She took a tentative step, checking the strength of her legs. Biting back a cry of harrowed outrage, she clenched her fists and turned toward the paltry forest where she belonged, away from those she would harm, away from whatever semblance of life was left.
And Oriana fled.
She wove through trees, over fallen limbs, and around boulders, never daring to stop even as her lungs grew dry and she wheezed from the exertion. The brush and branches of the forest grabbed at her, threatening to slice through her skin, but she pushed forward. She would have welcomed it, the sting and prick of her flesh being punctured, but it never came. The lack of it–the physical pain, the piercing of her flesh–made it all the more unbearable. She deserved to feel pain, to be stabbed through with a curved blade, ripping through organs and expelling sinew as it was torn free. She deserved the excruciating pain of a thousand terrible deaths, one for each life she had taken. But she could not.
The curse was the only explanation. Anthes didn’t want her to be able to end or evade the curse through physical harm or even death. He was cruel indeed.
“Bastard!” she screamed, as if he could hear her.
Oriana didn’t stop until she made it back to the barley farm, her legs finally giving out from under her. She fell to her knees in utter torment and came completely undone.
The tears flowed unbidden, streaking lines through the blood caked upon her cheeks; she was too weak to hold them in any longer. She was so exhausted, mentally drained, and no longer able to move.
Oriana lay there, a broken shell of who she once was, remembering her victim’s faces and their terror with agonizing detail. She closed her eyes, wishing the images, the screams to go away, but they only grew clearer, louder. It was then that her belly roiled, and she vomited the contents of her stomach onto the cold hard earth until there was nothing left inside of her. She turned her head away from the sick, not wanting to know what had just come up.
Oriana lay there until she had no more tears to shed, every ounce of the salty liquid soaked into the dirt beneath her. Finally, she looked up, taking in the scene of the barley farm, the only place she had thought to go. A place she had begun to call home.
The farm around her was littered with limbs. Red glistened across every surface. It was like an artist had dipped their hand in blood and thrown it in every direction, creating an abstract work of slaughter. An arm rested on a bale of hay, two fingers missing from it. Bile rose in her throat at the thought of where those two fingers were. A decapitated body lay beside the barn, entrails ripped from its middle, pulled across the ground in an array of butchery. Oriana gagged and turned away from it.
She was a monster.
She could still feel the blood of these kills on her flesh. She could hear Liam and his wife’s screams in her head and taste their lifeblood on her tongue. See their petrified faces.
Oriana curled herself into a ball in front of the barn, her back turned to what was left of Liam’s wife. She shook as she began to dry heave uncontrollably. She had become that which she tried so desperately to suppress her entire life. That part of her that wanted death and destruction enjoyed the idea of torturing, of watching someone’s life slowly leak away until there was nothing left but a sack of meat and bone. It was her darkness, her other self.
Ever since she was young, she had felt like two wholly different people, as if two complete and whole consciences were inhabiting the same body. Each one vying for the right to dwell on the surface. It was a constant internal battle, the two consciences forever warring with one another.
Until now, until this curse, she had successfully suppressed her darkness. Her other more prominent half, making up her light and her love, the part she wished to be always on the surface, had been winning. It was only now that the darker self, the true evil that lurked in the shadows of her mind and soul, finally seemed to be set free. It was her bloodlust, her demon, and now she knew that it would have complete control every thirty days on the eve of the full moon. Now truly a separate conscious form. The realization rocked her to her core, dizziness overtook her, and the world began to spin around her.
Anthes’s voice came to life in her memories, “In the cover of night’s celestial glow, a lust for blood left hidden will grow.” The words now made perfect sense. How had she not realized it before? She had been in denial.
She had been a fool.
She would now become the part of herself that she wanted to rip from her very soul every single month and if she had only tried to understand, dove back into those agonizing memories to fully grasp the words of the curse, she might have prevented the bloodshed from rearing its ugly head this past night. She could have at least done something–anything–to lessen it.
Oriana wrapped her arms around her torso, rocking back and forth, shutting her eyes tight against the memory that had kept her from analyzing Anthes’s words and trying to understand what he had done to her. It was the reminder of what he had done just before he issued the words of his curse that had her pushing the memories away like a plate of spoiled fish.
Chestnut eyes flashed in her vision, the pain and love in them had her choking on a sob as she recalled the moment her heart and soul–the love of her life–crumbled to the ground before her eyes. Darragh had been pure and good; he did not deserve the end he was dealt. The Gods were cruel and mirthless beings, and she wished to see them burn.
She couldn’t live like this; she couldn’t let this happen ever again. She needed to save the people of this town, prevent her monstrous self from picking off every last living thing in this world. The screams echoed in her mind once more. She shut her eyes against it, “Stop!” and pounded her bloodied hands against the soil beneath her, plumes of dust billowing around her.
Oriana replayed the words of the curse over again in her mind, trying to piece together a way out, a loophole, anything to stop it. The only thing Oriana would bring to anyone was death and despair. She was a bringer of death who deserved no tears and no pity, only an eternity of misery.
There was nothing. No piece of the curse presented a crack to chip away at, a way to navigate through it without harming anyone ever again. She found nothing, and desperation took over.
Something gleamed in the morning rays just outside the barn, a pitchfork leaning against the wooden panels. She crawled her way toward it. She had nothing and no one left. She was all alone.
Grabbing the pitchfork, she ventured into the barn. There, near the barrels of hay, was a small crack in the wooden flooring. She wedged the handle of the pitchfork between the crack in the flooring before climbing up the rickety ladder to the hayloft. At the loft’s edge, she stood, staring down at the sharp spikes below.
A world could not exist with her in it. She would be its destruction.
Oriana could not bear the thought of becoming that thing, that monster, every month. The idea of no longer having control, of being fully one person and then the other, was too much. She needed to end it. No more death was the only thing going through her head as she fell onto the jutting spikes below. Praying that the Gods would allow her this reprieve, that they would allow the skewers to punch through her flesh, spear her heart, and spill her lifeblood onto the hay-covered floor of the barn. But nothing happened. The tool did not pierce her skin. Her body had just simply bent over the metal as if she was leaning over the wooden beam of a fence before collapsing beneath her weight. No piercing pain or splatter of blood–her skin remained perfectly intact. She shouted at the sky, “You cannot do this to me! Let me end it! Let me be free! Offer me this, I beg of you!”
Even as she said the words, even as she had tried to impale herself on the spikes, she knew it wouldn’t work. That she would survive.
She rolled off the broken pitchfork, pushing herself up shakily, taking two unbalanced steps, and sank against the barrels of hay stacked along the side of the barn, weeping.
She sat in the barn until the morning breeze chilled to a bitter cold, and blackness began to take over the cerulean sky. Cold, autumn wind blew leaves the color of apricots and mulled wine across the worn floor as she replayed the events of the past two months in her mind. She needed to find a way out of the curse, to find a way to suppress her darkness once again. She needed to become whole–a single being–and eradicate the monster that had been her constant companion since the day she was born. She needed to venture back to where it had all begun on that fateful night two months prior.
