The air was like ice, it was another winter night.
There had been many stories, legends if you will, about the girl leader and
knight to be. Legend said that he had been killed before his time, that the
girl had killed him herself, for no reason. They had been in love, though on
different sides of the war. They had been secretly meeting for years, a
different location each time. The night of his death she was late, that is what
everyone agrees on. What happens after that has been speculation for years.
Some claim that the girl went insane, she’d been of the sort to go insane,
after all, and truly had gone insane by the time he had died, if not before.
Others claim the boy’s fellow squires killed him, others believe the knight he
apprenticed under did it. No one knows what really happened, except that he
died.
The girl had ended up carrying his child. Her
leadership position had been removed, herself regarded as a traitor, a spy for
the enemy. She had screamed and cried, every night without fail she would
mourn, and every morning she would sleep. She began to babble nonsense, would
attack those who tried to take care of her. Once the baby was born, she seemed
to snap out of it just long enough for it, a girl, to reach five. She had once
tried to drown the toddler, only stopped by her adoptive father, who decided
that the toddler would be safest if sent away. This enraged the girl, sparking
the massacre that led to the fall of the nation she had once fought so desperately
to protect, the massacre in which the girl had died.
It had been 19 years since the incident, to the day. A
group of travelers had stopped to give a young teen time to mourn. Emma’s eyes
were red, just like her mother, betraying her mori blood. She’d never met her
father, though somehow she couldn’t bring herself to blame her mother. The
oldest knight in the group, the one who had trained her father, put a hand on
her should to comfort her. She smiled, glad of the company as they returned
home, and back to the castle where her father had spent his time.
The air was like ice as time seemed to freeze, a small
red eyed figure with horribly mangled metal claws stepped out from a snow
drift. Its skin was pale enough to blend with the snow, but the blood red eyes
and dark blue hair made it stick out. Its eyes studied the group, settling on
Emma and the old knight. A sharp metal claw was raised, pointing accusingly at
the old knight. It growled as only a demon could, nobody dared breathe.
“You did lie, and now you must die.” The creature screeched,
red staining the ground as something pulsed from its hand. The old knight fell,
his heart having been removed. Someone screamed, all panicked. There was,
however, no escape. Every single one of them was slain, not a soul was shown
mercy, except Emma. The creature could not bring itself to kill what had once
been its daughter, instead vanishing back into the snow as though it had never
been there.
Once a year, every year, without fail a group will
fail to return to the castle. They are all found dead save for one child, some
strange and terrible beast’s claw marks litter their bodies. The attacks are
randomly timed, never falling on the same day. Some of the children who were
spared claim it was the girl, shrieking and crying that leads the group to her,
and that she slaughters them. No one believes them though, after all, ghosts
are just a legend, are they not?
