In Space the stars are no nearer. As I child I've always tried to reach out to touch its cold expanse, only to find nothing but the heat of my breath, and the humid wasteland of Outworld's tortured nights.
My childhood spent beaten by a man I never called father, and ignored by a wretch I killed, known as my mother. It was not intended, but I remember one day, my father held me down and spat in my face as I screamed and cried. The wad of saliva slowly scraped my flesh as the tears and salt showered its parade along my shame. I screamed for her, screamed for to end. He held a finger to his dirty, jagged, and oft missing teeth to bite at the hardened skin after a long day's work in the city and produced a small steam of blood that dripped onto my wet childish skin.
"Drink it." He smiled and I gagged.
His tongue etched and burned across my face to collect and taste the salt of my horror, the rivers of my childhood that flowed like his favorite wine.
All I had ever wanted as a child was to be who I was going to become. To be normal, to have a home with a mother and father that cared, for someone to love me, and for me to have a place in this broken world. To become who I was born to be, little did I realize, meant the complete destruction of who I was born as.
His tongue crept into my quivering maw and so vengeance and desperation took over, like a fit of survival and rage that ripped that gross flesh from its disgusting moist cavern! Oh, I drank his blood alright, but it did not kill him. His hands found my throat and my mother screamed at us both to just shut up. We were a bother to her as she was drinking her tea and enjoying a relaxing evening in a land of illusion where I did not exist and she never accepted the bond of a man that could never love her. Not like he showed his twisted version of love to me every night she refused him.
That girl, that starlit child that reached for the heavens discovered one night that the stars were never there. Flickers of dead light in a world beyond my comprehension. I only knew then that they did not care, no one did. The only person to ever fight for me, to ever try to save who I was was who I wanted to become.
Horrified at the sight of his tongue spat across our small decrepit space you might call a home, I ran to the wash basin, a knife had been placed there after he had skinned a meal he had only cut for himself. It was intended that night for me to kill my father, this man I could not bestow such an honor as that title, this disgusting sack of meat and filth, but when I turned back into the small den of a living space he would beat and destroy me in, he was gone and only a trail of blood remained. In my anger, I whipped the knife down like a star torn through the night sky and spiraled down into the Earthen swill of Outworld's feet and connected into my mother's chest. Right between the third and second rib was her filthy, fat covered heart.
Funny. I never knew she had one until it bled out.
Funny the kind of thoughts that run through your mind when you gaze absently at the very thing that create you. Snapped back to reality, I watched the stream of this child's blood drizzle across the stone and dirt streets of the city beyond the Coliseum. The Kollector has packaged this little girl into his backpack to hide as he trekked through twisted alleys until I had followed him to a hollow den close to the outskirts, and closest to the Forbidden Forest.
Here there were no lights to help me find him. No flicker of moonlight that danced across the red stream to illuminate the way. As best as I could to reach his final destination, there was only nothing. It wasn't until I could smell the foul breath of this creature closer than I would have liked to know it did I reach my destination.
"I have the girl." He breathed, a scrape of throat that escaped his maw like a claw digging across stone.
"You disappoint me, Kollector." Another voice, not the reptilian, but someone else, had answered him after the creek of a door being slowly edged open preceded him.
I had remained hidden behind a hovel between this stone den and the wall that barely contained this city from being bled into the Forbidden Forest. This voice was smoother, but older, and sound wise beyond its years.
"He tore her jaw off." Kollector hissed.
As I stretched my body to its limits just to see a reflection in the puddles that pooled under the rain that had begun to retreat back into the clouds, I had seen a great green aura form. This was no reflection, no shadow, no cloud, no mist. It was its own light source, like the ambient heat of a soul as once told to me by my grandmother that claimed to have seen one collected by an ancient sorcerer.
"We are not alone." These words startled me.
They had to have herd my gasp, a young girl only slightly older than the one that had bled out into the streets. I held still against the wall of the hovel, with no intention to discover the truth. No intention to move for hours, if not for the rest of the night. It didn't take long though for the door to shut, and the sound of this ominous rain to cease.
My breath stretched from my lungs to the soil in a slow crawl that, in the coldest wind of outworld would reveal how jagged my heart beat. So horrible and yet so exciting.
Her blood enchanted me, and these secrets beyond the walls excited me to no end. This girl could only bite her lip in anticipation of being caught, of having to fight her way to freedom, to kill, to live, to survive another night.
Blood was how I was born, and blood is who I am. Who this girl was, I had decided to learn the truth of, but who she became after death, that, was the true gem. Who was she to them now that she had fallen? Was she like me when I killed my mother, when I later found my father and cut his throat in these very streets? Did she try to cut theirs?
The stars may be no nearer, but a whole new world laid itself out just before me. To die before I step upon it, or to become its new inhabitant?