AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I bid no farewell before I leave to my rooms.
Wind rushes through the open balcony doors, carrying a chorus of laughing voices:
Vi-o-let
Vile witch
Stupid dirt-born.
I sit up in bed at once, sweaty and cold, bracing for theheadache. Fog is thick outside, and the sky feels closer than ever. Across my room, the moon seems to ripple in the full-length mirror.
The Fates are here again.
I pinch my nails into my palm, but their whispers don’t go away. Hasn’t enough happened today? Slipping out of bed, I walk across the blue-dark stretch of my room toward my mirror until I’m close enough to press a hand against my reflection, crowned with moonlight.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I sense threads in the future that I can’t grasp.
One life owed,the voices chant.
You will burn for him.
You will burn to ashes.
“I won’t start a war for you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” I’m finally seeing the bigger picture—the scheming of gods. Their taste for blood. Their taste for power. “You are helping that witch, too, aren’t you?”
She chose, she chose,
blood and roses and war.
A pawn, a puppet, a player:
which will you be?
So it’s true. “Is it a choice if you give me none besides murder or death? If you’ve been watching me, then you know there’s nothing I hate more than being told what todo.”
We will not mourn
when they betray you.
You are no one, nothing—
A shade, unwhole.
“Or being told who I am.”
In the mirror, my face is weary and fraught behind my loose hair, all color drawn away in the dim light. My nightgown is rumpled from fitful sleep. My hand holds the thorn, though when I look down at my real hand, I don’t see it.
You deny your destiny.
He poisons your heart.
“Better him than you all.”
The thorn bursts into life, vines coursing up my arm, my neck, my body. I stumble back, reaching for something to smash the mirror, but the dull throb of my injured hand reminds me: I don’t know whether I’m asleep or awake.
The writhing growth covers the whole of my reflection until I’m nothing but a speck of the eye. The voices coalesce, singing as if celebrating:
Something rotten lies in your earth.
