✓ | 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐂, Stefan and Damon

Prologue

Broken.

Abomination.

Freak of nature.

Witch.

I had been called so many things in my lifetime that I wasn't ready to admit that the words they call me still hurts, still leaves a mark on my heart after all of these years.

In those years that I spent semi-human I could at least say that I had myself together. I knew what would happen if I crossed my family, my village, my people.

Should I even call them my people? The people who threw me on my ass and called me such horrid things. For years they treated me like I was less than dirt. To them, I was a mistake, a punishment to my family for something that they must have done before I was born. A curse from the gods perhaps.

Mikael hunted me like the rest of my siblings, but I was never in his favor in the first place. Esther at least didn't truly want me dead like the rest of my lot, I don't kill unless I am attacked. She was an awful mother and a terrible person, but at least she didn't hit me the way Mikael did. It was too often that he would draw blood on the third or fourth hit of his beating. Oftentimes he would choose to not waste his strength and just drag one of his knives across my skin.

Whether it was a blessing or a curse that I never died of an infection remains a mystery.

The beatings that I got were nowhere near Niklaus, but for a young girl like me they could have been worse just because I had always been so frail, so weak, just getting enough food to keep my body from shutting down. My ribs were on showcase all the time, even through my dresses. Those ragged dresses that Esther would make for me out of pity, often just fixing parts of Rebekah's old clothes.

From the time I first siphoned I was cast out. I ate outside. I wasn't allowed inside the house anymore unless I was going to sleep. I didn't know what was so wrong with me, what I had done in order to warrant such treatment from the people I loved. It almost broke me. At 6 years old I had become nothing when I had been Mikael's favorite child beforehand. I was his love and his light until the darkness that roamed beneath my skin shone through. Now, I was just another monster.

To him, I had been broken by what lurked in my young mind.

After we had become Vampires, Nik finally took it upon himself to take care of me. Always and Forever was promised to me first. I coined the damn phrase. I didn't know at the time that Always and Forever would be such a task, such an unreasonable curse. What could you expect out of a girl who was forever 16.

Forever 16 was what I will always be, even as the years turned into centuries and as the centuries turned to a millenia. A never ending teenage whirlpool of emotions that had been heightened with Vampirism.

To this day I cannot understand why Nik didn't try and help me before, why he did not find kinship in a sister that had been beaten to near death in the middle of the night just as he. We shared our longing for revenge even in our youth.

I wanted her to suffer, my mother. She was the woman who told the village about my affliction for siphoning. If she had been quiet about the whole thing, had kept it from my father like she kept Nik's Werewolf nature a secret I could have lived a normal life. Nik, Elijah, Rebekah, Kol, Finn, and I could have just been the usual Viking era family.

Nik always had been Esther's favorite. I didn't hold it against him, it wasn't his fault that he was born, it just hurt to know that she would keep his secret but not mine. She would allow Nik to have a relationship with his other siblings but she took that chance away from me when I was only 6 years of age.

He would be hated by Mikael, he would always be hated by Mikael, as would I. We were the abominations of his perfect little family. We were just that, abominations.

But unlike Nik, who became the abomination after he killed someone, I was always the abomination.

To be a witch was not something seen as awful in the slightest in my family, as Esther, Finn, and Kol all practiced magic themselves. When I was very young Kol would often show me what he could do with magic. He had always been the fun brother, even in our youth.

Finn and Kol often would play with me the most. Finn was the one who would go on and on about different fun facts that he had learned. If we had books back then he would have wanted to be a scholar. To Finn, learning was the only thing that was worthy of his love.

When I was young, Finn would often tell me his troubles. I would give my honest opinion to him, sometimes making him laugh or even cry. He even told me about how much the death of Freya, our eldest sister who died of the plague, hurt him. Finn would often say how he saw me in her and that he couldn't lose me like he lost her.

In the end, he would lose me, but not like he lost her.

Although most people thought witches to be freaks of nature, I found them interesting. Finding out that I was a freak of nature was not a problem to me. I was not angry with what I was, just angry with how the people around me reacted to that knowledge. They saw me to be a bigger freak of nature than the rest of them.

To that, I felt sorry that they could not see just how kind I was once you got to know me. To them, I would always be the freak of nature.

While now I am able to see that Witches only do things for their own benefit, when I was young I must admit that I would worship the ones in the village. Magic was all that I wanted, all that I yearned for. It was what kept me going.

In a way, magic had its own way of finding me in the worst ways possible. Nevertheless, when we turned and I learned that I could channel magic from myself, I had Kol teach me magic for the first time.

Our relationship was able to grow based on the fact that while Kol had lost his magic, I had gained my own. Kol worked his magic through me, teaching me everything that I needed to know. Most of our work was purely for defensive spells, but some of the masterful spells that he would teach me, the ones that could inflict more damage than I could have ever thought possible, were the ones that I prided myself on knowing the most.

After all, I am the Original Heretic Witch.