A Court of Pain and Sorrow

Home

She didn't want to leave.

Not anymore.

She wished to stay in the already familiar walls of the Guild with the rude criminals who hated her.

And all because she was back in her mother's room, suffocating her with a pillow.

Because she was back with the doctors who tried to calm her down. With her sisters who felt sorry for her because of what she had witnessed.

Because she was back, right where she lost herself to anger for the first time.

Right where she took a step into the darkness. The first step into violence and blood.

'The first of many'. She realized, bitterly.

She couldn't take it back and she couldn't step back to the light.

And she shouldn't go back to her shack.

To a shack she had dared call her home.

A home full of people who mourned the woman she had murdered, all of them still thinking that the illness had taken her from them.

All of them not knowing they shared table, house and bed with her killer.

It wasn't the first time she did it. The hiding and lying.

At this point, she was good at it.

She sometimes even had trouble knowing where the truth ended and the lie started.

She had mastered it, the art of lying and pretending.
She controlled it so much she sometimes forgot vital things. Or at least, she pretended she had.

She pretended she hadn't killed her mother.

She pretended she hadn't been raped by three men in the woods.

She pretended she hadn't witnessed hoe Evelyn and Cameron were murdered by their families.

She pretended she didn't know.

It was what she did to survive, to live without going mad.

Here, she didn't need to pretend.
Here, she could scream the words that had haunted her dreams every night:

'I want them dead. All of them. I want those three men dead, I want Lord Byron, Lord Don and their whole families dead. I wanted my mother dead.'

She didn't have to kill them, right?

She just had to see their graves so she could spit on them for what they did to her.
For filling her with anger, with pain, with sorrow... With longing for revenge.

'I don't need to kill them. I don't have to kill anyone. I killed once, I can't do it again.'

She often thought about murder. About how horrible it felt.

About how easy it was.

She didn't want to feel it again, the power.
The power of having a human life in the palm of your hand, the power of deciding what you did with that life.

She didn't want to feel it again because she liked it.

She liked being in control for once, having someone at your mercy.

Everyone likes power, everyone wants to rule the world.
Not everyone is fit to do so, though.
Rhaella strongly believed she wasn't only fit to rule, she believed she was made to rule.

Unlike Nesta, she didn't remember the days of wealth, the days of fortune where they could shower in gold.
Unlike Nesta, she never got a taste of what living and not surviving felt like.
However, just like Nesta, Rhaella believed she had the right to live, that she deserved to be surrounded by wealth.