond. "Please, please, please, please, please!"

The corners of his lips wrinkled into an unused smile, displaying delight. "How many of them are there?"

"I don't—"

He cut her off. "I'd advise you to be mindful of what you say." He took a pause, perhaps loitering long enough that his threat would scavage the remains of her spirit. "You're no use to me if you know nothing." His eyes watched her through the few loose trends of black waves that obscured his face, messy, deranged…taking after him. "Nothing is a death sentence."

"Two," she hummed so low but by the enlivened inhale he took, she knew he had heard her.

"I'm afraid I missed that."

"There's two of them. A man and a woman."

He took a step forward. "And?"

She took a step backwards, struggling with the flow of her words as she watched him follow her steps. A step forward. And another. And then another. "And...and..."

His shadow veiled her now, drinking down the dark of her own until it was his. "What are they going to do?"

"They're going to take him."

He followed her words from under the tip of his nose. "Him as in?"

"The prince."

"When?"

"At the upcoming ball."

"Why?"

"She said it was a good distraction."

"No, I meant why him?" he corrected. "Why Prince Levion? Why not just kill the king and liberate the whole nation while they're at it? Why him? He's not entitled to the throne, he's not loved by his people, he's not his father. So why?"

A weak chuckle broke her lips. "They're not going to kill him."

He returned her laugh, although his was more of a hurtful scoff. "They're assassins or have you forgotten? Killing is in their pathetic occupation."

"They're not going to kill him," she repeated, turning her gaze to challenge his. "They're going to save him."

"Oh?" he seemed alleviated by her passively belligerent response. "And who told you that?"

She did not answer him, there was no use.

Who could ever defend the words of murderers to another murderer?

"Hm," he droned, eyes pouring around them, soaking up the bodies littered about the space. The bodies of his work. " I guess our time here is spent."

Tears scarred her cheeks.

"My heart hurts," she said quietly, talking to herself, to her creators above. "I don't want to die."

"You're not going to die, Esme," the man before her soothed, turning to scan her. She choked out a horrid sob at that. "You're just...not going to exist anymore."

And then his mouth opened, gorging teeth glinting.

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࿐SERAPH࿐

|Than—July 22, 7425|

A GORY TEMPEST. A father's final sermon to his child left to wilt in the retribution of the world's ingredients. Snow grated a fluffy ballad of vigilance as a band of armed hunters drifted through the empty wilderness of raw white. She couldn't have gone far, one said. No strained eyes were needed to see the other hunters' shifts of disagreement. She's The Tempest, another grunted but his irritation clashed with an inquisitive reverence. She could be in another planet by now and none of us would have a clue. The plants rebuilt themselves as a painful blizzard current snaking at the wetness of sinned eyes and slaughtering the air in lungs like a cancerous cigarette. The clearing was a mere plate of white that the once anticipated leafy wind restrained with lanky hoary mountain terrains iced in sleet and a surplus of an albino shroud's tears. My peculiar cataclysm of heaven's pain, the faceless man whispered into the nightless dusk. A father's chronic findings were to be endlessly preached into the ears of his strangest artery of life.

His dearest bastard of a daughter.

Her body trembled and tightened with the ailing cells of her body, all charging a crusade from the insides of her bruised organs. They prompted an ignorant waiver with every rise and fall her crimson cut chest gave away. A cyclone that ruled ruby sacrifices. The smell of the beast's carcass let loose a foul stench, coiling and branding a receipt of rot through the broken ribcage that held her moonless heart in place. The expanse of the monster's corpse was wide enough to fit the woman’s battered body but the unpleasant weight of its afterlife clung to her face and torn clothing as she lulled in a fetal position. Do you know what is more promising than a seething typhoon? The woman had bowed the daze to her valour. A raging one that knows how to kill from the ravines of silence.

The hunters' freight crunched over the snow as they moved further north. "What do you reckon that is?" A blond-headed hunter asked, nodding his head towards a large, brown blob of fur in the distance. The glob was sloped messily against the ice with a bulging hump that seemed as if it was stretching out for them.

"It looks like a Medvealk. And a rather large one at that," another answered, squinting the greens of his eyes to clear the sweating breeze from his view.

"Where'd you think its pack is?" The youngest questioned with a searching twist of her caramel head as the group steered closer towards the dead animal.

"Probably split when whatever took the beast down attacked," the huge man in the centre responded, jerking the galvanizing rifle in his grip in the direction of the sagged creature. "Stay close, El. Do not wonder unless you want to go home to your mother a corpse."

"Yes, father," the girl promised, smothering the shudder of alarm that fluttered within her at her father's morbid warning. For a second, the girl thought she saw the monster's fluffed side shift out of pace with the gusts. If the poor beast was truly still alive, it'd be a matter of time before the biting frost remembered its dinner.

"It's got a lot of meat on it, maybe we could take it with us to the village." Saliva tingled at the buds of the blond's tongue as he spoke, "A beauty like that would last us for weeks."

"We're here for the girl, Zeke, not a feast," the enormous man rasped. "Anything we get for her blood would be worth much more than a few weeks of wasting Medvealk meat."

"Do you think she did it?" The emerald-eyed hunter piped up with profound interest. The others glanced his way, browsing him as a distanced curiosity glued to the tip of his tongue like exotic confection. "Do you think the assassin—this Tempest...do you think she could have killed the thing?" Her name tasted like a sour rumour, a bad epidemic.

All but those from the allianced planets avoided it like a bad omen.

A bald man beside him gave out an incredulous snort in response. His gloved hands rolled sharply with the chill as he signed his muted opinion. 'It takes a whole flock of Swelns to kill a Medvealk. There's no way that a wounded girl could've taken it down alone. It would be impossible even if she was a tempest.'

"I agree with Rudd, Neil," Zeke pronounced the name with voiceless contempt. He turned away from Neil with a begrudged glare and eyed the other three. "But what could've possibly killed something this big with such ease?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Neil mumbled back bitterly, honoring his stale tone to Zeke more than the others. A delicate frown deepened his face as he pondered—a frown so integral and intense it would've had all their conclusions dropping to their unguarded knees.

'Don't touch it. If the Swelns slaughtered it, the thing's blood will be polluted with enough venom to kill a fleet.'

El's gaze drove from Rudd and to the looming figure of her father. "You didn't tell me why we're hunting The Tempest." Her words became weak at the edge of the title when the consciousness of the girl's query sat as arduous as the stares her party lent her.

"Because it's not important," her father brushed away with a burning flicker in his eyes. "All that matters is that there's a group of particularly wealthy and important people willing to pay a high price for that devil's head."

El winced at her father's testimony. She knew her father breathed his life as a hunter and served with one's fixed mind and open spirit, but hearing the lack of contrition in the man's cutting declaration was enough to make her trust queasy with concern.

Zeke elbowed her from the side. "And what he means in particularly wealthy and important people is the King and his government of jesters."

"But she looks around our age, father," she spoke shaper this time, sparing a reasoned glimpse towards the sage-eyed hunter who studied their surroundings with an overtly uninterested veneer."What could she have possibly done to warrant such a doom?"

A muscle in her father's jaw feathered in displeasure as his grip found the loose material of his daughter's coat. "You shouldn't rely so heavily on the deception of age, El. This, 'everybody is good until proven otherwise' phase of yours will get you killed someday—" The bites of her father's harsh exhale scratched her face—"Or worse: all of us." He gave the robes a fierce yank as he hissed the words, "You understand me, girl?"

"Wulfric," Zeke called in a reminder but his call was subdued as the bearded man took another tug at his daughter's garb.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"You understand?" El didn't trust the frailty of her voice, so instead the shaggy-haired hunter opted for a cooperative and understanding nod of her head. "Good."

An inaudible sigh fled Rudd's lips as he strode from the family's conflict. He paused for a few second, turning back to the curtailed group with a dictated sign of his hands. 'We need to set camp for the night. We can't catch any tempest if we're all frozen before nightfall.'

"That means forget about that dead Medvealk and prepare for camp, Zeke," Wulfric grunted as he proceeded to match Rudd's wide gaits. His next and final declaration was directed towards the entire party. "We should be able to make it to the west of Viervanes by the next sunset." Neil trailed a distance behind them with an out of place withdrawal, glancing between the far trees.

Zeke gave out a callous scoff as he quietly mumbled, "Yes, of course. Forgive a man for acknowledging his body's cries for food." Both he and El lagged behind the group as they remained posted near the cadaver. "What do you think, daddy's girl?"

"What?" El ignored the taunting name the man used as she attended to Zeke's mischievous attempt at persuasion.

"You wanna try some?" The blond gestured towards the dead creature with a mirthed glint in the lowest blues of his eyes.

"Rudd said it might be poisoned."

"Rudd's just being his usual paranoid, unfashionable self," Zeke answered without missing a beat. "I know for a fact that the beast wouldn't be this fresh if it had any Scwelns venom coursing through its veins." He shifted closer to the furry animal with a greedy gaze. "All those organs should be keeping some of the meat well."

A chill pressed at El's back, a sensation she was sure contested the stalking eyes of a predator tailing unsuspecting prey. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Zeke didn't seem to be dominated by the tense haze as he crouched in front of the severed and mauled stomach of the Medvealk. "I think we should start catching up with the others," El's suggestion was a whisper distinguished to the thrashing climate.

There it was again. A chill. It was a pricking coolness that was singeing against the snow's usual cold puffs. Zeke jabbed at the corpse's abdomen, jerking it open with a hungry smile that vanished almost as instantly as it leaked. A vacant void of vessels met the two. No intestines. No lungs. Just a empty shelled Medvealk with a mutilated heart. Zeke bulked from his squatted position, the dense air having finally slammed into his soul and tossing it away at full speed as his eyes traced the startling words carved into the russet heart: Her eyes are on you.

Then woods of white began their wails of great prophecy. A prognosis of a group of hunters' mishaps.

"Wulfric?" Zeke's call was gnawed on and hurled back into the frozen flush of his face by the wind. It was like the other half of their group had vanished entirely from existence. No matter how many times the duo called their names or ran with their trails, it all seemed to fluctuate back into one sterile orbit. "Father?!" Every direction they moved plucked them back into the direction of the hallowed out Medvealk remains. "Rudd!"A winter maze without walls or doors. A limitless gale of artifice. A terrifying tempest of false's untrues.

The rough setting exploited a parched game that jammed the back of El's throat. "Zeke," she called numerous times but the blond's own yells of distress subjugated the topography. "Zeke!"

Zeke collapsed to his knees, hands shaking as he reached up to stroke the exposed skin between the blond curtains grazing his neck. He pulled away, eyeing his pale palm before turning back to El with the crimson salvo of his body seeping down from the side of his neck.

"El?"

His friend's name was another slice let free from an unseen blade, letting easy a gaping hole within the throat of the usually impish man's neck until the only devilish thing about him was the red blitz tarnishing the snow carrying the weight of his body.

He was dead.

"Drop it or she'll decapitate you." El recognised that voice. That withdrawn and flamboyant voice that loved to chime across all of the holographic billboards in the city where her father would drag them every fortnight. "I could try and stop her but I'm afraid that not even I could hold a steady fight against the Tempest."

The Tempest.

Prince Levion stood a few steps away from her, hands held up as a standard of surrender to the woman who towered behind El, blade inches from her naked jugular. They were both doused in blood El knew to be second-hand, scarred with the dessert of scrapes and bruises. Her hand…His bright eyes flickered from the Tempest, then towards the rifle young El had forgotten she was clutching dearly until now.

"You killed Zeke." That was all she could do in that single moment, replay the memory of her friend's end into actuality. "Ze—He’s dead."

"Yeah, and depending on how I’m feeling tonight, you might just be joining him." It wasn't Levion who spoke this time, his mouth was stitched shut with a sort of sorrow that wrong-doers intertwined into contrition as the Tempest paid zero care to him.

"She didn't mean to kill him," he told El with deluded belief, turning away to glance at Zeke's frosting corpse. "We thought you two were with my father's private platoon."

"It doesn't matter if it was a mistake or not," the assassin barked, her knife scratching at El's neck with every emphasized syllable that left her mouth. She eyed the prince from the corner of her eye. "She’s a Hunter. Do you know what that means, playboy? It means that she was going to try and kill us for a few coins."

"And you're a hired killer," the prince argued back at her, "What difference does it make when you both get paid to kill people?"

El stared at him pleadingly. "I haven’t killed people."

“But we have,” called a snide voice chipped through the device on the Tempest’s waist. “And very soon, your Highness,” the voice spat in tease. “Your father’s oh-so lavish patrol will be updating their tally.”

“Scarlet,” the Tempest addressed the voice with a audible sigh, adjusting the machine on her belt to lower the boom of his voice. “Do you remember the man from the ball?”

“The touchy-feely boy? The disgustingly good-looking one?”

“Scarlet,” she answered galled, scanning their surroundings. If El wasn't as scared as she already was, she could've cringed at the loss of sting from the Tempest’s blade at that moment, the wash of spikes which drummed onto her from the blood which dripped from the taller woman’s cut-up wrist. “I think he knows who I am.”

A laugh ran from the other side of the static machine. “Yeah?”

“The animal bit a chunk out of her!” Levion blurted aloud in a hiss, only shutting up once the Tempest sent an irritated glimpse his way.

The humour that was formerly being admitted from the machine thwarted, blistering painfully with the outrage of Scarlet. “He fucking did what?”

“Barely,” the Tempest murmured bragging, fidgeting with the volume on the device as she adjusted its volume against the wails of winter. “At his most pathetic best, he only got in a nimble.”

Something inaudible passed through the transmission before Scarlet’s voice chirped in again.

“What about the woman?”

“Woman?”

“Levion’s woman,” Scarlet answered, causing the Tempest to spare a glance at the man.

“Esme?” Levion butted in, a grave look besmirching his face. “What about Esme? Is she ok? Is my wife alright?”

“You tell me,” Scarlet responded. “Seems to me that she had other motives tonight.” A disparaging giggle ran through the callous climate. “Perhaps she found someone more charming, Levion. Shame.”

“What is he talking about?” Levion breathed, half addressing the Tempest who watched on cautiously before him and half himself. He snatched the communicator from her, tightly bearing it in his hands as he brought it close to his face with urgency. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Your wife broke her deal, Levion; she didn't show up,” was all Scaret said to him, not following up with anything as the static of the radio buzzed.

“No,” Levion choked, grasping the communicator with a vice grip. “No, no, that's not right.”

“Then please do exactly tell us,” the Tempest spoke from behind him, seeming vexed by the pacing man before them. “What is right here? Because to me, this seems awfully like a dismally deliberated scheme to dupe.”

Levion was silent for a moment, eyeing her with a hysterical stare. “You,” he muttered with a disbelieving scoff, struggle-marred face reddening aside from the cold. “You two thugs really planned this one out, didn't you?”

“My prince,” El whispered, not knowing who to be more frightened for.

He ignored her, “I knew I should've listened to my gut,” he seethed, taking a step closer to the Tempest, “Did you kill her?”

“And if I did? What could you possibly do, Levion?” She chortled cruelly, watching the prince with burning repulsion. “Kill me?”

“You bitch,” Levion hissed, snarling as he launched her way. A frightened squeal broke El’s lips as she dove away from the man who knocked himself into the taller woman. “You evil, conniving, bitch.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed, Levion,” the Tempest snarled at him, seeming mellow as Levion found his way above her, pushing his weight into her wrist, dagger in her hand arched in an angle that made it so that the blade scraped against her skin.

“What did you do to him?” Levion spat, hands pushing her face into the biting snow below them. “Did you kill him too, huh? Answer me!”

“I don't know who you’re talking about Levion,” replied the Tempest, voice lacking in all its mirth.

“The waiter.”

A half-scoff fled her lips, a hiss arising from her as Levion’s elbow dug poorly angled into her. “I think you already know the answer to that question.”

She pushed him off her with an incredible shove, watching as he stumbled on his feet and to the ground, away from her although El knew the man was going to waste no time charging at her again.

“Séra,” the familiar voice came from the communicator. “Franklin has issued an enim for Than.”

“Now?” The Tempest growled the question, watching Levion. She stood on her feet, patting off the white which glued itself to her.

“Now,” the confirmation singed through the chill.

“Copy,” she spoke, eyeing Levion blastoff into another attack with a broken battle cry. Though this time she did not resist, instead pushing her weight into her forward foot as she jabbed a hand upright, impaling him the second he was a few inches from her.

Gushing, the snows below gossiped to the rhapsodic wafts, It’s gushing regal blood.

A softened wail ran out Levion’s lips as he clawed at the material of her clothes, scanning her with a surfeit of hatred. He pulled her closer to him by the hems of her clothes, spitting in her face before she let him collapse pathetically to the ground and at her feet.

The Tempest took a disgusted wipe of her face, saying calmly, “I told you that you were going to get yourself killed, Levion.”

El didn't realise she was sobbing until she forced her eyes to blink against the ice, her shout rumbling against the rattles of nature as instinct envolped her frosting body.

El closed her eyes with her sacrificial cry of battle, the Tempest’s eyes finding her.

BANG!

The sound of the rifle shushed El’s weeps, ears ringing and outing the terrifying crunch of sped boots against the snow as the Tempest’s bloody palm found itself flat against the side of the gun before it unloaded again. A yell ran from Levion on the floor, dwindling in anger, stirring in stress as another boom rattled the air. Fully opening her eyes, a cry of hysteria broke El’s chapped lips at the sight of the woman before her, the tree to the far left of her shoulder shredded with two blistering gun wounds. Missed. El had missed. The Tempest yanked the gun out of the girl’s grasp with a single tug. She took a strong kick to El’s chest, knocking the air out of the girl’s lungs as she dropped her to the ground next to a bleeding Levion, the Tempest’s bloodied boot slamming back into the white ground a few feet from them.

Click.

BANG!

“AAAAAHHHH!!!” El’s scream pulled at all the fissures of her vocals, straining to haul out every figure of her pain into the sky as blood rushed viciously out of her thigh.

“I-I,” a shuddered voice piped, bringing the Tempest’s attention back on Levion who was turning a concerning pale, rifle in her hold clicking menacingly. “I-I’m going to kill you.”

“You can certainly try, Levion,” she replied boredly, eyes delighted at the sight of her mess as once again, she raised the barrel of El’s assaulter. “But haven't you heard? it’s quite the challenge when you're dead.”

BANG!

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࿐SÉRAPH࿐

|Instances of disaster|

|Cazar, a few months later|

TWO FIGURES descended from the busy sky, the first's body silked down like butter as she fell unconsciously through the sky-high traffic. The second's mysterious veins leaked a turbulent barrage of carnage as she trespassed, eclectic eyes half-closed as the vehicles forcefully glowed their way into her pupils. Her cord to life had snapped, yet her grip on the limp girl who plummeted by her right never wavered. How was it that a person at the rim of death could be packed with so much resentment? So much rage? Hate was her sprouting thread to life and now it would be her ending for it.

She could feel everything and nothing at the same time. A true sign of a person's crushing defeat.

She felt the same waves of vapour gushing around her body, urging her to keep moving back and over the crunching shatters of glass as she made her last ruling. All she could do was watch the crepuscular-eyed man before her as she let everything go. His pretty lips moved so fluidly, governed words slithering from the blood-soaked woman as the cries of the wind huddled her eardrums. Before she had realised what she had done, the broken window's end shortened her sight, the cruel and frustrated stare of the strange man dying with the soulless figure of who she believed was her target. Solomon Cazar, the leading magistrate and leader to the 6th planet of Cazar that had cost Séraph her life, all because frittered stories meant nothing to him. In his place laid the child who valued cost over life, a child who was brought to his knees by one once reputable subject. A child whose family would never know he had long left them, that their child no longer was theirs, but a mangled display of solar politics. A son, a brother, a soul, all ruined by one avaricious request formulated under one anonymous cloak of misdeed. A request that Séraph hadn't questioned until now.

A force heaved the two women's strength down with them. An unseen grasp of burning oxygen let their skin through its soft command without much care. Drifting headlights flashed and horns blared as the sticky traffic that cultivated the impressive city was instantly halved by two apathetic figures of plunging nonpareils. One cursed to be awake at death's mercy, the other too blacked out and unlucky to reflect her hidden annexes of luck.

They were falling and they were falling hard.

The reason the moons and stars made their company to the awake girl was not that she had she heart stolen by one who lies but because she was not an angel. There was a reason the girl was not gifted with feathers that bound the beauty of the heavens; the reason that she, as the mists of clouds whispered to her, was bracing her last entertainment of midnight before all she had ever know was truly gone.

Everything that was not already gone.

The girl was falling and death was her cord.

Bitter stabs of salted rain graced the cold exterior of her cheeks while her legs snatched themselves high to try and touch the flashes of stars in the sky for the last time, her arms bound to the lumbering body beside her as if she were a rooted snare. Her eyes were wet with her own hurricanes of emotions, rapidly retreating from her figure in the knowledge of their sad demise.

Outrage.Wrath. Shame. So many barbarian and estranged emotions prowled the young woman from the inside. They didn't dare waste a second for their last supper. Why? Why couldn't her heart be numb like the rest of her body? Sprinkled rainbows of lucid advert holograms flashed graphic as their glints grazed her skin, letting her body berth from their grip. Where? Where had it all gone wrong? The half-concealed moons stared down at the falling woman with dented surfaces of grief and anguish. How? How did the small girl that once looked so great up to them become the one that now blended the navy torn sky with her cries of defeat?

Tonight, even the mighty stars hid their eyes as hell opened and a certain loss became the victimised shouts of another damaged soul.

She was finally going to die.

There was no use in fighting; the ground was leaping greater and loftier. Her eyes drained themselves of tears and as it did, she caught glimpse of the monster that curled the fair numerals of her age, arriving for its last affront of goodbye. A wicked time came to a stop as it embraced the woman's soul for what felt like the very last time before a long, mislaid eternity.

While the winds howled, a devil's parting words soothed her ears, deafening her as the deep iron of his of intimate voice registered to her, preserving her. My girl, how can we expect to mend if we ourselves cannot be fixed? It was not like she could do so, even if she tried. All she ever touched resulted in the opposite of fix. She was not made to fix it. She was made to destroy. A child of balance that polarised because nobody else could.

My girl. His voice was not one she could put a face to, but that didn't help the ripple of pain in her heart hearing it. All new like I had promised, yet all so broken. A smile tugged her lips as she gazed up at the distancing cosmos. She was indeed broken. Broken. That was a word she had feared since childhood. A word that now nurtured her pitiful existence.

How very ironic.

The cries of panicked motors bellowed a blanket around her, advert billboards cackling as the galaxy above her cheered. Even if you're hurting, there will always be someone whose love is willing to heal all your wounds...that was what Scarlet used to say. The woman wondered if cracks were all his vision of love could heal. Could it heal the invisible? What if her pain wasn't all physical?

Too much hope makes us blind, She knew that but a little wishing couldn't do much harm. Maybe then she could someday be happy. Dying happy...that didn't quite fit her, did it? How sad. Actually, thinking back to it now, nothing really did ever fit her.

How tragic.

ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʟᴀꜱᴛ ᴡɪꜱʜ, my girl.

𝘼 𝙬𝙞𝙨𝙝...

Her last wish of ruinous happiness was bestowed to her as a blur of her unfortunate life, looping transparently in her fading consciousness.

𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙞𝙩 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙜𝙤𝙣𝙚.