Feared or Loved

Trigger Warning: Yellow?

──────⊹⊱✧⊰⊹──────

It's better to be feared than loved. I was feared all right, ever since I was born the mark of my end was blazing for everyone to see.

The mark of wrath.

Our town was where legends were born, dragonborn, horsemen of the apocalypse, and the legends of horror. What fits into the crowd was the birth of the seven deadly sins. Seven unlucky souls born to represent the wrong in the world.

As we grew up everyone watched us from the sidelines, wary as to how we would turn up. My parents never casting a look at me, leaving me to be raised like every other lost, rejected child in the village. I only had the sins to be aquaintances with, never friends.

Gluttony had a big appetite, that was the base of it. But it went deeper. You could see how they wanted more of everything they had. Taking it in like a hoarder.

Greed was the same, though driven mad by their insatiable need for massive amounts of what they owned. They never would spare a single drop for what they had, and everyone learned not to ask.

My dear pride, envy, lust, I always had treasured you the most. Even when the nature of yourself brought you to the brink of death several times. You were my trusted companions. Weak to the pull of fate.

I was not weak.

The pull of wrath slithered itself onto the basis of my mind, beckoning for me to fall into the trap like the others had so easily given into. The thought of it formed a pit in my soul. My destiny was something I wanted to choose for myself.

I tried everything to rid the curse from my body, burning the mark only burned me back. Trying to gouge it from my skin only to find it shadowed beneath, slithering to another spot to nestle until I lost the will to take a hit at it anymore.

My only chance at escaping the embrace of sanity was to escape the accursed village. And with a sorrowful good bye to my destiny intertwined companions I fled. No matter how the people poked into the seeing oracle they could not find me. I would not be their puppet of fate.

Looking back at it, I could have been stronger. I could have saved the other sins rather than being coward and going alone. I fear that they still had the string back to sanity and as I parted, I had only brought the scissors to a close on that line.

Leaving the village brought me to nothing. I have nothing in my travel pack anymore. My resources depleted with no currency to obtain more. Even if I were to die of this wilderness, it would be a savior to the soul inside of me.

Until, I had met a group of people, ones cursed to live through their own hell.

She had a child with her. It was uncertain if it were her own. Another was held in the arms of a poorly clothed girl. They were a mess of a ragtag band. I tried to them by, but the child would not let me go.

"Sarah, she's different."

She turned her attention towards me, scrambling in the arms of her keeper.

"Miss! There's something off about you!" She frowned. "I'd like to know what it is," she mumbled.

I gritted my teeth. A brat to tell me that I was, odd, weird. Not right?

I turned to the woman. "Keep your damn kid's mouth shut."

She ignored me at turned to the child. "We don't need a hothead in this group. What could she have that is foretold?"

"I can here you clearly. And I ask for you to shut up." My anger was slowly rising. My palm seared from the heat of my mark. And no matter how much I tried to calm down my body refused.

She sneered, "You're nothing special to us. Let's go, kit."

I could feel the peaks of my horns grow under my hair. I wanted to scream, throw a tantrum, saw them off. But my anger would just consume me. I'd become exactly what I was made to be.

For years I've tried to keep them away, everything that made me a monster. And yet, strangers were able to change me.

I glared after getting out of my bubble, reaching out to grasp my hands around her neck, only to find the kid touching my horns.

"What are you doing!" I growled.

All she did was smile and stroke the curve of them. And slowly, they disappeared.

"A demon of sin to balance the cause. The blood of the world on their hands. To be born anew."

I saw it in her eyes.

It wasn't right, but it was a change in the universe. There was a destruction of a world not yet established with us in the middle. But the underlying feeling there, it was something else.

I put a hand up to my eye, a tear staining my cheek. And as I looked down to my palms, the mark of wrath whispered off on the wind. A change for the new world.

I would be a creator of it.

My name is Jezra Saville, and all I wanted was to be loved.