CHAPTER 3: BLOODSTAINED PAST
1212 Words
Before Amethyst became a phantom of vaults and shadows, she was just a little girl in a red velvet dress, clutching her mother's necklace and humming lullabies she could barely remember.
She had no memory of the city they lived in, only fragments: the taste of strawberry jam on warm bread, the sharp scent of roses in a garden she used to play in, her father's calloused hand wrapped gently around hers. And her mother's voice—soft, golden, and always singing.
Her mother's name was Anastasia De Hesus, and she smelled like lavender and old parchment. Her father, Hector Deltore, had a laugh that could chase the night away. They didn't have much, but they had love. Amethyst remembered how her mother used to say it:
"We don't need the world, my love. Just the three of us, and the stars."
But on the night of the blood moon, the stars went out.
It was the fifth day of September. Amethyst was five.
They had gone to a late mass. Her mother wore her red shawl, the one that shimmered like flame, and her father held her in his arms as they walked the candlelit path back home. The streets were empty. The city felt asleep. But the sky was wrong—an eerie, reddish hue casting long shadows over the cobblestones.
Her mother paused.
"Don't stop walking," her father whispered.
Amethyst remembered his voice. The tension in it. The fear.
A group of men emerged from the alleys—tall figures cloaked in black, faces hidden behind ivory masks carved with unnatural grins. One by one, they stepped into the light, surrounding them. Their eyes glowed faintly through the holes in their masks.
Her father put her down. "Run. Don't stop, no matter what. Find someone. Anyone."
"Hector—"
"Now, Ana. Now."
Amethyst remembered her legs shaking. She tried to scream, but no sound came.
The first blade struck her father in the back.
Her mother screamed. Daggers rained down, fast and silver, and her father's body hit the ground with a hollow, broken sound. Amethyst's legs gave out. She fell behind a bush, her eyes wide with terror.
She saw them slit her mother's throat like it was a silent ritual.
One of the masked figures stepped toward her.
But something—someone—intervened.
A blinding light broke through the mist. A woman in gray robes, barefoot and holding a cross that shimmered like starlight.
"Enough!" the woman bellowed.
The masked figures scattered like crows.
Amethyst fainted into her lap.
----
She woke up two days later in a bed with wooden bars, the scent of incense and lavender floating in the air. A cross hung over her, and sunlight spilled through the cracked window like forgiveness.
Sister Lydia sat by her side.
She was old, but not fragile. Her hands were strong. Her eyes—unlike any Amethyst had ever seen—glowed faintly blue. There were whispers about her from the older girls, that she healed the dying, that her prayers were answered too quickly. But no one questioned her presence.
"You are safe now, little one," Sister Lydia whispered. "But your life will not be easy. You were born with purpose. That kind of light always draws shadows."
Amethyst didn't understand then. Not really.
But she never forgot the way Sister Lydia looked at her. Not with pity. Not even with love. But with recognition.
St. Michael's Orphanage was her home for the next decade.
It had a garden in the back where white lilies grew wild, and a chapel that echoed with songs no one remembered writing. The other children were kind enough. Some were quiet. Some angry. But they all carried invisible wounds.
Except Amethyst.
She never bled. Never bruised. Never broke bones, even when she fell from the top of the oak tree behind the chapel.
The nuns whispered about her resilience. They called her marked. But Sister Lydia only smiled when asked about it.
"Her light isn't of this world," she said once. "But neither is her enemy."
Then one morning, when Amethyst was ten, Sister Lydia vanished.
No letters. No trace. No goodbye.
And no one spoke of her again.
Every time Amethyst asked, the other nuns would go quiet. They'd change the subject. Some grew visibly afraid. One even cried.
That was when the dreams began.
They started soft. A door in the dark. A whisper behind it. Then the dreams turned red. Masked figures. Silver blades. Her mother's scream.
Every year, on the anniversary of their death, the dreams would return with more detail.
By fifteen, she remembered everything. The masked faces. The glowing eyes. The blood on her hands. The smile of the figure who nearly found her behind the bush.
It was always the same one.
The tallest.
The only one who didn't carry a blade.
The one who watched.
She began to feel like she was being watched again—eyes in mirrors, reflections that weren't her own. She told no one. Not the nuns. Not the therapists. She simply locked it all inside.
Then she turned eighteen.
And the world outside St. Michael's demanded her presence.
She left the orphanage with a scholarship to one of the top universities in the country. She excelled. Valedictorian. Multi-awarded. Cold, brilliant, untouchable. The professors praised her discipline, but none saw the truth—Amethyst was never trying to be the best.
She was trying to forget.
But the world wouldn't let her.
----
Now, twenty-three and wrapped in shadows once more, Amethyst stood in the den with the red diamond humming faintly on the table. She touched it, and for a heartbeat—just a second—she saw something:
A field of black trees. A sky burning like a thousand blood moons.
And her mother.
Bound. Gagged.
Still alive.
Her father, suspended upside down. Skin marked with glowing symbols.
Behind them, the same masked figure.
The one who never aged.
The one who watched.
"You are the key," the voice whispered.
Amethyst stumbled back, breath stolen from her lungs.
She looked at her hands—glowing. Faintly. Like something inside her was waking up.
Lexter's voice came from behind her.
"Hey, Ame—what's wrong?"
She didn't answer.
Because now she remembered something else.
Sister Lydia's last words before she vanished:
"When the red moon rises again, they will come for her soul. And when they do, the hunter must rise... or fall."
And then, like a key twisting in a long-forgotten lock, something deep inside Amethyst shifted. The weight of years—dreams, whispers, questions, and unspeakable memories—coalesced into something sharp and undeniable. The visions, the voices, the strength she never questioned, the light in her blood that refused to dim—they were not anomalies. They were inheritance.
She gasped softly as the memories flickered out, but a strange clarity remained. A piece of her that had been absent for so long suddenly aligned with something ancient and hidden. A name without a face. A destiny she hadn't asked for.
For the first time in her life, Amethyst felt as though the silence within her had begun to speak.
And it was saying: You are not who you think you are.
- Writer
