I sleep in darkness. I awake in darkness. Light carries salvation, but that is not what I seek. I seek revenge. Revenge for dooming my mother to lie in a cold and lifeless crypt for the rest of eternity. I will never feel my cheek on her face, no matter how hard I press against it. Her eyes are as empty as my own. The clothes on her decaying body are nothing but dried remnants of the royal life she once lived – a life stricken from her in a single instant, by a curse that has doomed me in anguish.
They call me Striga, but they need only call me Death.
Revenge is all my mind can comprehend. To see a hue other than the blackness of my soul is blasphemous. My one desire is to bathe in the blood of any man who dares to live. My claws are sharp, my teeth pointed. Each time I can rip flesh from bone and taste the sweet lifewater that makes men breathe, I am relieved. Red. The most beautiful color in my world. It warms my grey, wrinkled skin, and satisfies the dryness in my throat. It pulses through me, down to the very end of the cord that still swings from my belly, the lifeline between mother and child.
I kill to satisfy my revenge, but no matter how many bellies I slit, or necks I break, the hunger remains.
It is all for her, the mother who loved only to discover someone claimed to love her more – someone who could not bear to see her carry the child of a man that was not him. He judged me before giving me a chance to live. Money and power could not buy him love, not the love my mother held for another. So, he suffocated it, satisfied that if he could not be granted what he desired, he still held the power to eradicate it.
Now I will judge every man who walks with a shadow and takes their precious lives for granted. For them, the sting of hatred and the fires of chaos will never smolder.
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