Aeryn was no longer reading a historical record; she was absorbing a memory. The truth about the 'curse' was not that it was evil, but that it was born from a profound, agonizing trauma.
There was a girl... young, barely past her first bloom, a streak of sunlight in the cold. Hawasa was her name, a daughter of the Southern Azure dominion, where the snow met the sea and laughter cracked like ice. She had been joy, she had been hope. But joy is fragile in a world set on fire.
When the people of the Cinder Fire Hegemony came, they did not come as conquerors; they came as devourers. They took everything: her family, her tribe, her betrothed. Their ashes scattered over a sea that no longer sang. They chained her like a beast and hauled her across the ocean, burying her in a stone prison beneath the crust of their cruel empire.
There, in the bowels of the Cinder Fire Hegemony, where the walls sweated and stank of rot and despair, Hawasa began to wither.
Aeryn read with faintly trembling hands, her breath slowing as the images painted themselves across her mind. She saw Hawasa curled on the stone floor, eyes fierce but desperately afraid. The prison was forged from silence, starvation, and the unbearable stench of burning hope.
The guards came, fire in their hands and something hungrier in their eyes. Aeryn swallowed thickly, feeling her stomach turn. They pressed Hawasa into corners where the shadows couldn't even look. They seared her skin, tore her clothes, and violated the last sacred things she possessed. Her body became a battleground, her soul a scar.
Aeryn's eyes stung, her vision blurring, but her hands refused to let go of the pages. Her breath hitched, imagining the silent screams that sat in the throat like a swallowed knife.
Hawasa fought, trying to draw moisture from the sweat on their bodies, from the filth in the gutters, but the fire devoured it. They held her down until her voice gave out and she became a silence that bled. Her body fractured, her cries died into the stone. When dawn came, they left, satisfied. And Hawasa was laying half-dead on the floor, slick with her own blood, sweat, and silence.
She didn't move for days. Her limbs were too broken to crawl, her soul too shattered to scream. She forgot the sound of her own name. But then... her body betrayed her.
Aeryn let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding, instinctively clutching her own stomach to ward off the echo of that pain.
Hawasa had denied it, refused to believe that anything could grow in a place so soaked in death. But her blood spoke the truth. A child had taken root, born of violence and seeded in agony. Never love.
Hatred became Hawasa's second heartbeat. She tried everything to rid herself of the life inside her. She starved, threw herself against the walls, and clawed at her belly until her fingers were slick with blood. But the child clung to life like rot clings to damp wood. It would not die.
The day it was born, it came with a storm of agony. Hawasa bit through the pain in silence, limp on the floor, the blood pooling beneath her more familiar than breath. The baby came wailing, small and screaming.
She turned her head away, sickened. But when she looked... something twisted inside her.
The baby's eyes were wide open. And they pulsed.
Aeryn was flinching as the description seared into her mind.
Veins throbbed beneath the newborn's translucent skin, not with weakness, but with something unnatural. Something aware. Power hummed beneath its flesh. It was a mirror, showing Hawasa everything they had done, carved into muscle and blood.
Rage rose in Hawasa like floodwater. She crawled toward the child, trembling, her hand stretched out not in welcome, but in judgment. But just as her fingers hovered over the tiny throat, the cell door slammed open.
A guard stepped in, eyes widened. He snatched the child from the floor.
"No!" she screamed. "No, give it back! Give it back to me!"
Aeryn's chest ached. Hawasa hadn't wanted the baby back to love it; she had begged for it so she could kill it! But the door slammed shut, and the child was lost to her forever.
......…
Something in Hawasa shattered. She collapsed in the corner, her cries silent, a shaking, unmade thing. The image of the infant's flickering veins, its unnatural body twisting, haunted her.
And then, one night, a lizard scurried across the floor.
It was nothing. Small, twitching, insignificant. But Hawasa's gaze latched onto it, unblinking. Something inside her, somewhere beneath the grief, deeper than pain, focused. She didn't chant. She didn't breathe hard. She simply reached. Into the stillness. Into the blood.
The lizard twitched. Its back arched, legs spasming. It staggered sideways, confused and trembling. Then scurried away, half-bent and broken.
Aeryn sat frozen, her hands clenched on the page. Her skin prickled.
It was not joy Hawasa felt then. Not even vengeance. It was control. Cold and sharp and absolute. And it changed everything.
She began to practice on rodents, honing her skill. Years later, when the guards returned, the laughter in their throats turned to coughs. Limbs jerked. Bodies twisted. The fire in their palms sputtered as they reached for her and found their own blood working against them. Hawasa didn't scream. She didn't rage. She simply stared... and bent them.
The cell had become a womb for vengeance.
The first blood weaving was not a weapon. It was a scream. A scream that shattered a lizard's spine. A scream that would one day become a legacy.
They called it evil.
But Aeryn, her face pale and tear-streaked, could not find the strength to call it anything at all. Because for Hawasa, it had not been born from darkness. It had been born from survival.
Aeryn was weeping by the time she reached that part. Not gentle tears, but aching, breathless cries that clawed from her throat. Her hands gripped the edges of the book as if it might anchor her. The horror pulsed in her blood.
This broken soul was not a villain. She was a wound that never scabbed.
Aeryn pressed her forehead to the book, sobbing soundlessly. Rage consumed her. Not pity, but a bone-deep, soul-wringing fury that tasted like iron and fire. The voices in the wall had not been echoes.
They were screams, sealed in time, begging to be heard.
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