Farewell
Lacie Baskerville,
Like ashes, they fell around her, black feathers delicately drifting about the gleaming bands of metal that tore through her soft flesh; parting skin as easily as paper, leaving their own form of ink behind.
Pain, a red-hot fire to match the rain of blood that fell against the polished marble floor. It felt as if she was being reborn in a wave of searing agony, her whole self replaced by a creature of light and darkness, both halves threatening to consume her.
With my chains of conviction—
I pass judgment on you.
Even through the chaos that whirled around her, through the tendrils of darkness that crept across her eyes, she could see the anguish in his gaze. It was almost funny that only one of them was truly afraid –
That the one who would live because of the sacrifice should feel fear, instead of she, who was being sacrificed; the thought made her smile, weakly and without joy.
Join us in the darkness. You, who have mothered our vessel, join us in the abyss. Already the voices welcomed her with dark fingers that burned like ice as they touched her blood-stained skin.
Your sin –
Which threatens the peace of the Abyss—
Is that of being born with the eyes of the child of misfortune.
Even now, he could not pass judgment, for it was not her he blamed, but the eyes that sealed her fate as his blood sacrifice. Perhaps now, he blamed himself, as if it was his sin to be the cause of so much misfortune.
She was nothing more than a child—one who heard and felt the Abyss as her own mother, one who was now being pulled back into its gaping womb to be tied down by loving fingers and watched as she withered in agony for as long as she had breath – and when she was without, her body would hang like a demented trophy of the sin that she never meant to commit.
Is it a sin to be born?
Or is the true sin living on?
The crimson-cloaked Baskervilles who shunned her as a child now watched her demise with lowered eyes, as if to reassure themselves that she was never human—not really. That they were not monsters for sending her to the Abyss, but saviors who protected the world from the misfortune she had yet to cause.
All but two: her brother one, and the man who fathered her children the other. One, unable to tear his gaze away from her; the other, dismissing her presence with a smile and a simple motion of a bandaged hand. And a third, missing from the circle.
Long, soft hair, clear green eyes—the gaze of a fallen angel, pure and twisted—these things formed the shell of the plaything that nipped at her heels like an eager puppy. One not ready to accept his own sin. She had never expected him to arrive – she had never given an invitation.
If he had, she would have been disappointed, for she wanted him to remember her as someone not tied down by fate, free unto death.
She had lied to him –
She had never truly been free.
Tears mixed with pain and anger, blood and soot, trailed down her face, dropped into her upturned mouth. They tasted of death; the final chain ripped through her chest and its metal tip pierced the side of her already-broken heart. So there was no pain, only phantom screams and shaking hands as her cursed soul shattered.
And as the doors of abyss closed above her like a starless sky, she raised a hand in a small wave and ended her existence with a smile.
"Nii-san."
Your sin is your very being.
Then I shall cease to be.