Hell Hath No Fury - Book One

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To say Ava got a few minutes of sleep would be an overstatement. She spent her night in a cloudy haze, a peculiar mix of awake but asleep. In her foggy state, her dreams and her thoughts ran rampant all night. Earlier she had felt that she had no time or space to be able to take a breath and think through everything. She had been wishing for that feeling all night, begging to have anything but time and space to think about all of her dilemmas.

There was the issue of becoming a pirate. There was the issue of her father. There was the issue of killing a man that she hadn't fully dealt with. Oh, and lest she forget, her sister and Cooker were an item when she was younger which she would have never seen coming in a million lengths. All of the thoughts bounced around her head in a loop. Fear building up in her chest for every minute she spent tossing and turning. She could end up failing the test to become a pirate and be back at square one. If she did make it, there was only a matter of time before she was discovered and when that happened Ava wasn't sure she wouldn't be skinned alive.

She dreamt of her chambermaid pushing her off a cliff, the cliff more specifically. It was a dream she had been having the whole journey down Elox. It was one she knew well, the begging and the screaming not to be pushed off. A new nightmare arose that night though, it was of her father standing alone in a pitch-black room. She began to walk towards him but all around him, flames began to rise. Ava looked down at the flames to see faces and hands within it, reaching out and yelling at her father. Some of the faces were ones she recognized, townspeople from her home in Aubermasse, travelers she had encountered throughout her journeys, and some of the women aboard the ship. She couldn't make out what they were yelling at him, the only thing clear from their voices was the agony carried with each unintelligible word. Her father showed no signs of a reaction, staring off into the distance. Cold and calculated, like she remembered him. A rage began to fill up inside her, she began yelling at him as well. Ava ran towards him, pulling out her blade and ready to attack but the flames burned her when she tried to get through.

She had awoken from the nightmare with a start, heart racing and eyes darting around the room. It was still taking her time to adjust to being on the lower deck, no light at night to help her see. Her heart began to calm down but her thoughts hadn't. Why was that her dream? Why was she trying to kill her father? The rage she felt inside her though was familiar, it was what she had felt for sixteen years. Her father and her mother would often cast her aside, ignored her opinions or thoughts, and constantly chastised and punished her. It was part of the reason it was so easy to run away, she never belonged at home.

To everyone Umbar Vaith interacted with, he was the pinnacle of charisma and power but to his family, he was not the warm man everyone thought he was. Ava had gotten the shit end of the stick for sure but he wasn't much better off than any of his children or his wife. He was impatient, often yelling or ridiculing someone when something was done incorrectly. He was rude, not worried about crushing someone's feelings, disguising it as the truth. And lastly, he was scary. When Ava was nine, she had brought back a few friends she had made in the city, all four had no last names. They played in the garden for hours until it was supper time and they had to go home. Ava was brought to her father's chambers and admonished for doing such a brash thing as bringing peasants to the Aubermasse Estate. She was confined to her room for four cycles, just long enough to miss the celebration of her 10th commencement anniversary. A party was thrown in her honor, in the garden right below her window but she wasn't allowed to attend. She spent the sun watching her family and the great houses from all-around Elox play and feast together. When her punishment was over he brought her back to his chambers and explained if Ava were to ever make the same mistake that Lord Vaith would have no choice but to arrest both the children and the parents for violating the law and trespassing onto a noble estate.