Douglass
I almost choked at the sight of the woman and man being mauled by a pack of werewolves. They looked like Nate, but older and with slight changes. When the scene ended, I forgot I was dreaming at all and faded into something else.
My mama, staring coldly at my young self. Her blonde hair and blue dress were swaying in the wind, effected by her wrath.
"Please, I didn't know..."
"No, you chose to ignore," she snapped.
"Mama-"
"I am not your mother! You are no son of mine." He whipped her hand across my neck, magic marking my skin. "Get out! Get out of my home!"
"Please, please I have nowhere else to go!"
"Who's fault is that? You're own!" She shoved me back. "Out! Leave!"
I turned tail and ran as fast as I could through the darkened meadow of my homeland, eyes stinging with tears and my hands cupping the now blue place on my neck where she'd last touched me.
Again, the scene faded.
Lilia, the siren who'd unlocked my magic. "You'll be most loved down in the sea, young one."
Her hand touched me, caressing my body as a lover would their love—except her hands burned.
My body transformed, my legs fusing together and thick scales climbing up my back, bones cracking and fins growing rapidly. I wasn't born a siren—meaning that the process of becoming one was painful, brutal, unnatural. No one should be what they weren't born as.
The memory fused with something I'd been seeing for the past six centuries.
All the faces of my life, everyone I'd ever loved, all now hated me. They all stared down at me, humans and supernatural creatures alike glaring with loathing down at my crumbling and cracked form.
"You were never worth the effort." A lost healer I'd come to love, one who didn't even see me as a person.
"You don't deserve love." My best friend, long dead because of me.
"You are no son of mine!" Mama's voice broke through.
"You fucked everything up! You always do."
"You should've died, not me."
"I gave everything I had for you, and now you're nothing but a coward."
I screamed, clawing at my ears, begging them to stop.
But they didn't. They went on and on and on, sneering their hatred like a snooty royal would a street rat.
Coward.
Unwanted.
Unloved.
Orphan.
Monster.
Broken.
I slammed my fists down, cracking the stone beneath me. The cracks spiderwebbed, reaching out and becoming wider and wider until there was nothing left but a clean-cut circle where I kneeled.
The sudden stillness was suffocating.
After all, silence is the most deafening scream.
"Coward."
That voice was the most painful to hear.
Maximus.
His feet were the first things that come into my vision. As I looked up, I saw the body I'd committed to memory all those years ago. His face was just as I remembered from the last time I'd seen him. His dark skin contrasting with his fiery blue eyes and the gold markings that traveled down his arms and onto the backs of his hands. His leathery wings spread out wide and horns obvious on the front of his head, invoking fear.
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Drawn to the Sea
काल्पनिकCOMPLETED I was caught in the net, with no hope of escape. As the net broke the surface, four men shouted in alarm. One called for someone to come up from below deck. He opened the door and studied me. I hissed at him as he approached the edge of th...
