Prologue
391 Words
In the heart of a vast, decaying city, where the night seemed to stretch its claws into every alley, there lived a girl named Scarlet. Fragile and slight, she carried a beauty that did not belong to this world. Her eyes, clear and blue as a midsummer sky, shone like stolen fragments of heaven, while soft curls framed a face too innocent for the cruelty that had claimed her life.
Scarlet's existence was bound in chains. She lived within her father's mansion, but its polished floors and gilded walls were nothing more than the bars of a prison. Every day was torment.
Her mother's heart had long since hardened to stone. Every word she spoke stripped Scarlet of what little dignity she had left. Her elder sisters found their joy in breaking her spirit. They sneered at her exhaustion. They mocked her silence. They reduced her to nothing more than a servant in the house she was meant to call her own.
From morning until night, her hands bled with labor. She scrubbed until her fingers ached, polished until her own reflection blurred in the silver she held. Her body weakened under the strain. But worse than the labor was the hollowness gnawing at her heart.
She had never known the sweetness of childhood. She had never felt the warmth of affection. Love, to her, was a ghost, something she had only ever dreamed of.
But Scarlet's tragedy ran deeper than cruelty.
The truth of her life was buried in lies: the family she obeyed, the family she suffered for, the family she yearned to belong to, none of it was hers. Not by blood. Not by right.
Her identity had been stolen. Veiled. Hidden from her. And she was too innocent to see the chains wrapped around her, too desperate for love to notice that her innocence was the very thing that made her prey.
Still, somewhere deep inside her, a flame refused to die.
A belief that something was waiting for her. Love, perhaps. Freedom, maybe. She couldn't know.
What Scarlet didn't yet understand was that her path was already shifting, drawing her toward forces far greater, far more dangerous, than she could imagine.
Salvation and ruin both waited ahead.
And once they found her, the girl who had lived in the shadows would never be the same again.
- Writer
