A strange, tuneless song tripped from her tongue, her crimes of hunger left behind with the blood-soaked bits of cloth that never seemed to come clean. It had been her mother’s dress, once... The song rose at the thought of her mother, lost to eternity shortly after she’d been born. Eternity, or whatever madness had driven her into the dark. Either way, a lost soul...
Yet for some reason, thought of the woman she’d never known, always filled her with such thoughts of hope. Supposedly destroyed by some twisted thing in the dark- Eliana’s own father, if blood were to be believed- the thought of the woman still always made her smile.
Her grandmother had admitted once, in a rare moment of wistful remembering, that Eliana actually looked a good deal like her.
“I have the gold of her hair,” Eliana quoted aloud, seeing no reason not to, “And the twist of her smile as well. And a spark of disobedience that grandmother has never managed to sway... But my eyes...” And here she faltered, here she always faltered.
I would say that eyes like that, could have only come from your father. And that was the end of any fondness.
Eliana’s feet stopped in their tracks, and she lifted her face to the night sky. She wondered what had happened that night. What might have happened as well, the night she was conceived. A demon man, and a human woman, little held into this world by normal reason... Did it have to be a tragic tale?
She didn’t know, and that not knowing was far worse than bearing any unholy blood. Her grandmother couldn’t tell her. Her grandmother’s tales were always dark, and filled with pain.
Eliana’s step lost some of its strength, though never any of her grace. Her mouth puckered a little in absent reflection, while she now stubbornly refused to think anything at all.
And then all thoughts of mother or father were driven from her mind in an instant, as she came far enough into the village to see the light flickering in her grandmother’s window. A groan escaped her, from somewhere low in her chest, and her shoulders slumped in something like defeat. So she’d been caught again. It shouldn’t even matter anymore...
She did pause though, for just a moment. She couldn’t help but turn her eyes out into the place where human life ended, and only the hunter, and the hunted, held sway. How easy to vanish, as her father before her had vanished, surely never to look back.
“I cannot deny that I am his daughter,” She mused, slowly casting her eyes down, to the tracks in the earth, made by her own feet, “Nor that his darkness echoes within me.” And somehow, she couldn’t even hate him. She knew better than any what he was.
For a long moment she stood like this, and then her lips twisted into something like a smile. She allowed herself a brief fantasy of her mother, fleeing the mortal world forever to be with her demon love. But of course, that hadn’t been the way it had happened at all, was it?
“Grandmother...” She grimaced as she returned to reality, then grinned perversely, and spun on her heel, her strength restored. Let the old woman condemn her, let her try to deny her the night...
But when the darkness fell, the night was all she was.
