Prologue

Bright greens looked on, jaded, worn out, merely one step away from the final edge. Jade orbs adorned her visage; dull gray, the reality she lived in. Odd, she couldn't yet comprehend it. Then again, she feared wrapping her mind around it would ultimately drown her in the endless piles of nameless bodies, unmarked graves to be unheeded. Glossed over. As if they hadn't been to hell.

Absentmindedly, her thumb, caked with dried blood and dirt that would stain her skin for years to come, reached out to the necklace hanging limply around her neck, softly brushing her collarbone and grazing her breast ever so slightly. With as much strength as the walking corpse could muster, she vehemently rubbed the cold, metallic surface. A symbol vaguely unbeknownst to the perpetrators of the carnage that ate her away. And her family. And her country.

And so she waited. She awaited those large, vivid carmine eyes to stare her down and that perfectly crooked smile of his, showing teeth as perfect and white as his hair and canines as sharp as the screams of agony in cattle wagons. The bundle of dirt and misery she'd become. His posture spoke of jest, the little asshole, but his words caressed her bloodied hair and touched her shattered heart. The little asshole.

And then, it would be as if she were not rotting in a prison where the innocent are judged as vermin. As if she were not forced into useless labor, picking up stones and depositing them at the opposite extreme of the compound in a ridiculously endless circle. As if she were not given one bowl of aqueous soup of debatable origins and suspiciously low nutritional value everyday. As if she had not been stripped of any shred of dignity and put int meter cage of pure hell.

No, for despite the six meter deep scars adorning her once pretty figure and the cries of the unfortunate souls who were not told 'right' haunting her dreams, she found hope in his mere presence, in his words of encouragement instilling her to stay strong, in his efforts for keeping her alive and semi stable. Though she guessed it was too late for the latter.

She did love him, deeply. Fondly. She would rub the goddman piece of metal until her thumb was no more if she had to. Just to see him. His perfect visage, laugh, voice. How come she hadn't met him earlier...? Before the war, that is.

But she had him now. The necklace was hers, and so was he. And she was his, as was her sanity. He himself had told her so.

She smiled, an expression thought extinct in a place like this at a time like this. And suddenly she no longer mourned the tragedy that moved the whole world into a turmoil, a thousand hurricanes and planes and tanks that spoke of doom and cementaries and became the messagers of death. They had never seen such devastation, and neither had they seen him. He'd end this, he'd promised her. She believed him, for he'd demonstrated he was more than capable.

The first time she'd avoided asking, though curiosity had promised to leave her bound to madness otherwise. The second time the words had unwillingly slipped out of her mouth, yet he hadn't seemed to mind. The third time she'd yelled at his jest, his babbling. How dare he speak such nonsense when the people around her died by the second.

But then, her mind eased, her pain numbed and she felt as though she had finally perished at the hands of starvation, diseases, depression, death labor. Or perhaps she'd been shot straightaway. Strangled by a desperate inmate.

And that was when she truly lost it. She'd surrender to him, yield, be at his mercy. For he was all she had been deprived of. He had everything while she was no one.

He'd end it. Lest she succumb to the fires of this hell.

She just wondered why none of her inmates could see him...