It was tradition for children in the village to be born at dawn. That is why everyone found it surprising when I was born under the cover of darkness, the witching hour they had called it. The stars were out and the moon was full when my delicate cries broke the silence of the night. Magical, my mother had called it and yet, with my eagerness to enter the world I became a target for ridicule and scorn. By my seventh birthday, my mother and I were banned from our tiny village with nothing to defend ourselves but the clothes on our backs and each other to lean on. My father having been killed five whole months before I was born fighting with bravery for land and food was not there when the thieves, and rapists, and witches and finally the demons came to steal away the lonely widow and her cursed daughter. Yet we were a fortress in our cabin in the woods we were impenetrable and had killed every last one of them. Maybe, I am cursed as everyone wants to corrupt me in their own sick way.
It was on my 16th birthday that the demons came and as I became enraged at the audacity of these nightmarish creatures a faint glow began to shine around the edges of my being. For the first time, I felt as if I were invincible, I was suddenly stronger, swifter, and my strength was overwhelming. I was able to rip that first demon’s head right off his acid producing body. The next one I just looked at and he exploded into a million pieces flinging his black oil like blood into the treetops. The third one died such a horrible death even I was scared of my own power. I just stepped right up to him and before I knew it I was a ghostly form passing through him shredding him from the inside out. I was in his body one moment, and the next I was pulling the remaining intestines off of me that hadn’t come off when he literally split down the middle and I stepped out of him. The rest of the hoard of demons were so scared they took off like lightening. I smiled a big smile as I stared up at the full moon on that dark night. Again, I thought of what the villagers had thought of on the night of my birth. “Ah! The witching hour.”
For the next few years my mother the one person that never abandoned me, the one person that loved me unconditionally, the one person that sacrificed her entire world for me helped train me to control the power now coursing through my veins. She never treated me as any different, a freak, or strange. Even though at this point we both knew I was so, not normal. She was my heart, my soul, my everything. Her heart gave out when I was twenty-five and no amount of power I had would bring her back. Believe me, I tried. Upon her deathbed, she revealed that she and I were not of this world. This world of humans, and that my father was not killed in a combat for land, he had been killed trying to protect me and my mother from her kind. The kind that killed without remorse, they rape without conscious, they cut you just to watch you bleed out on the ground like a dog. I come from a world, where there is no compassion only wars and hellish creatures. My mother, having been the product of said creatures stealing and raping a human, vowed she would never go back once she had escaped, met my father (the kindest human she had ever known) and found out she was having me.
She had somehow survived long enough to bring me into the world and raise me as a human. When I clearly wasn’t. I was angry with my mother at first at the betrayal I felt for waiting until she died to tell me. I became so angry I lashed out at the village that had made us leave so long ago, the disgraced duo. I terrorized them relentlessly. I seeped into their dreams at night and laughed a hair-raising laugh when they woke up screaming from the nightmare I had turned it into. I loved the fear, I craved it, I would breathe it in and roll around in it. Then, again, during the “witching hour” perched on the rooftop of a young girl pale and blonde, watching as the nightmare began to take hold of her. Savoring in the beads of sweat that popped up on her head and the sheets she began to twist and pull. My mother appeared to me, a ghost in the midst of my torture. She scolded me for treating the girl in such a way and the tone of her voice had me bowing my head in shame. I released the girl and scurried down the roof heading for the woods and my home. I leapt from rooftop to rooftop looking back terrified that my ghostly mother was still following me. The hollowness of her eyes and her long dark hair waving slightly in the breeze was enough to give me a heart attack.
She came to me and told me a war is coming. The gates from our world would be broken and there would actually be a hell on earth. These humans would need protecting and it was my job to do it. I grieve for her every day but after that night, the grief lessened and I began to prepare for the war that would end all worlds. The rest of my childish ways fell away as I fully embraced adulthood and found my purpose in this world.
Now, here I stand overlooking that very same village ten years later watching as the very same humans that banned me so long ago now seemed to be comforted by the fact that I stand on my hill and watch them. I stand there long after the sun has set and the lights come in each and every house. I can feel the full moon on my back, the stars gathered above my head, and I can even smell the ‘witching hour” is upon me.
I stand there with my raven hair cascading down in waves as the warm breeze tries to carry it off. My strips of black leather, that cover just enough, yet, not enough. My black spiked boots (they gotta be spiked, better to stab someone with) and my red ruby lips, waiting, watching. My alabaster skin begins to glow that familiar fairy blue along with my eyes that glow the very same color when I can feel someone from my world, close by. I look down into the valley as the clock tower begins to signal that it is indeed midnight. The flood of creatures only hell can imagine race across the valley like gravel toward the village. I unsheathe both machetes from my back and smile my evil grin. “Time to play!” I think to myself. As I realize everything good that happens, happens at the “WITCHING HOUR”.
Sacrificial Chain Breaker 