For as long as she could remember Mircalla Karnstein has worn a rag on her right wrist. It covers the mark that bears the first significant thing her soulmate will say to her.
More times then she could count she has been visited by the priest, her wrist uncovered and bathed in holy water and prayers said before being wrapped and bound to keep curious young hands out. Mother had never told her what the words were or what they meant, only that the words were cursed, and whomever would utter those words would never be worthy of her.
Still one night in an act of youthful rebellion she unwraps the cloth and read the foreign words written on her skin in the looping scrawl of an invisible hand.
It was a simple sentence: Hell, even you deserve better.
She stares down at the mark tracing the cursive words. The first word shocks her and the rest puzzles her. She began to wonder whom the blasphemous yet seemingly kind person would be. Perhaps it would be someone royal, come to sweep her away from this place, a noble prince taking her on adventure, or a cunning and intelligent princess. She knows that when the time comes and the words are uttered she will go away with the person, and let them take her away to a land of adventure and dance, of excitement and curiosity.
She wonders for only a few more months before she is murdered and rescued in the same night.
The world opened to her, she travels, she has the freedom to explore and learn as she wishes. She dances and indulges herself, she hunts her prey and thrills in the chase. She thrills in hearing the screams, both of pleasure and pain, as the mortals begged for their lives as she drains them dry.
The heady taste of adrenaline filled blood, warm and rich flowing into her mouth as they screamed or begged for mercy was her favourite.
Still that mark, uncovered now and black as the ink that never touched her skin makes little sense.
How could she possible have a life better then this?
For 200 years she played her part, the weak and sickly girl left behind at a ball or to weak to travel after an accident. Imposing upon the kind strangers until she can regain her strength, acting as the confidant and friend of a few. As she plays the game she figures out that taking advantage of the words written on the girls wrists when it's possible, tricking them into thinking she was their soulmate, makes it easier then she could ever have hoped. She could only laugh at the naïveté and hope that each of the girls has when she repeats the words written on their arms, rehearsed until the tone and cadence are perfect, the scene planned and executed with a romantic perfection almost too good to be true.
They walk around with their marks uncovered yet never expected to get taken advantage of. She can only laugh at the humans and their hopeful belief in a broken system.
It was in the moments that her mark was bared to others that she would receive sneers because all vampires marks faded to grey by the end of their first century.
Hers is still black there is still someone out there somewhere and somewhen that thinks she deserves better. She would laugh in their faces if she could.
She wonders what the blood of her soulmate will taste like as she drains them dry.
It's when she meets Ell that everything changes.
She is still innocent and naive to the ways of the world, blue eyes full of wonder and wide with the innocence of a belief in a good world, despite the dangerous hand she had been dealt. She walks around with her wrist bound, alike her but for vastly different reasons.
Ell is one of the blasphemous, a century ago she would have been burned as a witch, now she was merely pitiable yet there was nothing about this happy girl that showed the hand she had been dealt. She smiled and laughed, and was kind to those she met. She was also lonely however, locked away in her schloss different from others and unable to tell the world about her unmarked wrist.
As she goes through the motion that have become a practised second nature she finds herself beginning to feel again. She begins to feel emotions she thought long since buried, and new feelings as well. When she looks at Ell she can't bare the thought of letting her go. She can't bear the thought of never hearing her sweet voice calling her name or seeing her angelic face alight with a smile reserved only for her so she doesn't, instead making plans for them to flee away from her mother and away from the sacrifice that will take Ell away from her.
She has found better. She has found the meaning of the words on her wrist. She will not let the one thing that fills her with light be taken away from her.
At least it did until Ell betrayed her.
The first days after being interred pass in a blurry haze of betrayal, pain, anger, and overwhelming loss. She spent each moment counting as she waited for the burning in her mark, for the feeling of her soul shattering as its mate was taken from the world.
But it never comes.
She's broken perhaps the ultimate taboo; she fell in love with someone other then her soulmate.
And now she pays the price.
She would trace the words often in the darkness over the blood soaked rag that covered them. She would wonder if they had faded to grey yet, those words that promises more then she ever deserved. She wonders if her soulmate had spent her lifetime searching for her.
She has long since given up turning the words over in her head; there was no point. She didn't deserve any better then what she had gotten.
This was her life. This was her punishment for daring to fall in love.
Instead of holding onto her soulmate and subjecting herself and her soulmate to the danger that she brings she vows to let her go. Whomever she was or will be she wishes her a happy life.
When she hears something echo moments before the dark and quiet of her world shatters around her. Where there was only silence and darkness there was now light, noise and air.
She growled and struggled, long buried instincts surging forward as she begins to fight for her freedom and her life and the once elegant coffin shatters.
It's later, once she's restores to her right mind that she claws as the blood-soaked rag tied to her wrist. She rips the fabric without a second thought.
Her breath catches and she could swear her heart stutters for a moment as she catches sight of the familiar words.
She feels the pressure behind her eyes and the lump in her throat rises as she stares at the familiar words.
They're still black.
When mother found her in the fifties she knew that there would be no escape. She would be reinterred.
It would be back to the game she had been playing for the last century.
The one that had taken Ell away from her.
It also came as no surprise when her mother asked about her mark.
And perhaps it had been witnessing what happened when she lost someone she loved, or perhaps it was a newfound desire to seek revenge but she lied.
"Yes Maman," she whispered as her mother reached out and caressed the thick band of cloth she kept tied over her wrist.
"Good," she cooed as she withdrew her fingers, reaching up to touch her cheek.
She couldn't hide her shiver as she flinched away.
She found small joys in the revenges that could be taken. It was never going to be enough though and for every girl she managed to chase off another one was simply taken in her place, and she would simply receive another bone-chilling smile from Mother.
Nosiness about the marks only increased as the population of the world exploded and became more interconnected. Soulmate that she remembered being separated by perhaps a hundred kilometres at most suddenly became oceans apart. The unmarked became more common, and something that had been a rare phenomenon in the past, the countdown, began to appear more and more often.
With the advent of the online and the invention of social media it became even more difficult and the number of unmarked and countdowns only increased.
She glared across the room as she watched her short roommate cry over her ex-boyfriend again, the one who left her for his soulmate. The one who monogrammed everything in her possession listened in annoyance.
She simply glared at them. She wondered when the idiotic youth of this generation would learn that there was no point in falling in love with another, it would only lead to a broken heart.
The blubbering one had looked at her like she was a monster when she said those words.
But still there were times when she would stare at the uncovered mark under the cover of darkness and she would wonder why? There was a pointlessness to the marks, they let so many be taken advantage of simply because they have a set of words written on their wrist. Anyone could read them and say them at the right time, and you could look at theirs in turn. But it was also an exercise in futility to try and escape the pull of the mark, she had seen it again and again, two people falling in love in some kind of clandestine affair and when they pledge to love their partner over their soulmate and it fails every time.
She huffs before turning her gaze onto the two dimwits she had been assigned to room with. The sooner they were sent away in tears the sooner her return to the idiocy of university life would be over.
She absolutely could not wait.
When Mother reassigned her to a new room she had never been so relieved to escape the two idiots she had been forced to share a room with. All she knew about her new roommate was that she was much to nosy, and had been poking around in things where she did not belong. She was to keep an eye on her and stop her from looking any further into the girls that were being taken to use in the sacrifice.
It shouldn't be to hard, all she had to do was keep her nosy little roommate out of Mother's way and really it shouldn't take to much to chase this one off.
It was when she opens the door and enters room 307 for the first time calling out a greeting. When the pint sized brunette asking far to many questions that she felt something infinitesimal within her shift as Laura Hollis shifted in her chair and looked at her through confused eyes staring up her from the desk chair. She had no time to look at it now, but maybe later she had a pint sized problem to deal with first.
"Excuse me but who the hell are you?"
And so begins the routine of being the worst roommate in history.
"Hell even you deserve better."
And as she looks up at the cup- at Laura she feels something within her shatter as the words on her wrist burn.
Laura was her soulmate.
It was a single thought that was running through her head on loop, and she had to bite her lip to stop herself from blurting something out. She stared at her, wondering it what universe they were a match, but even as she continued to stare at her the words echoed in her head.
She deserved better. She deserved better.
She didn't. Time had already shown her the lesson she had needed to learn, but somehow through 70 years of suffering the lesson never stuck.
She didn't deserve this and the brunette in front of her didn't deserve her as a soulmate but she knew that resisting the pull would be futile. She never had thought it would come to this but now somehow she had found her soulmate, and in the situation she had feared most of all.
Laura was targeted to be a Sacrifice and she had already learned what happened the last time she had tried to keep something for herself.
Even as she watched Laura talk to the camera, telling her nonexistent audience that they could do it together if they all worked together, in some naive sentiment that if they all worked together they would be able to overcome anything. She watched her become passionate as her eyes flared with life, passion, and youth, a belief that everything would be okay, and the thing that had tilted on its side when she first laid eyes on Laura shifted a little more knocking against something until it gave away.
She watched in silence the brunette upload the videos to the Ethernet. The alarms began to blare a few seconds later, and as Laura left the room directed by one of the annoying gingers she closed her eyes and took an unneeded breath before she walked over to Laura's desk and shutting the camera off.
There was no point in resisting the inevitable: she would fall in love with Laura. When the time comes she would take Laura and flee whether the other girl liked it or not, there was no way she was going to lose another person she over to her mother. For now though all she can do is play her cards close to her chest, watching her mother and hoping that this time she'll be enough to protect the girl she's going to fall in love with, if she hasn't started already... Damnit!