Trigger warning: gruesome/scary stuff :>

╒══════════════════╕
Adela Palace, Nasavte
Year 32 of the Diewelan Era
╘══════════════════╛

Blood stained the royal carpet in slow drips, the only sound in the shocked stillness of the throne room. After much too long with no movement, horror seeped into the quietude. The dripping ceased.

Andreya had shut her eyes, wincing from the deep slice in her cheek and cowering from the blade. When the guards released their grip, she crumpled to her knees.

"Witch!" the man who had cut her cried. "Who can heal their wounds in an instant? She is a sorceress!"

Andreya opened her eyes to the blood on the floor, registering the pain in her cheek now as only an ache, and the guards, having recovered from their stupor, wrenched her to her feet.

"Is this how you have retained youth?" the King growled, his face twisted in repulsion. The word monster was unsaid but undeniably present. "Take her to the dungeons. She is to be executed immediately for malicious witchcraft and an attempt on the crown."

"What?" Andreya found the will to struggle. "I mean you no harm, Majesty—"

"Take her away!" he bellowed, and she was yanked backward. "Ready the scaffold, restrain her magic!"

Then the majestic door closed and the prison door opened. Opulent high ceilings and gold trims to dank, slippery stone and half-lit prison bars. They strapped Andreya to the wall by her wrists and her ankles and left her there with nothing but her numbed limbs and a creeping air of prison fever. She spent what could have been hours or entire days staring at a single illegible carving on the floor from a previous prisoner.

Then the door opened once again and she was taken from the wall, called horrible names she didn't remember and marched through the prison to the place of her execution.

Andreya did not know what she was living for, but she did not want to die. She thought it as she stared at what should have been a scaffold and was instead a guillotine—at the blade, cleaned and glistening in contrast to the wine-stained sky of dawn, at the basket at its foot, at the bloodthirsty crowd gathered at the call of retribution. At the King, observing in disdain from his balcony.

The mighty clock tower rang seven mighty notes and the guards nudged her toward the wooden steps.

The strongest memory Andreya would have was of the smell of the guillotine, of iron and death and human excrement, the products of prisoners mad with fear in the final moment before death. She noticed the crusting of blood on the wood where even soap and scrubbing would not reach, crevices stained black and the basket hardly cleaned at all. Andreya pushed back against the arms forcing her forward, digging her feet and stumbling with no other choice up the three steps onto the raised platform on which she was to die.

Her struggle grew stronger when they buckled her knees beneath her and the executioner took his place, when they thrust her head in the slot so her throat hurt and closed her escape off with the loud scrape of a latch.

Andreya was granted no movement but to stare down in growing horror at the empty basket as they announced her crimes to the crowd. It came to her suddenly that they were cheering.

They were cheering.

They were cheering.

When the announcer finished, Andreya writhed uselessly in her restraints. Her breaths quickened, her pulse thrummed against the wood encircling her neck. She could see nothing but the basket. Nothing but the blood they couldn't clean, soon to be mingled with her own, her life not snuffed out but violently chopped with a giant, metallic thud.

"Stop!" she screamed.

Then the blade slammed the bottom with a ringing thwack and Andreya Marivatan was dead.

──── ❉ ❉ ❉ ────

Andreya saw nothing. She felt nothing. She was nothing, for all she could tell. Blackness all around, but it wasn't black. The absence of light, but not the presence of dark.

"You're back."

Andreya recognized the inhuman voice and its indescribable wrongness at once. "Death."

Not a second after she spoke, its form appeared, invisible but for a warp in the nothingness, a twist of existence in the place where nothing existed. Seeing it, Andreya couldn't deny she'd been here before. She'd been killed—murdered in the night, soundlessly, before the rest of her family had met the same fate. The memory had vanished for years—eighteen years.

And now she was back here. Dead. Where remained only long lost memories and Death itself.

"I was executed," she said. "Decapitated. I can't return from the dead this time."

"You are not dead," it replied. "Go back whence you came, spirit. Haunt the afterlife no longer."

It was being incredibly unfair—just like last time, if she remembered correctly. "How? I can't regenerate limbs."

"If I do not know you, you cannot die." It made it sound so simple. "Go back."

"How?"

"I do not know you."

"Why not?"

"I do not know you."

"I'm Andreya Marivatan, and I'm dead!" She expected her shout to echo, but the nothingness absorbed the sound completely. "Let me die."

"I do not know you. You are not dead."

Andreya shot up suddenly as if from a bad dream, gasping and shaking. It was dark—actual dark—and cold as a cellar. She moved her arms and rolled her ankles. Through the shadows, she began to make out her legs and the table she sat on.

She was alive.

Her hands flew to her neck, felt along her collarbone, her face, running one futile finger through her knotted hair. Not so much as a scar.

Around her, the frigid cellar gained detail—her table was but one in a line spanning the entire room, all decorated with bloodstained blankets under which she was sure were bodies. The acrid stench confirmed it. A mortuary.

She would have gagged if she had thought it worthwhile. Instead, Andreya swung her trembling legs over the side of the table and landed on the icy stone with painfully bare feet. She padded across the room, wrapping her thin, bloodied sheet around her shoulders as she did.

She was a living corpse. A thing of nightmares. Where in the world had this curse come from? She took the stairs two at a time and stopped at its end, pressing her ear to the door to listen before twisting the knob and bursting out into an unfamiliar prison hallway. She decided on left down the hall and kicked into a run. All the while her thoughts continued to haunt her. She had been killed with the rest of her family and come back all those years ago? And forgotten it? They were correct in calling her a witch from every unbroken bone in her body to her impossibly scarless face. Not to mention her entire head had reattached itself.

She skidded to a stop at an intersection in the hallway and paused in the suffocating silence. Her heart had the audacity to thrum, her lungs the nerve to burn, even twice after death. She had risen from the dead. She had healed her wounds and replenished her blood.

Inhuman. Wicked. Detestable.

She gazed down at her youthful hands and young muscles and hated all of it.

Andreya sprinted through the labyrinthine prison halls and skidded around the slick stone corners. It was a huge prison—suited perfectly for a king as despicable as the one who had condemned her—but Andreya knew if she continued long enough through the maze, she would find a way out, and it was a wonder she didn't get caught before she did. With prisoners as sickly as these, Andreya should not have been surprised the halls were unguarded.

When she finally found a door she didn't hesitate. Through it, open air hit her like a panacea, but she didn't stop for a moment. She darted through the empty, expansive fields in the shadow of the palace and crept around the loosely-guarded outer wall that kept the tyrant's property until she found a split stone. She tore the two pieces off and dug the rocky soil beneath, fingers bleeding and mind racing, until she could shimmy through with only several tears in the shoulders and knees of her dress.

The field continued on the other side, and she didn't dare look back to see if she'd been spotted even as her eyes watered and her feet stung, her chest ached, her bloodied blanket billowed at her back.

The day had dipped into late afternoon by the time she collapsed somewhere in a forest beyond the palace, gasping and broken. Of course, the only brokenness she was allowed to have now was not of her body. Her brokenness now could be nothing but shattered hopes, confusion, self-loathing. She curled her fingers into the dirt and cursed herself.

Andreya Marivatan was dead, and in her place was something even worse off. A something that lay in the forest and cried to the trees in a desperate and miserable hope that they might know how to cure her incurable state.

And the trees did not respond.

──── xxx ────

Heya, Homo sapiens! What's your biggest thought so far? Any suggestions or curiosities? I read through this chapter like four times before posting it and I'm still not completely happy with the flow of the second half, so if you have any pointers, I'd love opinions from fresh eyes!

Don't forget to vote if you enjoyed and check out more of what the ONC community has to offer! Later, lovelies!  ☆〜（ゝ。∂）