Chapter 3 Inherited Scars
The memories hit me then.
Not mine. Hers.
They crashed through my mind like a wave destroying a sandcastle. I held onto the table, bracing myself against the flood: images, sounds, scents, emotions so strong they threatened to pull me under.
A grand estate. Marble columns and rose gardens, fountains that sang in the sunlight, servants in crisp uniforms hurrying through corridors polished to a gleam. A woman with kind eyes and a servant's uniform, holding a little girl's hand, leading her through a hidden passage behind the walls.
"This is our secret, Liana. Just ours. When the world gets too loud, you come here. Understand?"
The little girl nodded, silver eyes wide, trusting completely.
An older girl, now ten, maybe eleven, is watching from a balcony as her mother is dragged away by guards. The woman's kind eyes are wild with fear, her servant's uniform torn, her hands reaching back toward her daughter even as the men pull her through the gates.
"Liana! Liana, my love—"
The gates slam shut. The woman disappears.
A tall man with cold eyes watches from an upper balcony, doing nothing. Saying nothing. Just watching, like a spider observing a fly caught in its web.
The little girl screams.
Years of loneliness. Years of hiding in corners, learning the secret passages her mother taught her, using them to avoid the cruelty of servants who'd once been friendly. Years of watching her half-sister, beautiful, golden Seraphina, receive everything while she received nothing. Dresses. Jewels. Tutors. Love.
"The bastard," Seraphina calls her, laughing with her friends. "The little bastard who thinks she's family."
Liana doesn't cry. She learned long ago that crying changes nothing.
A fever. Burning and freezing at the same time, her body wracked with chills, her skin soaked with sweat. No one comes to check on her. No one brings water. No one cares that she's dying alone in a shack at the edge of the estate, discarded like garbage, forgotten like yesterday's news.
She calls for her mother. For the woman with kind eyes who'd held her hand and shown her secret passages and promised that everything would be alright.
Her mother doesn't come.
In her final moments, Liana Vex felt something stronger than fear, stronger than grief, stronger than the fever that was killing her. Anger, not at her mother, but at the man who let her die. At the sister who laughed at her pain. In a world that had decided she didn't matter.
"Make them pay," she whispers to the empty room, to the darkness, to whatever gods might be listening.
No one answers.
She dies alone.
