The Source: Moonlight's Heir

Chapter 2

Seven years later...

Lizzie Beth, long hair suits you. It brings out your beauty.

My late father's raspy deep voice rang in my ears. Although his voice was only a distant memory, it still sounded as loud and clear as it ever had. As if he had just spoken from within the room. I could still see his smiling honey eyes and smell the tobacco he smoked. The peppermint still lingering on his breath and clothes. He was probably right I suppose, I honestly wouldn't know. I never asked anyone else; I just took his word for it. Papa was a smart man after all. Who was I to question?

If only I could hear my father call me his pet name once more outside of my memories. It would ease more than just my mind. It would lift my spirits beyond belief. Especially on such a special day, my birthday.

I could feel his phantom strokes run the length of my waist-length hair as I examined my reflection in the old gilded mirror perched atop my oak vanity. I imagined him standing behind me, like he had every year, adding flowers to the braid that held my hair back from my face.

There was a longing in my gaze, I knew all too well. I missed him and lately, keeping myself moving forward seemed harder and harder. I needed a change in my life, and as I glanced in the mirror at myself, the desire to cut my hair grew stronger. It was after all the cheapest, and easiest change I could make.

However, there was a battle within me. The desire to rebel against my stepmother and leave my hair long, or the desire for such simple change. Ugh, even in death, that witch was a pain in my ass.

She wanted me to cut my hair so badly when she was alive, so I assume the strange urge I feel to do something drastic could be misleading. An urge to silence her lasting presence, or satisfy her gross misjudgment. Who really knows at this point. Not me, not in this state.

On my birthdays, that was when her constant nagging and the side-eyed looks she had inspired from around the village generally started to make me feel more spiteful than usual. Even after her passing, two springs ago, the effects of her still lingers. Walking home from my shift today was torture. I could not get home quick enough. It grated on my nerves, the side eyes, so much so that I feared it would be my undoing.

I'd never cave to the peer pressure of others though, it wasn't in my nature. My father ensured that in me.

Regardless, she had spent so many of her years meddling her way around the village. So much effort was exhausted just to convince others I didn't belong just because I refused to fit into her social standards, to follow her every whim. The refusal to cut my hair was only one of the many things that she deemed childish, obscene even. With the way she carried on, you would think me a common whore...well before I had ventured down that rabbit hole to keep food on my table and clothes on my back.

I'd be lying if I said it hadn't started to take a toll on me mentally, but I was strong from the years of constant abuse she dished out to me. I could take it from a few passers by, strangers really, just looking for a reprieve from their mundane lives. Looking to wet their whistle if you will on the most commonly spoken of gossip, me.

I knew the stares and head shakes were just another tactic she deemed necessary. Her way of reinforcing her ideas. Her belief that short hair was superior in her mind. It was the way of her people, which is who I recently had spent the majority of, well...all my time really, surrounded by.

It meant nothing to me.

When she was alive, her and her posse would judge me as I walked through the markets of our small town with scowls on their grubby, taunt faces. No matter how uncomfortable it made me, I wouldn't fall to their peer pressure then and I wouldn't fall now.