Chapter (The Loss of Humanity)
While the mountain's other occupants struggled against their own greater meaning of destiny, Megan struggled simply to see the sun rise. The sky had just begun to turn a deep shade of blue when she broke the tree line. Looking worn and haggard she stepped out from the forest and onto the gravely stone of the lower slopes.
She had cuts and scrapes all along the length of both exposed arms, and she was covered from head to toe in the dark soil of the forest floor. She had caught and torn her shirt across the middle, revealing her tight, fit belly, and leaving a long pink scratch across her waistline.
Under different circumstances she may have thought the look was cute; in that moment however, and for the first time in recent memory, her looks were not among the thoughts racing about her panicked mind. Instinct had taken over, the will to survive trumping even her most ingrained habits.
After what seemed like hours she slowed to a halt, letting her boots drag to a stop in the loosely arranged stones beneath them. She interlaced her fingers and crowned both hands atop her head. Megan was exhausted.
The moment she stopped she felt the sudden heavy wave of fatigue set into her limbs, making them feel as though they'd been replaced with led copies of themselves. Panting she struggled to regain her breath. Her knees were wobbly, her hands were shaky and she had dark circles beneath both eyes. But she was alive, and the same could not be said about those she'd begun the night alongside.
For the first time she spared herself a look back across her shoulders. The forest closed like a veil behind her, a partition between herself and the horrors the night had offered. Tense, she waited for the tell-tale rustle in the leaves that would come before the hunter. There was only silence.
Megan felt her heart skip a beat when the cry of a distant bird sounded off in depths of the forest. She had made it. She was safe, at least for the time being. Her shoulders fell as they shed the burden of her tension. She rested, allowing herself the privilege of a few deep controlled breaths.
Her stamina would recover quickly and she allowed herself a moment to sit, letting her head roll lazily down to her chest. Looking down at her exposed stomach she again started to cry. No longer out of fear or pain, but from sudden grave realization.
Looking around at her surroundings, she found herself questioning all the things she had given up to get here. Her arms flopped to the ground like those of a child in the throes of a tantrum, and when her eyes returned to her stomach she let the tears come freely.
At home, when she was still just a girl, before she was Cain's Rose, she had had a tattoo. A tiny pair of entwined roses on the inside of her left hip. She had gotten it while in Miami on spring break with her girlfriends, but it was gone now.
Inking it on was a decision she may have regretted as she aged, but as a vampire it was no longer her decision to make. Her body had rejected the ink when it changed, ridding her skin of any scars and other imperfections. Cain had stripped her of her identity, of her humanity.
Now the void on her hip stood out only as one more reminder that this, the wastes of Tartarus,was her reality now. That she wasn’t going to wake up and be okay, warm at home, with no greater worry than an unfinished term paper.
The very meaning of the word home had been redefined the night Cain found her in that warehouse. She was one of the accursed now, a joiner, and a vampire. Forever young, forever beautiful, and forever alone.
Initially she had enjoyed being Lucian’s plaything. When Cain had first brought her to the palace she'd been showered in luxuries and given over to a man who had fit her 'type' to a tee. He was exceptionally handsome, with dark hair and piercing eyes, strong, and powerful. But he was also cruel, sadistic, and often terrifying. And she just didn’t want to play pretend anymore.
She was scared, alone, and above all else she was changing. Hers was an innocent soul that had only begun to twist into something she wasn’t. They had taken her body and begun to steal her mind as well. And the realization terrified her.
She had barely noticed it at first, but the primal nature of that night's fear returned her own thoughts to her head. The time she had spent in the lands of the shadow had begun to change her. She had begun to think in terms that were not her own.
The convictions and ideals of others had begun to horde the synapses of her mind, filling her thoughts with hate and violence. Things she had never been accustom to before arriving there. In her fear and distress, she cried.
The tears came softly at first, but continued to grow as night passed further into day. She did her best to stifle the sobs but more than once she was on the verge of breaking down completely. By herself but not alone, Megan wept.
