This Is My Town

Chapter Five ~ Pandora

"Stupid girl with her stupid condition!" Pandora screeched, pacing the floor of her throne room. "The night is when I need her eyes, and she has to close them for twelve hours straight?! Absurd! I need that Dred woman eliminated and now she has protection from the girl she tried to kill? This... this is outrageous! Despicable! Who does she think she is?"

"You should not have told her you were there," Lakin Jaspar mused. "The King will be protected now."

"He does not know I am not the one to kill him," Pandora snapped back to her most trusted servant. "He will be expecting me, but when that wretched girl shows up, he will not know that I will be watching him through her eyes."

"What of her condition?" Jaspar questioned, and Pandora turned around, continuing her pacing.

"I shall work around it," she admitted finally. "I will have to. When she sleeps, it is as if her body is not there, and I cannot see her anymore. She does not know it, but she is my servant in the daylight, where I cannot be seen. My body... it is over three hundred years old, and if I reveal myself in daylight..."

"I know," Jaspar stated, hiding a smile. "It will die, and you with it. So what better way to take advantage of your... situation, than to use someone else to do your dirty work where you cannot?"

"I knew you were a smart man, Lakin," Pandora murmured. "But I have another task for you. I need you to wait until Dred recovers from her injuries, and when she sets out for Crinya, I want you to follow her."

"You aren't going to kill the woman, my lady?" Jaspar asked, surprised, and Pandora shook her head, pausing in her pace for a moment until continuing.

"No," she replied. "I need her to deliver her message, and when she has, I want you to let her go. I will show her mercy, for the sake of Kiara's co-operation."

"What will I be doing in Crinya?" Jaspar asked, digging for the point in his task.

"I want you to speak with the Vampire Prince," she announced, stopping to face Jaspar for the first time in the past few hours Pandora had been in her throne room, pacing the floor.

"What do you want with him?" Jaspar questioned, keeping a calm, steady gaze with Pandora.

"I want you to convince him to come to Montilo," she answered, narrowing her eyes. "I want him brought to me alive, unharmed and I want him to feel safe, not like his life is in danger. Tell him I have a... proposition for him. To solve his problem. He will know what you are talking about."

Jaspar bowed his body slightly. "Yes, my lady," he said, then straightened up and left the room.

When she heard the door close behind Jaspar, Pandora let out a frustrated scream.

"He will never understand!" she exclaimed, then lowered her voice, becoming more frantic. "He will never understand. For he does not see as I do. He does not know as I do. He never will really know what it is like..."

Turning around, Pandora approached her throne, sitting upon the bones of her many enemies over the past three hundred years she had been in Montilo. And yet, every time she sat upon that throne, she didn't feel triumphant. She felt the need to kill more, and avenge herself. But from what, exactly? She had questioned herself for a long time now why she used the eyes of these child vampires to pick out the people that bad-mouthed about her. Obviously, everyone was talking bad about her; everyone in the whole of Frate feared her, and her presence in Montilo made the locals tremble. But why do all of this, if all it were to succeed in doing was let her live longer?

The shrine.

Ah, but there was a reason. There was a reason behind this after all. The Shrine of Maklon was the only way she would get what she truly wanted. It wasn't the King; Pandora told this to the girl to keep her mind occupied while she planned the real revenge she ought to receive. There was but one problem, and it was quite a big one.

Pandora had visited the Shrine of Maklon before, once. And the words of the God who answered her prayers still echoed around the walls of her mind to that very day, as she sat on her throne of bones.

Maklon, however, was that God that answered, and he wasn't impressed with what he had heard. When Pandora requested what she wanted done, Maklon threw it back in her face, right then and there without bothering to consider. You see, Maklon may have been a God, but he was a selfish and greedy God, and he wanted what he wanted as much as Pandora wanted what she did. And Maklon wasn't willing to make a deal with Pandora without what he wanted. And that was the soul of a powerful being.

But Pandora wasn't powerful enough.

When she was told that there was yet to be something more powerful than she, she left that Shrine and never returned. She plotted every day to find this mysterious being, of course, because she didn't want to risk her deal with the mighty God, but the fact that she wasn't the source of the most powerful thing in Frate made her mad. Furious, even. And, ten years ago, when a certain someone was born into the world of death, Pandora could tell immediately that this was the one. Kiara was the one who was to bring Pandora exactly what she wanted; revenge against all those who defied her.

Revenge against all.

Pandora's deal with Maklon was still tight and strong; Pandora could feel him watching over her sometimes, observing her attempts at getting him what he wanted so she could come back to him and claim what she herself wanted in return.

Destruction. But not the end of life, because that comes to all beings in Frate, whether they are Nonsept or Vampire. Pandora wanted something a little more lasting. She looked through the eyes of Kiara because Kiara was the most powerful being in Frate, and when Pandora got her hands on her and gave her soul in to Maklon, he would give her what she ultimately desired amongst all things in the universe. Not the destruction of life, thought, as Pandora made clear many time before. No, but something far, far worse, and completely imaginable to those who lived their lives how she did not.

Pandora wanted the destruction of death.