Dark Queen: The Cybelline Prophecies

Chapter 62

The hazy smell of cigarettes would always take her back to the waking nightmare that was her childhood. Perhaps it couldn't even been called a childhood, after the hell she had been forced to live. In one night, her parents had died, and then shortly her grandmother had disappeared and all of the sudden, she had no one. She forced herself to forget them after her first few months in the Grounds.

Social services never showed up. Instead two people introduced themselves to her as the Caretakers. They told her that since she had no one, they would take care of her and the rest of children like her. In effect, she had been sold to the government, and trained to be a child soldier. But they never found anyone else like her, she was the best that the Grounds had ever produced. 

Produced was the best word, for they were products. Cleansed of their humanity, they were treated as playthings until they were ready to kill for the glory of their country. Cybelline still remembered the "games" that the Caretakers played when they were bored. If the children hadn't completed their mission of the day to the whim of the Caretaker, they would hold their victim down and burn cigarette into their skin. The smell of flesh burning mixed with the acrid smoke wasn't something one could forget. The pitted scars weren't easy to ignore either.

Only she knew how broken she had been. Her physical scars had been left in that old, cruel world. But her invisible ones had followed.

She would never forget the eyes of the children that died, eyes that held anguish, helplessness, and pain. There were heartless assassins who killed for the joy of killing, those who killed for money... and then there was Cybelline, who killed because she had been taught nothing else. But she remembered those children.

And in this new world, when she saw the pixies who looked like small children, she was suddenly back in hell, where she watched little children ran screaming in terror, their training forgotten as a pack of hyenas chased after them. Above it all, the Caretakers laughed and shot the stragglers in the legs to make it more fun. 

When the General who had first started the program came to visit, his eyes would glitter whenever he saw her. One day she would close those eyes forever, but not before she had known what hatred tasted like. Those sick, depraved people who had used her and all the children to do their bidding would all die by her hand. She stood coolly as they begged for mercy, screamed in vengeance and cursed her name. She killed them all slowly and viciously, she made them suffer until death was a welcomed release. 

When she grew older, she toppled the government who had created the program and dropped its leaders into a pit of vipers in the jungle. They took weeks to die of poison, starvation, and terror. 

Those screams affirmed to her that she was monster that monsters feared.

Eventually, she would forever close that chapter on her life, mentally stitch together the gaping wound on her mind and force herself to become the deadliest assassin in the game of spies.

Back in the present, she stood quietly in the midst of chaos, a eye-catching figure in midst of the thudding of horses, the flying arrows, and the air full of the scream of innocents. No one could ignore her. No one dared.She stared at the screaming crowd coldly, her eyes seemed to reach into the depths of their souls and freeze them to the very core. These eyes held the imprint of death, promising that everything that touched her would be destroyed utterly and instantly. These were the eyes of vengeance, it promised to rip them apart, limb by limb. 

These were not her captors, she told herself. She force herself to leave the nightmare in her mind and come back to reality.

But she commanded their attention, their obedience, their all.