When the Blood Moon Rises: Part 1

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The human girl wiped a grubby hand across her tear-stained cheeks. The moisture only deepened the color of her eyes, a swirl of a blue sky swallowed up into the midnight heavens of her large black pupils. Even at her tender young age, those eyes cut through the grime and the grief on her crumpled features.

The young man beside her spoke with quiet determination.

"Please listen, Melina. I pledge to you on everything I am that I will come back to get you."
He understood her trepidation. Nothing in her life so far led her to believe in the words — or the actions — of others. He clutched her slender shoulders, masking his wince at the bony prominences of her emaciated, malnourished frame under the weight of his fingers.

"Wh... when... will you come back, Bleiz?"

"I don't know—"

"I won't let you go!" she cried out.

Bleiz rushed to hush her cry, peering over his shoulder at the slumped form of their drunken father, snoring only a short distance away.

"When I have a house for us, one where you can grow as many trees and flowers you want, I will return to you, I will."

With a sniffle, she rubbed her eyes again, her thoughts for a moment captured by the hopeful future Bleiz described. It was a shared dream that lived in stark contrast to the nightmare of filth and decay that was her reality.

"Swear on it?"

Holding up her little digit to him, she waited for him to respond. While glancing downward, he hooked his pinky finger on hers, sealing his oath to her.

"I promise, Mel."

###

The now fourteen-year-old Melina woke with a shiver, a flimsy, tattered blanket her only cover against both the cold air above her and the frigid earth floor below. Small rays of sunlight streaked the dark bedroom chamber, cutting through the planks of distressed wood joined by a few remaining nails. Figures moved as shadows outside the room, fluttering the ancient drapery which acted as the only door separating her "room" from the rest of the house.

Doubling over, she cursed to herself.

Her lower belly cramped and ached again as it had on and off for the past two days. She kept the pain to herself as complaining only resulted in punishment and even more misery. A strange sensation moved between and then along her inner thighs — something thick, sticky, and wet. Her brows furrowed, she reached to find the source. Her heart stopped as she tugged her hand back to see blood smeared across her fingertips. Blood? Blood?! Why was she bleeding?

Her panic overcame her well-earned instinct to hide everything from her parents. She leaped to her feet, dashing past the drapery barrier and out of the room. Her eyes darted around the shabby central room until she located her brittle and bitter mother, hunched over a ritual book. Off to the right, her father slumped back in an overstuffed horsehair chair, his ever-present bottle of whiskey close at hand. Incoherent, his chin stooped on his chest as he snored. Melina turned her attention back to her mother.

Slim and petite to the point of frailty, with angular features framed by long, stringy brown hair, a strong resemblance remained between mother and child. But where her mother's eyes sank into dark, fathomless pools of a deep brown, Melina's eyes shone a brilliant blue that still reflected something akin to hope.

The older woman turned to her with her usual mixture of annoyance and repulsion.

"What do you want?" she scowled.

Unsure, Melina held up her blood-laced fingers and gestured to her stained dress. A wicked smile spread over her mother's face.

"Finally, you are a woman now!"

Rushing over, she grasped Melina's head and crushed her into her bosom in a surprising display of interest and feigned affection.

"A woman now?" Melina repeated. She furrowed her eyebrows in confusion.

"Yes, yes!" her mother squealed as she shook the confused teenager with glee.

"What's this now?" her father slurred, awoken by his wife's cheering. With another swig of his liquor, he stumbled to his feet, glaring at Melina with his own faded, blue eyes.

Her mother rambled on, ignoring her husband's drunken interruption, "Now you can do our Goddess Qetelias' work! Your womb is ready to accept a man's seed and prove to Her your fertility!"

"My what?!"

With horror-filled eyes, Melina pulled away from her frenzied mother. The older woman's pleasure vanished as she stared back at her daughter.

"You are at the perfect age to bear children - many, many children. Your father could sell you to a few of the local tradesmen for fertilization!" At the thought, her mother became excited again, clapping her weak hands together. "You can stop being a leech and contribute something to this family. We will be rich!"

Her father snorted his agreement. "Desperate merchants will pay good coin to sleep with a nasty dog like you." With that, he raised his mug in a salute before swallowing another gulp. The girl flinched at his assessment of her worth. But her mother's words rang again and again in her ears.

"Fertilization?! No, no ... I don't want children—"

A stinging slap cut off Melina's sentence before it left her lips. The stunned girl tumbled to the floor in a heap as her father laughed at her expense.

"Foolish girl," he said with a sneer.

"You dare to deny our Goddess's will? Defiant wench!" her mother shrieked.

She entwined her bony fingers in Melina's long hair, grabbing a fist-full as leverage to drag her across the dirt floor. Melina reached up as she cried out, clawing at her mother's hands, twisting her slight frame in a panic to free herself from her mother's relentless grasp. The older woman threw open the lid of a large, wooden crate on the other side of the room. In a fluid motion, she lifted the small, squirming girl, tossed her inside, slammed it shut. Flat on her back in the box, knees to her chest, Melina shouted and clawed at the slatted lid. The tumblers in the lock clicked as her mother sealed it from the outside.

"Stay in there for the rest of the day and pray to Lady Qetelias for forgiveness for your blasphemous ways!" the woman's angry muffled voice demanded.

The shriek of the girl came from somewhere deep inside her, something primal, trapped, and desperate. She fought against the walls of the crate as her fingernails bent, broke and bled, but to no avail. The crate then gave a quick, hard jolt as her father kicked it, bouncing her head against the side. Melina stopped her struggle and curled up in her little dungeon, crying without a sound.

###

Hours later, her mother threw open the lid of the crate without a word and released her from the temporary confinement. Now lying on the dirt floor of her bedchamber, Melina stared up at the shadows crossing the darkened ceiling. She contemplated what it would cost her in mind, body, and spirit to live her mother's definition of womanhood.

As she sat in the gloom, she heard her mother mumbling her prayers to Lady Qetelias. Melina pictured her mother's prone form before her miniature statuette of the deity of virility. A large lump swelled in Melina's throat at the thought. She hated that sculpture - Qetelias' smooth features portraying this false personification of maternal instincts.

Melina closed her eyes, scoffing aloud as she pondered on the notion of the fabricated reality of the gods and goddesses of Etias. She asserted them to be nothing more than a lie by the priests of their respective religions to control fanatics such as her mother. Why did the gods allow their subjects to interpret their decrees? According to the doctrines of Qetelias, she represented fertility and a mother's love. Yet, Melina's mother embraced twisted the teachings into something much darker.

Meanwhile, her father was another mindless drone to the drink. He drank to avoid his raging lunatic of a wife, and he drank to forget their status in the world as humans. He drank to overlook the fact he was drunk. What had Melina done in her previous existence to earn such a living? Not only was she considered the weakest race in the realms, but she was born into a family of fanatical, narcissistic drunks who cared more about producing children than raising them.

As far as it concerned Melina, her predicament was because of the falsehood that was Lady Qetelias. She wondered if her mother never discovered the goddess if she would turn out different. Melina doubted it. Qetelias was an excuse for her mother's ways.

A thundering crash and an anguished cry jolted her from the spiral of her thoughts. She sat up, peering around her dank surroundings with a fearful gaze. More screaming rattled through the shack, pursued by the loud and deliberate footsteps nearing her room. She huddled further into the corner, making herself as insignificant as possible.

The curtain divider flew open, and someone stepped into the small chamber. The low, evening light revealed a man covered from head to toe in fresh blood. Unable to move or to speak, Melina sat frozen in fear under the tattered blanket she used as a feeble attempt to mimic invisibility.

The bloodied figure kneeled in front of her. She inhaled the iron-rich smell that surrounded them both. Then a familiar voice spoke.

"I told you I would be back. I will always come back for you."

Melina dropped the fabric shield covering her face to look into the hazel eyes of her brother, Bleiz. She took only a moment to overcome her sense that this might be a dream. She sprang into his arms, and he wrapped her secure in the strength of his warm embrace.

"Come on..."

Taller and stronger than three years ago, Bleiz was now a man. He lifted her frail body into his strong grasp, carrying her to leave everything behind them.

"What about Ma and Pa?"

He shook his head but said nothing, showing his desire for silence. Out in the conjoining room, Melina saw her father sprawled on the floor, seeped in a pool of blood as it spilled from several grievous stab wounds in his chest.

He was dead.

Their raving mother prostrated herself over his corpse, praying to her goddess to spare her own soul over her husband's weakness and to destroy their murderous son.

Stomach twisting in knots, Melina turned to bury her face into the crook of her brother's neck. Their crazed mother proceeded to shriek accusations and insults at her son's retreating form. Bleiz did not acknowledge her screams and never once looked back. He moved forward with Melina nestled in his arms, out past the dark forest and into a world beyond the darkness and sorrow of their childhood.