Vera tread the now-empty streets, wandering her way home. Her eyes cast downwards, she scanned every crack in the sidewalk, every stone, every veined leaf, everything. To the casual observer, her posture seemed thoughtful.
And it was.
Life weighed heavily on her thin shoulders, more so than any 15-year-old should ever have to bear. Her face, a mask beneath a mask, remained unmoved as her heart seemed to contract, squeeze, as faces flashed before her mind's eye.
Faces. Dead faces.
She had put them there.
She had killed them.
She had to live in the same city as those corpses, as well as the ones the dead left behind.
How often had a wail of putrid grief sliced through her eardrums as she ducked out of a house, leaving a widow in the window watching as she went? How many panicked spouses pleading, begging for her to take them instead?
And she couldn't even speak to them. Couldn't offer anything. No apologies, no consolation, not even a single word of remorse. Nothing.
How many time she has sat on the edge of a building and stared not out at the city, but straight down. How often she had considered just falling, and not getting up.
Giving up.
Quitting.
The idea flitted through her consciousness, constantly present. She knew that it would make nothing worse. Who would grieve, who would mourn? No one. Hell, it might even make this city a little better.
But she always caught herself. Never let go to that tiny, fragile string of life that she held, not completely. She often asked herself why. Why not let go? Why not end it all? Why not snip the string?
She knew the answer.
She was afraid.
Vera 'Regina' Mors, the deadliest and longest-serving of the Deathbringers, the girl who'd taken her first life at age eight, the girl who jumped off buildings for the hell of it, was afraid.
Afraid of the thing that she brought to people's lives, day after day after day.
Afraid of death.
Vera roamed, trying to decide yet again if it was worth continuing on, worth sleeping haunted by the faces of the dead, worth adding new faces to the list every single day.
A noise cut through her thoughts.
What was that?
It came again.
A voice.
Vera glanced up, at her home in the distance, then toward the voice, then back.
Then she turned away.
The voice pulsed through her mind becoming clearer and clearer with each step she took towards it.
A strong voice. A leader's voice.
A voice that maybe, just maybe, she could trust.
The first thing Vera saw as she rounded the corner was the crowd. A group of people were clustered around the entrance to an office building of sorts. Closer, and she could see that the vast majority of them were shabbily dressed, almost in rags.
She heard the voice through the crowd in snatches, snippets of speech.
"We've been beaten down, beaten up, and knocked down, but we get back up! We push on! We won't allow ourselves to be treated like this!"
The voice faded out as Vera moved closer, her concentration shifting to how she would get through the mob of people in constant flux. A second snatch wormed its way through her concentration
"We are here! Our lives matter!"
The crowd roared in reply, and Vera's eyes snapped wide, shaken to the core. These people could be killed at any time. Killed by people like her. They couldn't defend themselves. They were helpless.
But in a way, so was she. She was a prisoner in her own mind, not wanting to live but living all the same.
She turned her gaze to the front of the crowd, trying to get a look at the speaker. After several moments of trying to see between the heads of the people in front of her and cursing her shortness, a gap finally opened in front of her for a split second.
But in that fraction of a moment, she saw much. A flash of blonde hair and a surprisingly young face and shining eyes that met her own for the briefest time before the crowd shifted again.
Vera hmphed and pushed her way into the crowd, a few people pushing her back or shooting her dirty looks at first. They shied away as she turned towards them and glared at them, slicing into them with her razor-sharp eyes, the tiny wings on her mouth the only other light in the shadow of her hood.
At the bottom of the steps she stopped, eyeing the orator who seemingly hadn't noticed that she was there.
Now that she was closer, Vera could see that she was tall, unusually tall for a girl. Woman? No, girl. Hell, Vera thought, she can't be much older than me.
Glancing around at her audience and for the first time noticing a disturbance, a shift in the crowd's collective attention which should be focused on her, the speaker looked down. She had barely searched the crowd for a second when her eyes picked out a lone splotch of void among the sea of drab brown.
Vera sighed, expecting the normal reaction of shock and abject terror, but no reaction came from on top of the steps aside from a blink of surprise and a raised eyebrow.
It's almost like she's sizing me up, Vera thought, keeping her gaze fixed on the girl on the top of the steps. Their eyes locked for just a second, and it was Vera's turn to blink in surprise at the intensity burning behind those eyes.
It felt as if her gaze lanced straight through her, almost as if she could disassemble Vera's manufactured exterior, pull it apart and see the real her under all the callousness and disdain.
The speaker paused, collecting her thoughts, and smiled down at Vera. She returned her gaze to the crowd to continue her oratory, but by the time she looked back down, Vera was gone.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
