Witch Doctors Inc: SEASON ONE (Completed!)

Part 6.5

LILY

I dream of betrayal.

Arti, his treacherous, simpering face as he hands me a bowl of thyme soup. Onyx, who could have cured my disease, but chose not to. Faces, lingering, laughing, taunting.

I wake with anger bubbling in my veins. They will pay. They have paid. But it's not enough. I need somewhere for this anger to go.

I need the Dark Ages, when all the world was my anger. There's a reason I turn to darkness every time I return. My vengeance burns eternal. It cannot be doused.

I have returned fewer times than people think. Those who were burned in my place were mostly regular humans who dared to be different.

It was always fire. The humans remembered my weakness. They saw the way I edged away from open fires, and sought out the coolness of night. The girl Amarat, they said, is not adjusted to the heat. That's why they burned me. When they could tolerate me no more, they plunged me into flame.

I was weak then. I cried as I burned. But I am weak no more. I will not cry as they burn. I will immerse myself in their pain.

I survey my reflection in the pond. Sifting through the energy of my hair strands, I watch as my shoulder-length lilac hair transforms into a tumble of auburn curls. My eyes flash green now. They're Bethany's eyes.

I don't know how I didn't immediately recognise her in the Forest of Sorrows. Her face is so like mine, just painted in different colours.

The energy around my body shimmers until I'm draped in a floor-length black dress with a sweetheart neckline, a waist-hugging bodice, and a flowing skirt like a waterfall of night. Throughout the silk, vines sing a tune of toxic green. They curl through the darkness, their tips studded with real emeralds. The dress is finished with a flourish of iridescent beetles flashing green and black.

I never had a taste for glamour before, but things have changed. I want my reign to be elegant. Death should flow like poetry.

And death is what's coming. It's humanity's natural end, the end given them by fate itself. They were never meant to endure. A blink, and their lives are over. A blink, and the darkness swallows them whole.

We were meant to endure. Phaedra was meant to be forever. But it was not, and one day the one responsible will pay for that.

But that is not my focus. My anger cannot stray from humanity for long. I was once a Phaedrean, but I can never return there. My soul is chained here. My anger runs deep, all the way to this planet's core, and my hatred can only be quenched with the blood of those who breathe its air.

Let the ruins of Prometheus go cold amongst the stars. Let the Ariadne know us only as a memory.

My place is here, on the planet I crash-landed on a thousand years ago. Amarat, Bethany, Lily...it doesn't matter. I am the rage that festers. I am the death that burns. And when the blade of justice falls upon humanity, I will be the cause.