I feel as if I were the one doing it.
The knife strikes bone, slides against the man’s skull, and becomes slick with blood.
The tremor runs up her wrist, into her arm, into me.
For a heartbeat, I forget I no longer have a body.
I cannot control her.
Not again.
Not unless she lets me.
Even as she kills him, her heart is heavy.
There is no triumph.
No pleasure.
Only the familiar ache of someone who learned long ago that violence is safer than hope.
She needs to accept her own abilities in order to continue to hold mine.
Otherwise, my power — my magic, my memories, my fate — will crush her the way a wave crushes a drowning swimmer.
And now…
I see her fully.
I understand why the Fates picked her.
I remember my last breath,
The spell that froze this land,
The plea I whispered with dying lungs:
“Find someone like me.
Someone strong enough to save our world.”
But they did not find someone like me.
They found me.
They found me without my mother’s songs.
Without my father’s courage.
Without the love that softened the edges of my rage.
They found a spirit like mine,
But sharpened differently.
Sharpened by pain.
By survival.
By waking each day wishing the world would become something she did not have to fear;
And having that wish go unheard.
They did not choose a reflection of who I was.
They chose the version of me.
That only the dark would have raised.