She saw the blood rushing before the axe even fell, the laughter of the nearby children driving her mind into a place she had learned to suppress every day since her tenth birthday.
She still remembered the teaching sessions with her aunt, the very woman whose violet hairs whisked in the wind, when the blade of destiny fell and took the last person Hannah cared for.
Her Fiancé stood next to her while the headless corpse began to bloat and turn a sickly green.
She did not look at it, desperate to deny the Major's claims. She was his son's future wife. He must listen to her, right?
But when the head came off, it was undeniable to her. She had been raised by a hag.
The disappearance of her father and her mother's untimely demise made much more sense now.
But it was during such a moment that her dreams of blood felt more real. She clutched the pendant she was given, hoping to drive away those blasphemous thoughts as she cut herself on its sharp edges.
Her tears flowed freely now, her raven hair fluttering in the wind as she ran home. She knew that violence could not be the answer, and yet, when she looked back at the green eyes of the man she was supposed to marry soon, she felt nothing but disgust and the urge to tear him apart.
Nobody should own her, especially not someone who gawked at the last of her family dying.
Of course, the Idiot gave chase, and of course, he was just a tad faster than she was.
With every breath, she skipped through the stages of grief, denial, and bargaining, having passed while the hag had still been imprisoned. An emptiness filled her, and although sadness dominated her mind, she could feel it turn to rage, a river of fire filling the hole this moment tore into her soul.
She did not know exactly what she said, but when she opened her mouth and screamed hard enough for it to hurt, Nolan stopped chasing her. Quickly, she took the bag she had prepared and jumped through the rear window before she slid through a gap in the fence and disappeared in the forest.
She saw the blood rushing before the axe even fell, the laughter of the nearby children driving her mind into a place she had learned to suppress every day since her tenth birthday.
She still remembered the teaching sessions with her aunt, the very woman whose violet hairs whisked in the wind, when the blade of destiny fell and took the last person Hannah cared for.
The Half Elf knew that no one would be mad enough to follow her here, the legends about what might lurk in the elderwood as old as the settlement of Rivergate itself.
She felt at home in the wilds, the wind whispering through the ancient black oak crowns, the bark growing ever closer as her sprint got faster.
She felt the Elven legacy for the first time in her life, the connection to nature her people were known for slowly waking up in her.
When she finally was out of breath, her eyes wandered down, inspecting herself as she began to laugh at the absurdity of her current situation.
Soon, she would turn eighteen, just a ten day until she would get access to her legacy, and the first hint on who her father might have been.
Then, she began to slowly and methodically search the woods for a place to sleep, testing branches and crevices to find one high enough to protect her for a night, but large enough to allow for her to span her hammock.
While doing so, she searched for food as well, her gaze wandering between the trees and the ground in search of tracks, only dragged out of her focus when a deep grunt came from behind her.
Slowly, she began to turn, a rather agitated hog standing no more than an arm's length behind her, prompting a quick leap and curse as she ascended a nearby oak, the tree just barely large enough to hold her, especially with an angry boar staring up at her, functioning as a rather convincing argument to span her hammock and rest, barely clinging on to hope as she remembered the faces of everyone at the execution.
They looked happy, decapitating her aunt, even if she was a hag, they should at least have felt bad for her, supported her. Instead, the only one caring was her fiancé, and even he didn't seem to grasp what they took from her.
As she closed her eyes, she immediately passed out from exhaustion and hunger.
~{Esotorikum}~
Glowing jellyfish like creatures slowly move through the blackened waters, crystalline mushrooms sprouting from the sea floor.
One of them, barely the size of a fingertip, connects to something beneath the bedrock, a single strand of mycelium drawing upon the chaos beneath, amidst millions of strands simply spread through the sea floor.
A small but steady trickle begins to nourish the young crystal, purple liquid feeding it as everything around it acts like it did for eons, mushrooms leaving the ground, their mycelium turning into tentacles as they joined the Jellyfish above.
