Relie has seven days to live. Seven days before she, like every other female in her family before her, is sacrificed to the dragon god. She has seven days to decide her destiny.
Seven days to escape her fate.
[Cover by @Abyss-of-crazy]
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"A person often meets his fate on the road he took to avoid it." Jean de La Fontaine
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In a room that was sometimes forgotten hung a solitary tapestry. Although it was blanketed by a light layer of dust and had frayed edges, its image remained intact. It depicted a young woman with blazing red hair, standing with brazen defiance at the mouth of a black cave, and was simply titled, "Fiametta's Sacrifice." It was the woven legacy of the Kingdom of Aurelia. It was the last substantial link they had to their past... except for the girl who sat on the floor in front of it.
On her sixteenth birthday, this girl would ascend the mountain and be offered as a sacrifice to Aurastra, the dragon guardian of the land. On her sixteenth birthday, the girl would die. On her sixteenth birthday, the line of Fiametta would finally be eradicated from the land. Her sixteenth birthday was in one week.
Relie knew all of this, and even though she was the girl who the legends concerned, sometimes it was easier to imagine it was a entirely different person who would be sacrificed. She never quite managed to forget she was the one who would meet the dragon god and be killed by him, but she could pretend to forget. Only, it was getting harder to do that as the Day of Reckoning drew ever closer.
As she studied it, she could not help but think of the legends connected to the worn tapestry. They were especially poignant because they applied to her. Daegan often told her stories, and she whispered this particular one to herself from memory, hearing his well-known voice say it along with her in her head as she did.
