Oath of Steel

20 |Crimson Remembrances|

The first time she'd snapped a neck without using her hands happened after the passage of her seventh birthday, at the time she still was under the vigilant gaze of the lawyer of the Crown, Lord Brek Haywire himself.

He'd never liked her, and the feeling had always been mutual. She had no idea why Lord Regulus had assigned her to learn under his wing. Him, out of all the rest of the Apostles close to the Crown, the man who never in his life had hid his blunt hatred towards her.

Pharah still hadn't settled into her life, nothing more than a variant, the daughter of the woman who under the request of Lord Regulus had taken her in. She'd raised her into a living weapon, but there was something that the noblest woman of the empire didn't know on her account.

It happened after angering the former Apostle IV, who in reply to her accusations of him deceiving the common crowd had decided to lock her up into one of the many cells under the Imperial Citadel for a fortnight or so.

Dull food was considered luxurious, clean water a privilege reserved for few, and the light of the day a mirage lost in an oasis of desolation.

For ten days she sat back against the wall inside that tiny dark decadent cell. The faint light of the torches positioned on both sides of the door becoming an anchor to the last sliver of sanity still burning in her heart.

Things changed when she was paired up with a cellmate, a man who; lost in a delirium induced by alcohol, had stoned to death three young lives, staining the streets of District Street a crimson red.

Death was the only sentence the judge offered to him.

But that sentence hadn't been enough to break his spirit, the dark fire burning his heart flared out when he met his cellmate. He started asking questions on how she'd gotten there, on what she'd done to receive such conviction.

Rosalynde spared him no words as her eyes kept on staring at the fight torches burning in the dark.

The man however didn't give up asking as Rosalynde had thought, and by the third day - or night he decided to try a different tactic to make her talk to him.

He went for her meal, a meal made up of stale bread and what looked like sewer water mixed with crumbs of dirt, avidly stealing it from her weak grip before throwing it on the ground.

She didn't see her food falling, the only sound being the crash of the wooden plate hitting the iron bars, wasting it all. He laughed with vicious delight at the choking sound that escaped from her chest each time he did it.

He starved her from that day, some days eating her daily meal, while the rest of the time mercilessly throwing it away as she cried out in confusion.

As the guards did nothing, hunger kept growing day by day, while her strength slowly started withering away.

A rose with thorns slowly dying was the only thing her mind could focalize on, her hands leaves which with every passing day lost the viridian color of life, her body a marron dying stem ready to be crushed under a foot.

But nevertheless, she kept her gaze locked on the blazing torches flames, her light blue eyes shying away from the darkness slowly creeping inside.

She dreaded to reach that light at the end of the underprison, to feel the warmth of the burning torches under the palm of her hand.

The shackles to her feet were removed the next week, when two guards forcefully dragged her out of the cell.

What they didn't expect was to discover the corpse of the condemned to death lying against the wall Eye sockets empty while blood was seen pooling inside his ears, the blood still sliding down his face alerting them that it hadn't been long since someone had killed him.