I was born during the blood moon.
The midwife had trembled as she caught me in her arms, her fingers coated in crimson. The air outside the cottage had howled with unnatural winds, and animals had gone silent for miles. The moment I cried; shrill, raw, like the scream of a soul already mourning, my mother stopped breathing. Just like that, she was gone.
No one spoke of it, but everyone remembered.
My father named me quietly and alone, his voice hollow. He couldn't bear to look at me. I grew without lullabies or warmth. The neighbors whispered about me behind closed doors, called me cursed, a bad omen. Some swore they saw shadows coil around my crib. Others said my eyes glowed in the dark.
No one came to visit. No one dared.
By the time I was five, children fled when I passed by. Mothers dragged their sons away and crossed their fingers when I entered a room. I learned early how to be silent, how to disappear into walls, how to pretend I didn't hear the prayers muttered to protect others from me.
My father drank more than he worked. He never struck me, but he didn't have to. His eyes did the damage. Cold, full of guilt and fear, he treated me like a ghost he was forced to live with. And when he died, collapsed in the field, heart burst from too much wine; no one wept. Not even me.
I didn't feel grief. Only freedom.
But that feeling didn't last.
It was the village priest who first demanded I'd be locked away.
"She is dangerous," he said, voice laced with venom. "Her very presence poisons the soil and spoils the wheat."
And the villagers agreed.
I was only eight when they dragged me into the cellar.
It was dark. Cold. The walls were damp and scratched with fingernails, mine, now added to the countless others from animals that had once been caged here. They brought food just enough to keep me alive. I was a child, but they treated me like a beast. They didn't teach me to read. They didn't speak to me unless it was through gritted teeth. Some came just to hurl stones or spit at me through the bars.
And yet I survived.
I learnt to talk to the rats. To watch how shadows bent in the corners. To listen to the wind whisper through the cracks in the stone.
The curse didn't weaken. It grew.
I didn't understand it yet, but my bones ached when others cried. My skin heated when someone lied. Sometimes I knew when a storm was coming. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could see things that hadn't happened yet.
I was thirteen when the fire started.
The priest had come to banish me. To purge the evil with holy fire. But he didn't know that by then, the curse had become a shield, coiled around my heart like a serpent.
The fire licked at the walls. The door creaked under the weight of flame. I pressed my hands against the iron bars, not with fear; but with fury.
And the door exploded outward.
I didn't scream. I didn't cry.
I walked out, barefoot, soot staining my pale skin, and the fire moved aside for me. It bent. It bowed.
I was no longer a child.