Pyromania | Diego Hargreeves [2]

PYROMANIA: BOOK TWO.

PYROMANIA:
ignite the flame.

an elodie verbeck story.

ON THE TWENTY-FIRST HOUR OF THE FIRST DAY OF OCTOBER, 1989, A YOUNG WOMAN GAVE BIRTH.

This was unusual only in the fact that the young woman was not pregnant before the day first began.

The strange birth was labelled a curse. A sign that the devil had come to their tiny town and decided to wreak its anger upon the inhabitants. The young woman, innocent but impressionable, feared for her life, and for the life of her family, who the church swore would be killed by the tiny satanic child. She was driven to a stay of mania and in a state of panicked delirium, amidst heavy blood loss and in fear of her loved ones' lives, she decided to give the child away. She passed it off to the first people she could, a young American couple who had been happy to take the child off her hands. And even when they accidentally let slip that they had somehow known about the birth, the unfortunate new mother did not care.

And a day later, Archibald and Ursula Morticelli were the new adopted parents of Elodie Vesta Morticelli.

TWENTY-SOME YEARS LATER, AND ELODIE VERBECK WAS DECIDEDLY NORMAL.

Or at least, she told the world she was. While her origins were strange, she always shrugged it off as a stroke of bad luck, getting snatched by two people who did not care for her much. One thing led to another and Elodie grew up to be a pretty average societal failure, with a dead mother and a father she wished would be too. Adding in a younger brother she treated as her own child, a mediocre job she desperately wished to be done, and no real ties to life except for raging guilt and shame, there was nothing much interesting about her at all. 

But despite claiming to live a completely average and despicably ordinary life, Elodie could not be less normal. She was a strange individual, an anomaly amongst the crowds of conformity. For, no other's eyes had ever literally danced with flames, or been able to light their limbs on fire and feel no pain. Rare others had similar strange origin stories that even they themselves could not answer for, and very, very few of them had lived to tell the tale.

Elodie Verbeck had been one of those cursed few.

But this story is not about the birth of an extraordinary; rather, it is about the very opposite For,