A rainy day and a shabby hut.
The rain poured like the heavens weeping over the world's most pathetic tragedy.
Inside a rotting, half-collapsed hut that looked like it should've been put out of its misery decades ago, a girl lay flat on a bed that stank of mildew and sorrow. Her eyes, dull yet stubborn, bore holes into the ceiling patched up with mismatched boards and veiled in cobwebs like funeral shrouds.
The rain had better shelter than she did.
This was no home.
It was a tomb — a coffin for the living after being neglected for so long.
Neglect.
That word tasted sour on her tongue. Bitter, old and fermented with humiliation. That was her life.
Neglected by fate, neglected by blood, neglected by the very people who were supposed to cherish her. Her body, still paralyzed from the accident, refused to obey her.
And why should it? It had long given up trying to please the unpleasable.
They said she selflessly sacrificed herself for her younger brother — that sweet little cherub loved by all and praised like he descended from the heavens themselves. Letting her take the fall and hit by the a charging dump truck.
Hah! Love? How could she give someone something she never have? When there was no love left in her bones first and foremost.
It was never love at all. Perhaps it was desperation — the kind born of a festering hunger. The desperate wish to be accepted. To be seen. To belong.
What a ridiculous fool.
How laughable, that in a household desperate for a child, she was tossed away like an unwanted rag the moment she breathed her first.
The Quincys — oh what a pair they were. A jade figure of wealthy and handsome tycoon admired across continents and a woman hailed as the flower of her generation. Beautiful, radiant, perfect. So perfect, in fact, that even their failures had to be immaculate.
It took them six years to finally conceive. Everyone called it a miracle. Yet, the miracle turned out to be a nightmare.
The moment she was born, Severina's screams shook the sterile white halls of the fifth floor VIP maternity suite.
"Honey, where… Where is our baby?" the woman croaked, her arms trembling as she reached for her husband. Her face glowed with feverish anticipation, cheeks still wet from tears of joy.
The nurse approached, her arms carefully cradling the child. "Ma'am… your baby is a healthy girl…" But her voice quivered. Her steps were careful and slow. Then, suddenly, she flinched. An instinct older than medicine itself.
"M-Madame!"
She shrieked and abruptly stopped, taking a step back while trembling. How could she push her arms away when she's holding a baby?
She almost dropped the poor thing!
Severina's eyes landed on the child. Then she exploded.
"NO! No, no, no! What do you mean that dirty creature is my child? WHERE IS MY CHILD? That — that thing! That thing is NOT my baby!" Her voice shrieked across the corridor like a banshee mourning her own sanity. "You monsters! I'll sue you for this! You swapped her, didn't you?! My baby doesn't have… horns! My baby doesn't have the purple eyes of a demon! Give me my angel!"
The nurse shrank away in horror, shielding the baby with her body. But it was no use.
The truth was blasphemous.
And Fernando, ever the composed tycoon, pinched his brow like the weight of a thousand sins had landed squarely on his immaculate suit. "Check for a swap," he muttered, although his secretary had already confirmed — there were no other births that day. This creature… was theirs.
The man looked at her once more.
A hideous little imp with skin like baked earth, with grotesque patches that resembled scales, with eyes that glowed like cursed gems and horn-like ridges pushing against her skull.
Unpresentable. Unacceptable. Unthinkable.
"Take that thing away."
"Let Severina rest and give birth again. That monstrous looking creature cannot be the heir to House Quincy."
"Yes, Master," the butler bowed, his face unreadable, as if carrying out a sentence of death. The screams of the mother followed him down the corridor, "Give me back my baby! That thing is not mine! My baby is an angel!"
Nineteen years.
For Avis, it may as well have been nineteen lifetimes of exile. The days bled together in gray suffering. She was a ghost, a stain, a mistake that refused to die. She gave them everything — her pride, her body, even her blood — but the truth was clearer than ever now.
She was nothing. Would always be nothing. Perhaps, the name even suited her. For them, her existence was a crippling abyss that tormented them the moment she breathed her first.
A curse in a cradle.
A monster in human skin.
A taboo that never should have drawn breath in the sacred halls of the Quincy family.
Outside her home, a looking figure stood in the shadows.
"Damn it! Just when will that fucking bitch die?" The person snarled and looked oppressively at the rundown hut.
"Stupid wench. Just kill yourself and save everyone from waiting." Clearly, someone is getting impatient for the bedridden girl to meet her end.