Thorns

Chapter Seven

I was a Thorn. I always would be. My job was to prick the hands of evil and protect the rose I lived on. I went ignorantly unnoticed, I was viewed as unimportant and not worthy of mention, until I was needed to serve the rose.

But I knew now that I wasn't only a thorn.

I was the hand that was trying to tear out the flower before it rooted itself too deeply into the ground. I was what was trying to prevent the rose from casting its bewitching spells on the environment it surrounded itself with. I was the blood that dripped down the pulchritudinous white petals. I was what would reveal the strategically concealed imperfections the rose managed to obscure beneath its irresistible elegance.

The rose was alluring.

Seductive, even.

And I was damaging the velvet, pristine petals that have been protected for so long.

That have been protected for too long.

I would taint what they so desperately wanted to remain untouched. I would not only cause wounds, but I would stain the beauty around me as a reminder that no matter how insignificant I seemed I would always leave behind a piece of myself. I would leave behind a warning.

At first it would only be a trail of blood dripping slowly down the sloped edges of a single rose petal, but soon my crimson, sinful blood would contaminate the entire flower. It would stain and rot the petals, it would ruin the rose until there was no rose left to be ruined.

And it would only leave me with a tiny scar on the tip of my finger.

But to do that I would need to be tactical. I would need to be careful. I would have to hone in the recklessness and chaos I constantly thrived on and concentrate it into something I could control. To be able to manipulate chaos would take time.

Last time I tried to touch chaos, I had only dipped a toe in. My intentions hadn't even been to manipulate it, I had just wanted to feel it. When you're three years old, that's always the goal. Whether it was a soft rug in the store or the chaotic energy constantly humming throughout the universe, I had wanted to touch it.

I remember nothing happened when I ran my small, clammy hands over the fur rug hanging in one of the many shops in the marketplace. But when I had just barely skimmed my finger over the chaotic energies I had constant access to, an immense war broke out across the entirety of the Kingdom. I told myself a war would have eventuated in due time. The system has always been a mess, and the peaceful negotiations over the neutral territory between my kingdom and the neighboring one had slowly started becoming more and more violent, anyways.

But, at this point in the war, I wasn't even sure what was being fought over. Land, equality, the need to break away from the King, rage, all of it was taken out through blood shed.

I wasn't even sure the soldiers knew the point anymore. All that was known was it was a civil war and a territorial war all clumped together. The Pures from our Kingdom fought the Thorns because the Thorns had decided they wanted to overtake the Kingdom next to ours in order to start their own civilization.

It was a mess. A mess I had caused. But I was slowly beginning to see it was a mess that we probably had needed, although I was sure it would have been handled much differently if I hadn't sparked it.

I knew that to become capable of safely manipulating chaotic energy, I would need to submerge my entire body in to the dark, exuberant pool I currently couldn't even touch.

It would take time.

Time that I wouldn't have if I didn't listen to the desperate pleas and screams from the people surrounding me. Well, saying that they were surrounding me was being generous. The moment Kamilah had disappeared they had all fallen into some unhealthy state of shock that rested uncomfortably between disbelief and panic. I had watched their eyes widen as the silence in the room became suffocating. If someone had dropped a pin on, nobody would have had heard anything other than the tiny vibrations caused by the impact. The room felt like it had been vacuum sealed into silence.