Freeing Lilia

The Right to Choose.

Unedited.

Chapter 12: The Right to Choose

Angry tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I slammed the door shut behind me. I kept seeing Luca's face flashing in my mind's eye, desolate and hurt.  Grief and guilt thundered in the space between my ribs, bitterness chasing up my throat as I sat on the edge of the bed.

His face was my face. The same expression I saw reflected back for years when he was off enjoying his life. I never hated him for following his dreams – never. I was betrayed because once he got out, he never thought about his twin sister who had less opportunities to escape that manor that didn't involve marriage or death.

Then I thought of the one Luca never knew of. The tiny child born to that witch and the man I once considered my father. He had given me all his love, all his gummy smiles and clutched to me so tight with tiny, soft fists that I had felt some semblance of light in that house.

Tears continued  to stream down the swell of my cheeks. I didn't bother to brush them away as my hands hung limply on my lap and my shoulders bowed with the weight of my life's greatest failures.  His name had been Aland, a boy born with a shock of blond hair and eyes wide and trusting. She had ignored him once she fulfilled her duty of expelling him from her body but I had been in love with him the moment he had been handed to me, swaddled in cloth.

The nursemaid had fed him, but I did everything else. I changed him, cleaned him and read him stories even when he was too young to understand. I told him of the lives of the heroines in the stories I read, about, of the adventures I had gotten up to when I was a young girl and I had Luca to protect me.  He was my half-brother, but I cared for him like he was my own child.

A sob rasped in my throat and I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes as grief sunk dark claws into my mind. I didn't have Seren to turn to, where she would bring me high into the skies to distract me. I didn't have my brothers to pick a fight with;  we always knew that fights started un-necessarily were ways of curbing inner pain.

This time I curled in, instead of exploding outwards into the wild where the fresh air would cleanse my mind and remind me that Aland's death and my disfigurement was never my fault. I knew that deep down, but the human mind was a fragile thing and I could never shake the knowledge that had I done more for her, my half-brother would be alive.

Peeling off my clothes, and uncaring that my scars were on-show like a map of my past mistakes, I curled up under the covers in my undergarments. The bed had already become cold in my absence and my legs rose to tuck close to me.

There was only silence as I dozed off, and the weight of Seren and my brothers' absences was heavy in the room and in my dreams.

∦

Crystalline light glittered along the river, the grass damp with the last fall of rain. Her heavy head pressed into the grass, ruffling it as she heaved a great sigh.

The men in the camp cast her a glance.

A worried dragon was a very dangerous one.

One long glorious wing was stretched out stiffly, the membrane exposed in a way that Seren hated. The great dragon felt exposed on the ground, her wing pinned down as Beryl examined it in his usual way; slow and careful so he would miss nothing. The Sage prowled the great length of her wing as-well, sharp eyes scanning the injury.

"It won't be for much longer, Seren." Solemn eyes turned her way as the Sage decided to address her. A fine, aristocrat's hand skimmed along her shoulder in comfort. Seren and Lilia were always amazed at the way Sage moved. He was a man born with a fluidity to his body, a grace in every single movement that very few people ever attained.