The Unchaste

Chasing Foxes.

The harsh, northern winds had a damaging tendency as they charged the York moors at this time of the year, October, when the sky was huddled with dark clouds almost every day and without leisure, every night.

The meadows, by then, were also ready to propose a cold duel with the nature, growing a bit brown, a bit beige with a certain gloom in it, of a warrior on a battle ground, its harshness and strength bared to the world like a coarse artwork, hard rocks protruded out as the stubborn weeds that had been engulfing them withered and died out in the glacial weather.

The earth, as far as eyes could navigate, in its terrain was solid dark and barrenly wild. Grey-green.

It was immediately incidental that this was where Delilah had lived all her childhood. And equally co-incidental, that it was the duke of Yorkshire only who had gotten her dark attention this time.

She stood atop the hill in the defiant wind, that evening of her arrival in York, grown numb out of nostalgia; as she eyed her childhood earth with sedate fawn eyes.

There were mist rolling along the marshes.

And memories from the time of yore. 

The echoes. The shadows. The whistles on the wind.

All preserved in the ambiance of grey blue sky.

The tiny aquamarine pendant sat delicately on her soft palm, the petite, see-through, blue stone not bigger than her fingertip, inculcated on a small gold circular band, glistening as she teased it now and then.

She watched far off end of her vision, a faint, grey silhouette of the grandest mansion of Yorkshire winking from amidst the several hills, the haze and the evening coldth.

Stormcastle.

That was it.

That was where she was to find him.

His grace, Richard Winter_ Duke of York.

The man who was, apparently, purchasing bodies of young girls to do_ what?  Feed his sexist necrophiliac lust?
To do what? To sabotage their organs in barter of corpse market? What indeed? What else would a man wish to do with corpses?

They didn’t leave those girls unexploited in their living; they couldn’t leave her at rest in their death too? Didn’t their cold and grey, poverty marked bodies deserve the corporeal honor that all mortals deserve in their death?

Delilah was ashamed that she couldn’t save them in their lifetime. She would at least give them that in their death; the solace of a grave.

But first, Delilah needed to make sure that her accusations made on the man were adequate and true. There was no point acting rushed.

She had well plotted her way to his throat.

She had well plotted it all indeed.

***

When her Step mother placed the glass of milk with honey beside that plate of oatcakes infront of her,  Delilah felt like she was once again the same eight years old little girl, chastised and forced on the dining table after chasing the foxes too far in the marshes.

She remembered how unmanageable, how wild she had been back then.

She stared limply at the plate in front of her and then, up at the face of this old, hard woman infront, her step mother, who watched her back expectantly, waiting for her to eat.

A reluctant pout pulled across her lips.

“Still the same, I see.” The older woman huffed coldly. “Twitching in your chair at the sight of honeyed milk.”