Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ The Shadows of a Crimson Moon ❯ Sentenced "Crimson" ( Chapter 1 )

~.::.~ Dedicated to Brianne, without whom this would not even exist.~.::.~

 

~

But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,

Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent,

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race;

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

 

Yet loathe the banquet, which perforce

Must feed thy livid, living corpse,

Thy victims, ere they yet expire,

Shall know the demon for their sire;

As cursing thee, thou cursing them,

Thy flowers are withered on the stem.

 

-From The Giaour (1813) by Lord Byron

~

 

 

“God save our gra-cious…Queen, l-long live our n-oble Queen…God s-save the Queen…”

Her words were shaken, brittle by her choked, broken and hollowed screams escaping from her clenched, bruised throat and vocals.

 

“Open your eyes, you monster. Look! What do you see? Tell me!”

The man's enormous, massive palm clamped tightly around the back of her neck, throwing her forward and to the cobblestone ground below them.

 

Trembling, her battered hands grasped the rims of a stilted, wooden bucket, which tipped slightly at the girl's instability of nature.

 

Her luminous, verdant emerald eyes met themselves, mirrored by the dingy water settling unsteadily in the timber pail.

 

“Do you see it?”

Her wax flower face, which was in fact, a beautiful canvas, was mixed with dirty, vacant tears. She was so beautiful that she seemed unnatural; her beauty an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile the soul to the equally imperfect human condition.

 

Her hollow, soulless emerald eyes showed with a bright, incandescing glow that echoed through the darkness which consumed her scare-crow figure; mouth wide with prominent lips and filled with spiked teeth reminding her captour of finely stencilled sugar moulds.

 

“You know what I see,” He gurgled ominously, lowering his dark face to her own as she stared shadily into the soiled water, showing no expression.

 

“I see a creature not worth a songbird's elegy. I see a pathetic excuse of a mere oversight. You, walk and breathe as if the world accepts you for what you truly are. Will you tell me now what it is I crave to know, and save yourself from much unnecessary suffering?”

“S-send her victorious…happy an-d glorious, long to re-ign o-over us--”

Her only frail response to his cold and disheartened words was cut short by one of her many screams, seeping throughout her soul and clamouring against the cold stone walls of the large, billowing castle.

 

The scythe that lay by his feet had lunged forward, wedging itself into her lower back.

 

His large and calloused palms felt ablaze at the site of blood they had brought forth.

 

She fell frontward, collapsing, unmoving to granite flooring where her ebon blood had seeped through the stone, the candle sheen leaving a hint of an illuminating radiance upon the steady, black rivers of liquid.

 

She was still, her bright eyes veiled by her long, heavy lashes, until suddenly, she began to stir.

 

Her eyes opened slowly, her vision hazed greatly, and her entire essence wounded by the blow.

 

Her flesh began to seam itself back into its former piece, her spine creaking as it moulded itself together. She winced slightly at the pain it wrought, but nevertheless sat upward, her wound completely diminished and dissolved, and in its place, took a long and drastic scar that throbbed significantly.

 

He gave out a long, deep-throated chuckle that made her sick.

 

“You see, child? You're no more than a monster. You require so much from the human form that you are a mere parasite to this earth. A vampyre?”

He scoffed at the latter portion of his words.

He knelt down to her fragile figure, and took a fistful of her lengthy, ink coloured hair, yanking her backward with a heavy force.

 

He cast her bruised face upward to the light, and leered slightly.

 

“Such a pretty little thing…” he coaxed half-heartedly, “it's a shame that you're to die by my hand.”

 

He threw her forward once again, her long tresses themselves his gnarled fingers' anchour.

 

“I'll be back later, then. Let's see if you'll speak come tomorrow, and if not…”

 

He continued muttering his ominous yet inaudible threat, his hand wrapping tightly around the torchlight he had brought into her stone chamber, and rather silently, they both faded into the shadows of the hall.

 

She remained there, paralysed with trauma.

She collapsed once more to the soiled, cold and damp ground below her, sections of her figure skimmed with blood and burns.

 

Her eyes slowly closed themselves for a final time that night, and, in a hushed, yet reverberating tone finished her broken statement.

 

“Go-od…save the Queen…”

~.:.~

 

In the whole of a dismal and dreary day in her granite prison, she found it to be about mid-autumn of that particular year, for it was calmingly chill where she was nestled, and she could hear the soft gusts of western zephyrs from beyond her prison walls.

Streaks of orange and ochroid sun bled through the crevices of the stone.

 

Slowly, she went to touch the warmth, reaching frontward hesitantly.

 

She neither burned, nor bled when she felt the rays collide with her pallid, scraped porcelain flesh that mirrored the whites of her eyes.

 

She attempted to move further, closer to the warm light, when she heard an all too familiar sound intrude into her thoughts and throw her back into the realm of her treacherous reality.

 

Her manacles.

 

They smouldered at her ankles when she made a movement, screeching against the stone floor vociferously.

 

She halted, unable to move any further.

 

She had, many times before attempted to break free of them. Yet, every time her endeavours would be in vain, and only cause the ache to increase dramatically.

 

She was a strong soul, yes, that was evident enough. Her subjugator had never informed her of just how long she had been under his unyielding and unjust control, but she remembered, however unclear her first days of incarceration, when she was a mere child.

 

He had told her once that she was over two hundred years old.

 

She showed very little pain, especially when in vast amounts. She was docile, yet broken. A shattered song that held no ending, she remained, silent as her surroundings, and just as lifeless.

 

Her eyes were barren and expressionless. When her possessor would look into her crystalline orbs, he would see nothing, and often tell her so. She was radiant, even in her thin and grime laden rags, but it was her eyes that mimicked her soul, or lack there of.

 

Yes, she certainly was well built and sturdy. She was able to endure horror after distressing revulsion, and live onward, unable to process any hint of thought, reminisce, or die.

Yes, she was an immortal.

 

No other living soul could claim that they could survive what she has been through, for they would be speaking out of hindsight and ignorance. No one may sit and say that they can do what she has done; for she is something else, something more than anything or anyone else could befit.

It was calmingly tranquil in her stone sect, and she found it in her best interests to attempt to rest her uneasy mind.

She heard a slight, indistinct rustling from outside the walls, but brushed it aside, resting on her heart that it was merely the wind.

And as she went to veil her eyes into the darkness that she so often crept, she heard the disturbance yet again, and arose slightly from her fetal positioning. Her thick black hair

Cascaded down her muscled back and shoulders like a dark waterfall as she sauntered slowly to where the sound was erupting, silently creeping in her typical Lynx like manner.

 

She listened intently, relying on only that for answers.

 

Suddenly, she slinked backward; wide eyes fixated on one distinct barricade, soaked in moisture, and caked in filth.

 

A burst of great magnitude threw her slightly aback, yet she gripped firmly to her footing and did not move, strands of extensive raven hair flying backward in the great gust of air colliding with her thin yet toned figure.

The sun stuck her, nearly petrifying her with stillness from the bright warmth and light.

 

Two figures emerged from the distance, her dilated eyes making out the shape of a katana and a lengthy whip in each shadow's possession.

 

She heard the clamouring yells from down below.

He was coming for her.

 

Lost in a dazed confusion, she merely watched as one intruder went to break her free of her possessive shackles, and sliced through them like grease with the willowy sword.

A great saffron tinted light emitted from her eyes and fingertips as she was unbounded by the hexed metal restraints, the irons falling limply to the flooring as their power over the girl faded.

 

She too, went to collapse in fatigue, when a sturdy arm had caught her from the fall.

 

She stole a glimpse of the figure's vivid ruby eyes, and soon after her vision was succumbed back into the formidable darkness, her slender and slightly emaciated body sinking into heavy, wilted unconsciousness in the person's arms.

 

`Do what you wish with me, I will not concern myself. If you have merely taken me from entrapment to the next, that is the way it shall be. Thank you…'