Chapter 8

Viola is awakened by the daylight piercing her eyelids. Feeling relaxed she grasps the covers tightly, as if hugging a lover. She reaches to her windowsill and grabs a half smoked cigarette. Promptly places it in her mouth, bad habit ensues, blue mist returns.

"Am I awake?" she ponders. The flame on the cigarette is blue, but it's not burning.

"What kind of lucid dream have I found myself stuck in?"

Suddenly she wakes up for real in a panic and knocks over the ashtray, creating a graveyard of tobacco sucked dry.

"Damnit."

After a hard stretch, and sweeping up the ash from the floor, she hops out of bed and begins to cook breakfast. Peering out the window at society moving about the community like busy bees. The fake prophets, who always look homeless, are in rare form as they proclaim a destiny doomed for the city.

"Sure, our technology sustains us now, but LOOK at the damage it's done. Black clouds reign above us. Disease, pollution, children are dying while being born! We will not live without the healing power of the rune! Do not believe that Lord Quinn will save thee, my brothers and sisters, there is no savior. Not even God of the Eternal! There is only hellfire, repentance, sacrifice. This country will be rained upon by violence and tyranny. We are not governed by man nor beast, it is the unknown...the demons, who rule us!"

A cold shoulder to the outside world. She has the day off, and rarely receives any company. Preferring a reclusive lifestyle. She moved there five years prior into an old woman's house, and provided a false name, yearning to be someone else. When the woman passed, Viola stayed, almost wishing they'd pass together. Normal smoke, normal day, normal thoughts.

"Ok...my grip on this moment is intact. Thankfully. What am I going to do with myself today?"

Disorganization in her small mess of a mess. The clutter from days far too relaxed for any woman. No entertainment in sight, barely any food or drink. You would think the home is abandoned. Thirty minutes in any direction to locate alcohol. A bunch of drug dealers littered her neighborhood, but the pills were rumored to induce psychosis. The last known case was a young teenage boy who stuffed his head in an oven, suicide successful.

"Lucky you," she thinks to herself.

Phony clairvoyants' rumored that he was killed for saying Lord Quinn is immortal. The thought would fester deep in the dark corners of her conscious, and release sunken memories of her own attempt to kill herself. Some habits are hard to quit. The misery of watching the world change for her is similar to watching the reverse transformation of a butterfly into a caterpillar, swallowed by the earth.

"Hmph, death by oven, death by fire. I could never. I could drown though. I tried to drown. The deeper the ocean... my poor children, left on the shore. I screamed at them not to follow me. My sixth and seventh attempt at being a shitty mother, floating lifeless atop the bottomless sea. I made it to the floor, spent a whole week down there. Monster to monster with the creatures of the deep blue. Too afraid to get out, and see pieces of me dead on the shore."

At the bottom of the Maroth Sea, a constant blue light kept appearing during Viola's week underwater, the result of a study being performed by a maritime mission. When they discovered her, and of her story, the small middle-aged crew kept secrecy of the event, in exchange for the rare information she had on the description of the sea monsters that lived below. The wife of one of the crewmember's prayed for her children who drowned going in after her.

"Fools, praying won't solve a thing. They are still dead...and I am not."

Cynicism is the only thing keeping her sane. While the nightmares of her dead children keeps her tortured. The cigarette is done now. She cleans the ashtray. It's time to leave memory lane.

"...I need to get out of this place."

She puts on some clothes, styled with a small dingy doublet made for a man, and heads outside. While pacing down the street she notices the drug dealers against her own will. Shrouded in oversized hoods standing in a circle resembling witches over a caldron. Some are human, some are addicts, to her addicts don't have souls. And the drugs had done a number on them. Sprouting pale green patches on their skin. The color of vomit.

"Hey you wanna try some of this? Wake you up from you're boring slumber of life," one dealer beckons to her in passing.

"Regardless of how poetic that was, I will decline today. I got high on my misery last night, all is well," she responds while walking faster.

Thirty minutes laterViola steps into the liquor store. She plunges in her pockets, discovering a trivial amount of money, just enough for a cheap bottle of wine.

"My first husband would've bought this entire establishment for me. Our three kids could not stop crying when they found out. I told them every night that immortality was the opposite of a blessing, and not hereditary," she reminisces while scanning the shanty store.

She remembered all the lovers she had, and how within the last fifty years, some of the men, and few women had become obsessive and couldn't live without the touch of her intimacy. For after so long, and never showing signs of aging past thirty years old, she has perfected the art of sex. She conquered the pleasure of seduction and could leave anyone trembling from satisfaction. But alas, what's the point when 'till death do us apart' no longer applies?

Drago is far more jaded and sadistic than his sister. Her attempt at humor contrasted with self-hatred was a drop in a pond compared to his infliction. He's the true black sheep. Immortality made him a killing machine when the war took hold, and he never mentioned Viola for her safety. He never visited either, but they liked it that way. Due to his position in Alastair's army he thought he would be spared of being dissected and experimented on, but he thought wrong.

He killed his first solider eighty-five years ago. Gouged him several times with a small stiletto, Oedipus Rex-style. His comrades stopped dead in their tracks to see the animal nature of the kill. Drago murdered him as if taking out a past lover. With each stab he kept seeing flashes of his mother and the young girl who took his virginity. Pleasant thoughts for a violent act, that's how his mind works. He recalls how his hand trembled. The feeling in his heart, the deep breaths, it was sex to him. Almost every witness would describe it as a 'crime of passion'. While the generals knew that it was the birth of a Leoviglid.