Innocenza

Beginning of Sighs

 

                                                                                CHAPTER I

142 B.E.

Wes Border Mountains 

 

           Viktoria's sporadic breaths were as the slow cerise tides that carried the wind's faint taste of copper, transient as a candle in that lashing waft. One eye had yet to swell shut, even though the world she beheld grew darker each visit. This room was her second prison whiles the adolescent body that had been without release from torture was the first. She would not remember this day as the one before or to follow, little difference was there when they blended into a seamless final hour. Viktoria had been awake too long with the incessant pain and so slipped again into her own world with iniquities not so dissimilar.

Not even an hour had passed before Viktoria was called back from perspiration and feverish illusions. Either her heart pounded in ears with the approach of her afflicters had set the pace for her existence. Always would these footsteps soon follow with blows that fell like dull hammers, a lighter penance before the flesh was made to absolve in gruesome ways. The most terrible of all their instruments of torture was flesh recompensed with flesh, their violent rods like hot needles through an open sore unremittingly.  This time the footsteps faded away at their height but fainted from the fright.

Where she was incapable of concise thought when conscious, Viktoria was lucidly aware during the nightmare.  Reflections of the ordeals endured meticulously. Each attempt to summon her mother's face was met with a splotched and incomplete picture. Hurried images came in streaks of bodily blurs, making the same revolting howls that came with the monster's animalistic ravaging. Sometimes she would hear the wind from the veranda in which she sat in her mother's lap, looking upon the silver cliffs and the Penumbran blak towers that scaled them. As happy as it should have made her, it mocked and left a sense of sorrow that no terror could induce.

The slamming of a door shook her awake like a tremour, a rush of adrenaline shot through her to where the pain diminished and her limbs thrashed about unawares of their condition. Snatched upright by the chained collar leashed to her neck, Viktoria trembled under his power. She was dragged the length of the bed until the loose shackling about her wrists caught on the wooden posts, straining the brittle limbs far as they would go and more. With Viktoria wide awake in a panicked state, her tormentor shoved her headfirst onto her knees into the bedding.

She could see nothing save the filthy sheets matted in issue and filth. It hurt to move the tender flesh of her neck yet it was the only way to keep from suffocating. It was clear what to expect from every other instance that ended in this position, save the impatient haste it made to undo its trousers. Viktoria bit her fangs into her raw lips as the foul creature drooled onto her back from the display. She could feel the burning tinge ring round her eyes hard fought to suppress, still the tears escaped and left her where they mattered naught.

The music box; there it sat on her small vanity table still, miraculously untouched in the ruin the monsters put it to. There Viktoria would sit and imitate the prepping she would watch her mother do before her father's friends, colleagues and family came over. It was then or times she felt without a friend Viktoria would undo the latch to reveal the little dancers within, cranking the mechanism with her small key and the pronged tube would spin as music filled the bedroom.

As Viktoria withdrew the decorative key from the draw and tuned the box one more time, her dungeon melted away before the starry night. As the serenade grew animated, so did the dancers, frolicking with her in the hills of a faraway dream world. They were to graceful to match and yet still Viktoria danced for as long as hard as she was able. Their long white gowns covered the field with light while the stars rained down like snowflakes in their hair.