Seven Deadly Sons

Prologue

Lucretia and Harcourt Moore had died and died again so many times, that living became a novelty. There was never a body to be diagnosed in autopsy, no disease to be found or pallor of skin to be assessed.

They were simply here, then they were not.

This had in fact happened so many times, that they had begun to realise they were falling through the tapestry of their universe, close to reaching a parallel but - at the last moment - being found, for some impertinent reason, unworthy of entry. Then, like clockwork, the besotted pair would find themselves again in their South-West London manor and proceed to celebrate in a ludicrous fashion.

Then, a miracle. Lucretia was pregnant. They had been trying for the whole year they had been married, but nothing had come of it and led to both the nobles drowning their upset in alcohol — while they watched their peers have joyous pregnancy after pregnancy.

But, briefly — wait...

Could the baby withstand their uncontrollable journeys?

Though Lady Lucretia was desperate to ask her husband of this dire question, he had become occupied with something of far greater importance. Not an heir, but the ability to completely separate and isolate each atom of his body at will. Though, they did not know the process with this much technicality at the time. All he knew was that something incredible was happening, and he could taste immortalisation on his tongue.

At once, there, then the next — a shadow.

More than a shadow, or a wraith from the Lord's Bible of which he had obsessively researched at the beginning of this saga, which coincidentally began to occur only when the couple were together. Lord Harcourt could become the depth behind the shadow, the energy of which black holes spun and sucked life away from all else. He was that which could devour at a speed light nor sound could escape, and with this, the force which previously denied entry was overwhelmed. In his presence, it was fearful.

"My dear, shall we? Once more before both become three?" Harcourt implored his beloved, "Only for a spell, I swear it. Imagine the world we could discover."

Lucretia, basking in his sudden painful beauty - come about by his new travels — was incapable of denying him.

"Yes." Her smile shone with a worldliness too brought on by their deaths and rebirths, "take me somewhere indulgent then."

Do not be mistaken, the Lady was no fool, born from a beggar and a disgraced spinster, she was both street-wise and can be said of having Royalist acumen. Though this was a decision made before consulting either worldly abilities, for when his fingers whispered against the hair follicles within her nails, her soul screamed.

As they touched skin, devastation thrashed through her so unforgivingly she could not move.

When they gripped, gentle as mothers caressing newborn infants, bones ached with sudden age no twenty-year-old should comprehend. From her canines to the stapes within both ears and across cartilage, curling at kneecaps and spreading beyond.

And when they tugged, Lucretia was so severed in thousands that, she would later recount, she truly believed she could actually hear the destinies of those nearby — her midwife, chef and even the growing foetus within her. Their child would not know love without devastation.

With horror, her lover realised with quick efficiency — learned from surgeon apprenticeships — something was indeed wrong. The veins within her doe-scared eyes were as violet as her iris, as if they were bleeding. Her skin, may the Trinity help them, was white. So white in places that translucency was a better description, the bones in her fingers grotesquely visible, the blood within gone.

One moment, the couple were there. Shocked, gaunt faces panting at one another. Then, they were not.

It is of this exact moment that the household quietly gossip over.

Witches? Cursed? But months later they were forgotten, when again the couple reappeared as they usually would have. Clockwork. Now though, they were two and a child — of what must then have been in at least year three — which was settled upon her mothers hip.

The house-staff arranged for the death certificates forged to again be burned, in their places a birth, alongside the new alterations of the family portrait above the hearth.

Lady Lucretia and the child's skin were adjusted to it's now permanent white, which no amount of sun could bronze, and the Lady's violet eyes and black hair were replaced with black and white, respectively. As if colour itself had been drawn out. The lower two-thirds of her now envied hair were in fact translucent, and grew so thickly the strands appeared luminescent, reflecting the light of the sun in a prism of colour not dissimilar to that of an oil slick.

The staff whispered rumours that the child was not theirs, that devastated from a miscarriage they kidnapped another. This was because of the peculiar quality the child seemed to have. Her personality could completely switch by the day, as if several girls lived inside her. The maids spoke of demon possession, they whispered to the kitchen about how the length of her hair could grow five inches overnight. The archery instructor would whisper back of how the child's skills fluctuated so prolifically day-by-day and the dress fitter they'd had to employ would discuss how quickly her tastes changed.

But the child — Melanie, for her hair of pitch — eventually grew to look exactly like her parents. The girls flickering personality ceased.

The whispers stopped soon after.

They all aged, Fathers hair soon matching Mothers for the white shade was now a trend, but after several years the Lord and Lady grew unsatisfied. They seemed to long to return to where they once were, wherever that may have been.

And they soon did.

A bleak day during Melanie's happiest of seasons, Midsummer, her parents died for a final time.

She, having just finished her first year — at nine years — of the Royal Finishing School for Young Ladies and having plenty of spare time, spent every day at the window, waiting for their prompt return to the family home.

The staff tried to explain her parents would return, they often went on their death jollies before her birth — but the untarnished young girl had never been told of their travels and deaths, thus struggled to believe.

Melanie grew colder and sadder as the weather turned, and though she tried to claim for her belongings no wills seemed to exist, so she inherited none. Both the staff and the electricity fled. Their beautiful manor fell into terrible disrepair, overrun with vermin which Melanie now loved dearly. The extent of which that when the Sheriff came to claim the land for the county, he did not recognise the forgotten heiress and the old swine actually had the nerve to evict her. From her own birthright.

Her home.

I suppose it can safely be said, summer's thereafter were no longer Melanie's favourite season.