Chapter 7 – The controller of life

Aurora had soon lapsed into another long spell of sleep. Her sleep was eventful. For the first time in years she was dreaming. They weren’t just dreams. She revisited the night when the prophecy was first made. The prophecy that had determined her destiny. She revisited the dark dungeons where the voltors had first held her when she was a child, when she had run away from her mother’s home. And she revisited Sceadusa, the same Sceadusa who had loved her and now who loathed her!

Sceadusa’s image in her mind brought back the piercing fear that woke her again with a jolt. She opened her eyes to find herself yet again in the same brightly lit room. Only this time she had company.

Sitting by Aurora’s side was her green ghost. She shrunk back the moment her eyes found him there. he smiled…a disturbing eerie smile. This wasn’t going to be good, Aurora could feel it.

Sensing her tense feelings, he spoke, “Don’t be afraid of me. I’m Orisis. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

She didn’t trust him, of course she didn’t. She questioned, ” Why am I here and where’s my baby? Did the voltors take her away?” she was desperate, tired and scared.

“No, your baby’s body is safe. nothing has happened to it. The voltors couldn’t touch her in my presence. They are powerless in my presence. They work on Sceadusa’s command but Sceadusa has no control over my power!” He explained.

This somehow puzzled Aurora. Wasn’t Sceadusa supposed to be the most powerful dark power in Fruscan? How could then she not have control over whoever this Orisis was? Orisis realised Aurora wasn’t really convinced.

“You are wondering how Sceadusa can’t control me, aren’t you?” He asked. Aurora nodded. He continued, “Sceadusa is the queen of the dark, she controls death. I, on the other hand, control life. She can’t use her powers on me. and I can’t use my powers on her either. She can kill my people and I can control hers though. that’s how I saved you from the voltors that night.”

Aurora interrupted him, “Why did you save me?”

He smiled. “I was coming to that. I know who you are Aurora and I know about your past. I know about you and Sceadusa. I knew saving you would anger her. And that is precisely what I wanted to do. I love to irritate my little sister!” He laughed.

Little sister! Aurora was at a loss of words. She didn’t know Sceadusa had a brother! Her brother – the controller of life! And he thought it was fun to irritate his little sister? What was this – some sick joke?

What was happening? How could this be happening? The prophecy was supposed to come true… but his was definitely not part of it! something was wrong and She shuddered at the thought of what this sudden change in events might bring.

Orisis saw Aurora’s puzzlement and he laughed louder. He then said, “We need to get you ready. I suppose you’d want to meet Sophie. She’s been waiting for you.” 

At the mention of Sophie’s name, Aurora’s eyes widened. Sophie, he meant her corpse. Yes sophie was dead. Orisis repeated, “Sophie is waiting. My maids will come and help you now. I will meet you in the main chamber.” With that, he left.

Aurora’s mind was now muddled with all the new information she had just received. Orisis – Sceadusa’s brother! Sophie… waiting for her??? She had to find out…she had to find out soon.

Chapter 6 – The strange room

She had melted. she couldn’t feel her limbs. and she felt strangely empty, like something was missing. Her eyes struggled to open. She wanted to but they couldn’t. She struggled harder…and was finally opened them. She looked around…and almost choked on her own breath!

She discovered herself wrapped in nothing but a silver sheet in an enormous room. It was spectacularly illuminated by bright lights on every visible surface. Not really being used to the light, the brightness stung her eyes. She struggled to understand what was going on.

Trying to focus on something that could give her some clue about her current situation, she tried to get out of the silver sheets. Unfortunately, she found out soon, she wasn’t just wrapped in silver sheets, but she was tied down as well! She suddenly fell still, really petrified now!

She wasn’t used to confinement ever since her last encounter with Sceadusa and the voltors. But this, this was very very different. This was scary. It wasn’t dark. It wasn’t something she could handle. She was lost in her fear. But the thought of voltors had helped to revive her memory a little bit. The voltors…weren’t they following her. Her and Sophie! SOPHIE! Where was she? Where was the dead body of her child?

With renewed resolve, Aurora struggled to get out of the sheets. This was not something the prophecy had mentioned. The prophecy had told her about the voltors and she knew how to deal with them. Why wasn’t she then captured by the voltors. Why were they not torturing her? She felt like she was in an entirely different world altogether!

But what was this strange place she was in…and where had that green ghost disappeared. Her memory had finally extracted those last moments before her had lost consciousness.

Wasn’t there that apparition that had saved her? Or had he really saved her? And what about Sophie’s corpse? Where was that? All these questions riddled her mind. She felt she would go insane if she didn’t find answers soon.

She started screaming. Screaming out loud. Screaming with all her might. She could scream till the last breath left her lungs. She wouldn’t stop until someone heard her. Someone, anyone, man, ghost, voltor or anything else!

She didn’t have to cry herself hoarse for in some time, her green ghost was back. He seemed to have appeared out of thin air! He stood there in front of her once again. And she stared at him. He was green…the shade of envy. He stood there with what seemed like a smile on his face.

She tried to wriggle out of her sheets, but was unable to. She called out to him. “You, who are you? And where am I? Where is..where is my child’s body? Say something!”

Aurora’s face was a twisted knot of questions. She wanted so many answers and he just stood there.

Suddenly he moved. No he didn’t move, he just said something, “Lie. Just lie. Now is not the time. We shall speak and I shall answer your questions. But you are hurt. You need to rest.”

Aurora felt anger rise inside her. Who was this insane creature? didn’t he know she had to bury Sophie’s remains before the voltors found her body? Didn’t he know she couldn’t care less about any physical discomfort? didn’t he know she was not capable of dying?

She struggled. Struggled some more…but eventually gave up. And Aurora started to cry. Those tears that she thought had dried up inside her, found life again. The green ghost had disappeared by then. Leaving her even more puzzled than the night before.

Chapter 5 – The glow

As if answering her unsaid prayers, the sky suddenly glowed with an electrifying flash of lightening. This event was enough to attract the voltors’ attention away form her for a tiny little solitary moment; which left just about enough time for Aurora to make a dive for the nearest turn in the street.

And for the first time ever, luck was smiling down on her, for her quick thinking coupled with the suddenness of lightening managed to confuse the voltors for a minute. Voltors were stupid creatures, soul-thirsty stupid creatures! She should know, she had been in their company before!

Once again running for her life (Hah! Life!) with her newly found confidence, Aurora soon reached the end of the village. She knew this edge of the village well. She knew there was a stable around here. She used to get little Sophie to play with the horses. Horses! That was it! That’s what she needed!

She was bloody scared of horses, but she had consistently worked towards getting over her phobia. Horses were just animals…just like other animals, much gentler and nicer than herself for sure! She looked around for the stable. She started running in a direction where she thought the stable was. She ran, ran with all her might. With all the blood that was now done flowing through the little open sores in her feet. She ran! Towards a tiny light she saw.

She got closer, the light grew larger. But somehow something was amiss. It wasn’t the usual yellow light of a lamp. Instead it was a strange blue – green glow. She inched closer, suddenly not so sure of her choice of direction. The voltors were back on their course by now. She had exactly half a moment to decide – surrender to the known or embrace the unknown?

She chose the latter. Curiosity had always been Aurora’s weakest point!

She ran towards the light. For some strange reason, her heart was filled with wild hope…a hope of the unimaginable. A weird hope for survival. This sudden optimism made her shiver. Was this really the time to be behaving so stupid?

Sophie’s body felt lighter to Aurora. Was it the unknown feeling of baseless hope or had the voltors already got her baby. Now, for the first time Aurora really felt like she was losing her mind. The light was making her crazy. Bu she couldn’t stop herself from going towards it.

Finally, as she got closer, she realised it wasn’t light after all. It was a strange tall figure standing in front of her. Someone-something she had never seen before. And Aurora stopped. Stood rooted to the spot! What in Sceadusa’s name was that!

The tall figure looked at Aurora. It was a man…no not a man, a…a…a…something. A ghost maybe…! Yes that must be it! A ghost! Yes it…probably..was…one…

Aurora felt weak. She suddenly felt very weak. She didn’t know what was happening. She saw the voltors approaching…and the ghost…the green ghost was still there…or was he…Aurora didn’t know. She felt Sophie slip from her arms. She screamt. Yes Aurora screamt. She didn’t want to scream. But Sophie…Sophie was slipping. What…what was happening…where…huh…and it was all dark. The numb feeling was back again…but it was a peacefull numbness…like deep deep sleep.

and the rain poured on…

Chapter 4 – Voltors

They were coming…her voice told her. She could feel her pulse quickening. She had to hurry. She had to get out of here. She had to take Sophie’s corpse with her. She didn’t want to leave Sophie at their mercy.

She gathered the dead remains of her child in her shivering arms. She took one look around the empty room. She knew she would never be coming back. Never! She stumbled and hurt herself as she made haste. Her eyes weren’t ready to come out of their delirium yet. Memories were working like opium, slowing her down, numbing her mind, making her want the easy pain…pain of submission and defeat.

Aurora had to snap out of it. Submission is not what she wanted. She had to fight. Fight to get her baby to her final resting place. She had to tuck Sophie in for a long night ahead.

Aurora hurried to get out of the dark and twisted room, not bothering to cover up the evidence of her heinous crime. She didn’t have to bother about that. The moment she had held Sophie’s delicate neck in her icy cold fingers, they must have found out about it.

She left the house with Sophie’s limp body on her shoulder. It was raining when she stepped out. Pouring rather. She dexterously made her way through the maze of puddles and slippery rocks in her path. The darkness of the night failed to aid her.

Rainwater lashed at her face. Her face, white as a ghost was devoid all emotion except a sense of deep urgency. Her urgency to get out of the village took precedence over the bothersome rain that poured from the heavens.

Heavens! She smiled at the thought. A smile of resignation and irony. Heaven was not where she was headed. She didn’t even merit going to hell. Her crimes were far too grave for that. Grave – now that is something she was in search of. She had to reach the river before they caught up with her.

As she hurried through the streets, she did not have the time to stop and stare at her feet which were being brutally assaulted by jagged stones on the street. They bled, the blood mixing beautifully with the black-brown earth. She owed that to the earth. Her blood! She couldn’t giver her body. But her blood she could. Maybe if she bled enough to drain the last drop of blood from her body, maybe then she could die.

But Aurora knew that was not possible. Silly thoughts of a silly girl! The thought brought the image of her mother’s visage to her troubled mind. No, not this memory. Not now. She had had enough for one night. Not tonight. Not again. She didn’t want to scream. She didn’t want to feel more pain. She craved for the numbness that Jonathan’s memory always brought. It was easier to deal with.

With a stern warning to herself, she struggled hard to banish her mother’s thought that seemed to be creeping into her mind. She didn’t have to struggle to hard though, for precisely at that moment she could hear their pulse thumping inside her. She knew they were close. Close enough to be able to pounce on her soon. She could feel a burning sensation rising at the back of her neck…even in that pouring rain that chilled her to the bone!

She dared not turn around. The urge to look over her shoulder was immense but the fear of finding what she didn’t want to was beyond comparison.

She kept pushing forward, almost menacingly now. She was hopeful because the river wasn’t far now. She would be there in no time. She had to be there in no time.

She could hear them now. They were there…seven of them! She had never thought Sceadusa would send seven of them after her! Seven voltors! Dealing with one was equal to battling a certain death. And seven of them?

Aurora was almost tempted to give up. What could she do? How could she keep Sophie’s body from the voltors? She could possibly not reach the river without being met by the menacing lot. She had to find another way. She had to get away from where they could feel her. She had to vanish into thin air…somehow!

Chapter 3 – Enigma

Jonathan Knightly had been everything she did not want. He was a good man. A man with principles and a sense of righteousness. And she could not stand it. He wasn’t a simpleton. But still, far too simple to understand her and her life. And she could not reveal her true identity to him. She dared not. Doing that would unleash a force so hateful that even she could not have escaped burning in the resulting fire.

Why had she allowed him to come so close? Didn’t she know she wasn’t allowed to? The hate that was alive inside her would take him down. She knew that. Yet, yet she had let him in. Perhaps, perhaps because she wanted to know what being intimate felt like. Not just physically intimate. She had of course experienced that, many times over. But the intimacy that came from being emotionally tied to someone. It wasn’t something she knew she could have. But she craved nevertheless. And with Jonathan, she gave in. 

The moment he had set eyes on her for the first time, she knew he had lost himself to her. How could he not? She was the most exquisite creature his eyes had ever had the pleasure of seeing. Slender yet not delicate, stunning yet not traditionally what one would call beautiful and yet dangerously mesmerising – Aurora was an enigma. An enigma Jonathan wanted to pursue. Her cold eyes said nothing, yet he sought meaning in them. Her body stiffened at his gaze but he could still see how vulnerable it could be. 

Desperately and unsuccessfully trying to maintain a strict stance, Aurora could feel herself melt. He wasn’t appealing to her usual nature. But those eyes had something in them. Something warm. Something Aurora had never seen. How could she? She had lived through the night until now. A night so long and dark that she craved for the crack of dawn. She craved for her personal dawn. 

As he walked up to her, all she could think of doing was run. She wanted to run, run far away as she always had. The way she had run away from her mother’s home. Far away from all that had killed her childhood. From those morbid memories of a past murkier than death itself. And now she wanted to run again. She was scared. Scared to have this man come close to her. Scared to have him look at her. Scared to feel what he was feeling for her.

But how far, how far could she run? She had surrendered. Surrendered to a life of safety. She had given in to the temptation of tasting the forbidden fruit. Forbidden just to her. The forbidden fruit called love, called life. And that was it. It was done. And there was no returning. She had committed the ultimate sin. She had loved. She had loved with all her heart, mind and body. Her soul was never a part of anything anyway. It had ceased to matter a long time ago. And nothing could revive that.

Not even Jonathan.

Her world was something she wanted to keep Jonathan away from. She could not drag him down with her. she should not. She remembered how she had punished herself for letting Jonathan love her. She had punished herself for being what she was…irresistible to him! He didn’t know it wasn’t her charm but something lot deeper that attracted him to her. Only she knew and she despised that.

She despised him for making her feel so weak and vulnerable. She needed control. She had to have control. Those cuts she intricately carved on her wrists could give her control. That was somehting her cold eyes could see but could not stop. That was something all the dark powers in her world could not stop. They couldn’t stop her from hurting herself. Her only trump card! Her only solace…her only morbid piece of happy knowledge. 

The memory of Jonathon’s face twisted in horror when he saw her in a pool of blood lying besides the bed was so vivid, she felt she could almost touch it. that fear was so alive, so close, so real. It was the fear for a loved one, mixed with panic and uncertainty, with inquiry and urgency. His disbelief at what his beloved Aurora had done, seemed almost comical to her. But how could she tell him that she needed to do this to stay sane? He would not understand and he never did. But she loved him. The only man she ever loved. 

He had given her a chance – a faraway but tangible shot at normal life, at normal human life. And she had liked what she had, not without bottomless remorse, yet she had liked it. He had given her the best gift…her Sophie. Her Sophie, whom she had strangled to extract the last breath from her little gasping lungs. Her sophie, whom she had loved. Whom she had loved even after her make-belief world had come crashing after Jonathan’s death. Her Sophie…who was nothing but a corpse now…to be buried deep in the womb of the earth. To be buried next to her father, Jonathan.

Aurora struggled to push away the memories as she picked up the dead child in her arms. She had to do this fast. They would be coming for her. Soon.

Chapter 2 – A long night

She had been running. Running away from this very prediction. She did not want it to come true. Hadn’t she been warned about it? But the dark prophecy had come true. And she had killed Sophie.

All those years of self control…of self punishment and mutilation had not been able to stop her from wringing her little Sophie’s delicate neck. How she had been scared for her mother. Little Sophie, even while struggling to gulp her last breath, had looked into Aurora’s eyes, into her mother’s eyes and been scared for her. She was scared her mother was turning into a monster everyone would be scared of.

Aurora winced as a sigh crept from the eerie depths of her tainted soul. She had brutally murdered her last ray of hope. Sophie was supposed to be her key to salvation, her ultimate chance for redemption. And now she had lost that too.

In a world where evil reined supreme, Sophie had been everything that embodied the opposite. She was pure as a wild-flower untouched by the polluted world. Aurora knew she should have let her go a long time ago. Keeping her child with her was a wrong decision.

Maybe, just maybe, something would have kept the inevitable from happening had Sophie not been with her. But deep inside her, Aurora knew she would have killed her anyway. The prophecy…that had tormented her day and night, that had robbed her of her peace of mind…had come true.

As she now saw the lifeless body in front of her, she realised the eyes were still looking at her. She could still see the love. The love of the little wild-flower. She tried to move shakily towards the body, trying not to look at the eyes. But she couldn’t tear her eyes away either. She had to look into them. They were the only eyes that had never mocked her. The only eyes that had loved her. How could she look away? How could she?

She took the delicate mass into her arms, holding it close to her heart. Her heart had stopped beating…or so she wished! The soft face circled by a halo of soft brown curls was lying in her hands. Soft curls, how Aurora had loved playing with these soft curls when she wasn’t scared of hurting her baby. How she had loved tying bright ribbons that fluttered in the wind with every spring in Sophie’s walk.

But that was a long time ago. In a faraway world, long buried in her heart.

That one night had changed everything. The night when Jonathan had breathed his last. Jonathan, the love of her life. The man who had made Aurora’s every dream possible. The man she had loved with all her heart, had died. She had learnt to live without him. She had learnt to live without his memory.

But tonight, it all came rushing back. The night was back. The same night when she held the dead body of another loved one was in front of her again…bringing with it an uneasy sense of déjà vu. It was happening all over again. The night was back to haunt her.

Chapter 1 – One tear at a time

Swollen eyes and a numb body…the ruins of a soul. This was what was left behind when the light left the room. Eyes crusted with dried tears, she did not even try to open them. What would she open them to? The emptiness of the room? Or the emptiness of her soul?

Was she dead? She wished she were. But that’s easy. That’s an easy answer…the way out. The easy way out. No way was the cruel hand of life going to deal her the joker. No no! Life still had some sick jokes to play on her. Life still had some tricks in her bag to make an empty soul hurt. Life still wanted to mock her.

And didn’t she deserve all of it? The mockery? The insults? The verdict??? The final verdict that had left her to live a life full of nothing but a burning desire to die.

Of course she did. She had brought this fate upon herself. Her innards hurt when she thought about it.

Only she was responsible for the dead remains of her only child that lay in front of her now. The baby she had carried in her wonb for nine months. The baby she had nurtured and loved…she had killed her little Sophie…

And now all she had were tears…and even they were drying up now. Only emptiness ruled.