The Bane of Light

Divulsions of Fame

∞

"So, why were they chasing you? I never get chased" Paris asked, licking his ice-cream. It was freezing outside, and here he was inhaling a vanilla ice-cream cone. Unbelievable. He forced us to stop for the cone, ignoring the fact that we were in the middle of a winter.

"They always chase. Then I break their cameras, and they chase some more. Though they were particularly rowdy today. Haven't figured out why yet" I stated to Paris, my tone indifferent. They adored harassing my sisters and I, though they tended to deal with the shine of the spotlight much better than me. No broken cameras or crushed fireflies. No front pages with my blurred out face making crude gestures at the camera. My bad temper had always been what lured them anyways, like moths to a flame. Maybe that was why I always got more coverage than them. I scoffed. That was deffinitely not why.

My sisters, at best, could be described as socialites. They held talent in magic and their practices, but it was all underwhelmingly mediocre. Nothing remarkable that could be specified as a one in a million ability. Nothing that they could build a brand off of. None of them were weak, heaven forbid, but they were nothing out of the ordinary either.

When my mother began her campaign as the East Coast, Matron of Magic, an influx of unwanted- or atleast unwanted in my part- attention donned on my family. So besides only fixating my shark of a mother, they became obsessed with my six sisters and I too. We held headlines for a while, each sister being straddled with one, singular, distinguishing quirk. There were simply too many of us for the public to all focus on, so the press made it a competition on who the public liked the most.

Deundre- the Responsible. Bronwyn, or Bunny, as she was called- the Beauty. Priya- the Ingenious. Pytha- the Rebellious. Calliope and Callpurina- the Twins. And me, Eulalia- the Bane. It was obvious that they wanted to straddle me with a much harsher name, maybe Eulalia the Evil or Eulalia the Despicable, but that was far as they could go without my mother's legal team suing for defamation of character. Honestly, Eulalia the Evil did have a nice ring to it

Each of my sisters was given a defining trait, my mother having chosen our names in specificality to our personalities. It was all pre planned. She had drakaeri witches read our minds in the womb, and psychic witches predict our personalities before we were born. Our births and personalities were already meticulously crafted political moves by her and her PR team.

The divination witch had predicted I would be "well-spoken", but she never predicted in what way. So my mother expected "Eulalia the Outspoken", a public activist or poet even, but not me- a bitter mess of cut-throat words and cruel insults. I sometimes believed my mother despised me so much, because I had been foiling her plans since before I was born.

Bunny, my second oldest sister, was a public favorite. She was a golden princess with her incomparable beauty and social-buterfly personality. She was a complete socialite, living for the camera and riding out her high on the fame. She handled it much better than any of us. Her dazzling smile was plastered on magazine covers and billboards, her name always in headlines. In fact, if her name wasn't in the headlines, we would assume something was wrong. She never fell from the publics favor.

They also adored Pytha, finding her rebellious tendencies exciting and perfect for their story's.  From street racing and crashing expensive sports cars, with her blood-sucking, rock-band girlfriends, to getting drunk and stealing yachts, Pytha was the perfect daredevil bombshell. She was fast, always getting involved in new messes before the old ones even settled down.

The rest of us, they didn't find as enthralling. Axel was already pushing 40, though he looked in his late twenties, by the time Mother became Matron of the East Coast Coven. Deundre was now a mother herself, and had always bored the press with her homeliness. She was the eldest of us all, and was a lost cause when it came to drama. They tired with her quickly.