After being blinded by those sworn to protect her, Artemis trades her vision for her ability to have a mate. Only things are not as they seem when she's taken in by a pack where everybody already seems to know her face and the brooding Alpha keeps a...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Ozymandias' pale grey dreadlocks looked almost white in the blinding sun.
"How did he do it?" I asked, throwing a feeble punch. He blocked it with more ease then he let on.
The old man furrowed his brow as he dodge another pathetic throw. "What do you mean, Dulce."
"How did he kill my sister." I spat with such malice that I even frightened myself. I couldn't let my hate take over, I threw a punch, this time I caught the old man hard on the jaw, he stumbled back, blood crawling from his fat lip.
"You hit hard, Dulce." He said, sounding surprised, "On the rare occasion you actually manage to hit your target."
"Answer the question." I grunted, ducking from one of his hefty blows, he had managed to hit me several times throughout our training and each one felt as though I had been bowled over by a semi truck.
"Did you ever think that you might not want to know the answer?"
He was right. I didn't want to know, I knew that as soon as the worlds left my lips I would regret it. Every time I closed my eyes all I would see is her.
Or maybe it would calm my conscience. My demons would vacate and sleep would be a thing of peace rather than unguarded terror.
"I want to know."
"She was hanged." He deadpanned, apparently not interested in fighting anymore. He slumped to the earth, the field was boundless and bare. Nothing but green grass fed my hungry eyes, only disrupted by the blue blockade of the horizon.
Hours earlier Ozymandias had made me climb the hill, the hike alone was at least an hour but now that we were here it was strange how foreign this nothingness felt. Only a monotonous green carpet stretched as far as I could see, before it seemed to drop off of the edge of the world and into the sky.
Maybe if I focused on my surrounding, then I wouldn't have to acknowledge my sisters death.
Ignorance was bliss, a gift I no longer possessed.
I slumped to the earth beside him, examining my bloody knuckles whilst he started out into the vast and empty nothingness before us.
"It's strange isn't it." I couldn't help the dry chuckle that left my lips. There was no humour but something about the situation was almost laughable.
"What is?" He said, his eyebrows biting in a frown as he turned to face me.
"How I was go for so long. I missed so much."
"I know you probably don't want to talk about it.." He said, I knew what was coming. "But what happened to you out there, Dulce? You were blinded."
I had nothing more to hide, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the only way forward was to stop hiding. Maybe if I told Ozymandias about my past then it would stop haunting me.
Maybe I wouldn't wake up almost nightly drenched in cold sweat.
"I was an experiment." He didn't interrupt, he didn't ask. Even when I wasn't sure if I was going to continue. "I don't know when, I don't know why. I don't really know much of anything except the pain."
I picked at the grass, uprooting a daisy. "They would test things on me. Chemicals, drugs, and sometimes just torture us for fun. I try not to think about it much." I tore the daisy in two. It didn't bleed. It didn't cry. There was strength in its beauty. I had to be the daisy.
Except the daisy would die now. I wouldn't let that be my fate, I would grow from the past and this was the way forwards, I was sure of it. "Sometimes the girls would just vanish. When they were considered too damaged to be used for further experimentation, whether they would dump them or they would just kill them I didn't know."
"The last time, they almost drowned me. I didn't know what it was but it wasn't water, it burned my eyes and when I woke up I was in the woods and I was blind." My shoulders shuddered with the loss of a force that had weighed long and heavy upon my chest and heart.
Finally I was free from those mind forged manacles.
"Don't you remember anything from before you were taken?" He stroked his long grey beard, seemingly deep in thought.
"I never really stopped to think about it until recently, even now I only have slithers brought back from what other people have told me."
I tried not to think about it at all.
Ozymandias hummed in response. For a while, either of us said nothing, we just sat there letting the comfortable silence envelope us.
Blades grass danced in the slight breeze, a thousand shards of funky sliced emeralds sparkling in the sun.
"Is there anything else I should know?" I stared at the old man, he was long, lean, dusty and dreary yet somehow lovable. His grey dreadlocks fell almost to his waist, the pale grey contrasting against his dark skin.
"Well.. There is one thing." He hesitated, looking at me with a look that asked once more if I was sure I wanted to know.
"What?" I asked cautiously.
"Flick's pregnant."
*** Any thoughts, theories? Anyways... Don't forget to vote and comment! -🍟
