when one looks back to their childhood, one remembers the vivid springs of laughter, climbing trees and reaching out for the stars, and making flower crowns in fields of flowers. but when [name] looked back at her youth, it was void of those colorfu...
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chapter 63. eternal night
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heaven and hell were said to exist beyond the final breath; two separate realms carved from the shape of a soul. the pure would walk among endless gardens where grief had long forgotten their names, and the corrupt would be swallowed by fire for every sin they once clutched to their chests.
if heaven and hell existed after death...then that was a lie.
this is hell.
a new day would start, and every day...
...was worse than yesterday.
and every new morning was simply yesterday repeated with sharper teeth, hungrier shadows, and a darkness that pressed against her bones a little more tightly than before.
her life as a slave could not be contained within words, because words were too small, too fragile, too merciful to describe a world in which breathing wrong could cost a life, in which a misplaced step meant a hundred lashes, in which the mere flicker of a frown could summon a gun barrel to one's forehead.
it didn't take long for luna to understand what death truly was.
here, in this place where iron and cruelty ruled like gods, the scent of death hung in the air the way flowers clung to spring; constant, familiar, almost gentle in its inevitability. it wrapped itself around her senses, painted vivid portraits inside her mind of final breaths and empty shells, whispered to her in morbid lullabies each time another body collapsed beside her.
this place was built on the edge of an endless cliff; you lose your smile, and you fall.
you fall, and you die.
and even death, she suspected, was simply another layer of the same hell.
she had watched countless people die for mistakes so small she could not even name them. hands trembling too loudly, steps taken too slowly, thoughts that drifted too far from obedience. their lives would halt as though they had been nothing more than machines in the eyes of their captors, gears snapping, lights fading, expiration dates reached, and the crimson blooming beneath them like roses that grew only from suffering. luna would wipe that red from the white floors with her own hands, her own laughter echoing softly as she did, the smile on her face as steady and unbroken as stone.
