Ashes of Lily

“You deserve it, witch! Burn her! Kill the sinner!” echoed the screams of the crowd outside the moldy cell where she was plated on the ground with her head resting on the stone wall. She wondered if it was a destiny she cannot escape this time as well. Was she perhaps meant to live in an endless cycle of vengeance where she stands in the middle of the battlezone barehanded? Isn’t it a tad bit too late for her to recall the memories of the past after being off the edge of hell by the hands of those she shed tears and bleed dry trying to help and serve? what is the point of flooding events of numerous incidents of past lives on the verge of the end of yet another one? Rattles of chains were heard approaching her cell, yet nothing could get the once noble lady to be brought out of her trance. “Oh my! Such a foul smell!” came a velvety voice that had once soothed and comforted. “How dare you, you wrench!” threatened a guard and unlocked the cell. he grabbed the woman by the hair and dragged her to the feet of the visitor. " Worthless garbage!” he spat. Leaning on trembling arms, the branded prisoner looked up with a devoid expression and asked with a hoarse voice, “You are?” A sneer marred the face of the beautiful lady in black standing, “Pathetic, Lilian! Utterly vile!” she continued with a hashed voice carrying contempt in its folds, “A worthless beggar like you has stain the family for too long. It is only worth my time spent conversing to scum like you to be appointed the heiress.” She smiled triumphantly and leaned down to look the blank-faced woman in the eye. “Another life wasted, Lily of the Fey Valley” At that moment a screeching scream could be heard at the farthest outskirts of the capital Utor. For some, it sounded ominous and for others, it sounded agonizing but the truth was far uglier. Back in the cell, lied Lilian motionless. Initially, the guards thought she went mad and dragged her back inside like a sack of dirt, but for the gifted eyes, and only the peculiarly gifted, the body with marred with countless scars: sunken ones, claw marks, cuts, slashes, burns and bite marks. those scars looked too deep to be even considered scars; they were the time’s mark to previous hellish lives that came to an end most ruthlessly. Lilian’s mind was in a matter of minutes bombarded by the lengthiest flash of antecedent lives bestowed on her by the merciful gods as if taking pity of her ill fate. Still, it all amounted to the same for every birth of hers carried with it the rewriting in the old books of destiny using her cursed blood. What curse is it that would transcend time and spheres to hold true again and again. She was Lily of the Fey Valley: a tribe that drew breath once peacefully in a lush valley far from common civilization. They saw beauty and worshiped harmony. Nonetheless, difference compelled wariness, and with that came fear and ignorance. The Fey were, for the lack of a better description, celestial. They were blessed with abilities that stemmed from the descendants of the Gods themselves. They did have the human element in them but chose to bury it under layers of bounding magic as they found the human side to be vindictive and destructive. They chose to steer away from the man-made society as they label it for nothing but the fact that they sought worldly gains and in the process stepped on the living and willing and generated greed and madness. “Why mother? Why?” sobbed Lilian or Lily as she came to realize. Her mother, a highly skilled and crafty Fey hunter, was taken as a slave from her valley when she was but three months pregnant. The grotesque deeds that she was subject to would have driven her to take her own life. Yet, it drove her to madness. The tribe was ambushed by someone who they believe were a saint: a man who carried himself in pretense of abhorring the ways of men and displayed pity towards their lost way. He was the traitor, but to her, it was a heart-shattering revelation for not one but two reasons. She was the one who pleaded their chief to take him in and heal his life-ending wounds as she stumbled upon him when she was patrolling the borders of the Gasping Caves - a series of phenomenal caves that held withing riches beyond measure- To her, while standing in the battlefield witnessing her kin slaughtered, every drop of blood spilled, every wail howled, every tear shed, every scream heard, and every dead body dropped was on her. She brought the doom merrily into her home and dragged her Fey into the murkiest depths of hell. It was her deed, her sin, her crime. Nonetheless, the greater sin was carried in her belly. Thrown to wolves and ravished by petty dogs took nothing of her misery and self-contempt. She was aware that her end was nearing and what use could it be to rebel and murder the lowly dogs when they were nothing but errand lackeys to a vicious man who danced with the devil and shook hands with the deity? She was dying and she knew she could not rip his throat and bath in his blood the way she yearned for. The child in her belly, albeit innocent, was a rejected existence and it was draining her faster. She thought and devised day and night fuelled by the echoing screams of her tribe and edged with the smell and sight of blood lingering around her being. Time will come and she would go the way of all flesh, but her vengeance would remain to very the end. The one to deliver it shall be the very cursed life feeding off of her body and soul; her very own flesh and blood…..and his: the infernal man Malus.