Ethereal Catastrophe | Tom Riddle

chapter ten

The pyretic flames of tears beat onto Asteria's skin, dissolving the minerals of impurities that the cleaning spell missed.

She scoured herself with her pumice stone until her golden skin blushed with an ebony cloud of ominous affliction.

Her skin burned into an agonizing inferno of macabre, but the itch to scrub as much deleterious ailment from the pores ignited brighter.

To clean his words, his touch, his face away from her body. To think herself so dimwitted and weak to accept an offer from him.

What was she thinking?

What had just happened?

For once Asteria was lost for words. To the forest, to him, to agree to something so deplorable. So unlike her. So permanent.

He had sunk his fangs into her and infused her anatomy with his malicious venom. Like a snake, he had coiled his words into ropes and tied her into an unbreakable vow of pernicious spite.

This is why Father resents your existence.

So, so weak.

Her skin broke up into onyx pinpricks as the stone bed deeper into her skin, scrubbing harder and harder and harder. The pain turning into a release.

The lavender steam rushing into her nose as she took short breaths, soothing her throat from all the acid that built it throughout the night.

She looked to her feet to see inky blood splotches diffuse within the water. She took her toe and drew a rune of healing onto the shower floor with the fallen blood. As she did so, her arms and legs started to feel like they were being draped in velvet and fluttered like the wings of a butterfly.

Her mind still whirled like leaves in a strong autumn wind as she stepped out of the shower.

It had been five-o-clock in the morning when she came back into her dormitory and the first thing she did was go for a shower and analyse everything that had happened that night. She felt like she had been locked into a dungeon. Her free will taken from her with a few venomous promises of nefarious intent.

She wanted to have trust in the universe and her intuition told her to but something in the way he... Asteria didn't even know. His aura was the blackest she had ever seen, like a night with no stars. The way he spoke, the way he moved, the way he acted; it was all...deathly.

She wrapped her towel around her and walked back into her dorm to find Li and Tia already up and getting ready.

"Could you have taken longer in the shower?" Li moaned as she shoved past Asteria into the bathroom.

"I wasn't in that long?" Asteria questioned them and herself with a furrowed brow. She hadn't been in that long. Had she? She couldn't remember. Asteria always remembers. She's always ahead of time. Always one step ahead of everyone and everything.

"You were in there for three and a half hours," Li exclaimed dramatically, mumbling through the foamy toothpaste oozing onto her chin.

"Asteria, are you okay? You know you can talk to us. I won't judge anything you say," Tia said softly as if she was speaking to a lost child. Asteria liked Tia. She was kind, but she was kind to too many people. People who wouldn't hesitate in killing her just because of who her parents were. Asteria saw in her mind that when a pureblood approached her she would get jittery, but she could mask that with a delicate smile that made flowers blossom into a bouquet of benevolence.

She could tell that she really cared. When was the last time someone truly cared? Asteria thought. Yes, there was Abraxas that cared for the most thoughtless things Asteria would do, but would he do that if he wasn't under Asteria's charms? Perhaps her aunt, although she couldn't see her mind, her actions were pure and loving. Her mother?