The Omega Princess

Chapter 2

It had been weeks since Mum had told me…

Three weeks and two days to be exact.

I had spent the last week fretting trying to weigh up all my options but no matter what I did nothing changed. It was inevitable, I couldn’t get out of the tower and I couldn’t change Father’s mind.

I had thought that living in the tower before was tragic but now it was just unbearable, I was constantly on edge and it was killing me slowly. I hadn’t been eating the little food I was entitled to, I didn’t wash. I just lay there staring up at the ceiling trying to cry just so I would feel something.

Yes I had been fretting but really I was numb, I didn’t know why I was fretting. I wanted to think it was because I was sad or angry but that would be a lie. I was fretting because that was the only thing I could do but of course that had only lasted a week, then it was just too exhausting to even think and I just lay there.

I missed my mother…

It was odd how I had never stopped calling her Mum until now. I guess it was best really, if I was leaving missing Mum would be harder than missing my mother. I’d told her to leave after she’d stopped crying, she’d just burst into even more tears but I half carried, half accompanied her to the door gently pushed her out and closed the door. I then moved all the furniture as fast as I could and fell back into my bed. She howled outside all night, scratching and moaning at the door until I told her I hated her and that I didn’t want to see her again.

I sighed as I remembered hearing the slump of her body against the door and the sound of her ripping apart her own skin. Then came the shouts and the heavy boots stamping up the stairs, stern and frightening. I peeked through the keyhole and watched my brother and father drag her away while she screamed like a mad woman.

I don’t remember what happened next but when I woke up I had red welts on my back and my furniture was back to where it had been.

Mother hadn’t visited again…

A yawn racked my body as I lay across my bed, my bony fingers tapping against my ribs…

Tap

Tap

Tap

It was like a drum, beating in time to my wearing heart. A thousand rhythms dancing with the electrical impulses that raged the decaying machine that rested in my rib cage. Protected by bones yet still so fragile, still so easily tortured.

The next tap that I heard didn’t come from my fingers or my heart, they came from the door…

I jolted up and stared at the grey metal.

Another knock resonated from it, the greyness shaking slightly as it pounded mercilessly by the person behind it. I whimpered as a louder knock hit the door and I covered my ears. It was time. A single drop of silver liquid dripped from my eye, and traced a river down to my chin in which the drop fell and landed on my thigh.

I looked down at the single salty puddle, the tear that had refused to come had finally arrived but it wouldn’t make any difference.

“Mia!”

My eyes diverged upwards as the door burst open, light flowing through and blinding me momentarily. By the time I had regained my vision I was being pulled by the arm, towards the light and out onto the cold steps outside my door.

My arrester allowed me to rest on the steps for a moment, giving me the chance to recognise his face. Eyes the colour of a raging thunderstorm and hair brown like the barest woods in the world. When I had seen him last he had been a boy with the appearance of a man, but now he was a man with the appearance of a warrior. The scars proudly worn on his arms, told a tale of many brave battles all of which he had survived.