"H e l l I s e m p t y, d a r l i n g . . . A n d t h e d e v i l ? H e ' s h e r e .
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Amelia has never really been a very lucky girl, maybe it was because of all the mirrors...
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They were what sounded like a hundred screams coming at her from all directions. No bodies, no creatures just screams.
She felt a wet feeling when she noticed the blood dripping out of her ears and onto the sides of her face. The screams got louder and louder. It was unbearable. She could not stand it.
Amelia fell to her knees immediately, accidentally coming into direct contact with the scorching floor. It burned her skin, one more second and she felt like it would have melted off.
she got up immediately and used whatever little control she had of her burnt hands to cover her ears desperately. She had only taken a few steps inside and she turned around, ready to leave the nightmarish forest.
But she couldn't. It was like there was an invisible wall. She kicked and scratched at it, tears rolling down her eyes as the voices turned her animalistic.
She ran left and right, the invisible wall stopping her from leaving seemed endless. Not knowing what to do, she ran deeper in the forest, trying to run away from the voices and the deeper she went- the quieter they became until they finally went silent.
Amelia grabbed onto the bark of a tree to support herself, terrified of falling onto the oven-like floor again. The skin on her burnt hands was peeling off. Her ears has stopped bleeding but the blood had smeared all over her face and she was still shaking from the screams. The only thing she could hear now was her own sobbing.
They were loud. And unforgiving. All shouting terrible things at her- about grief, lost, anger, pain and death. So loud and terrifying she could not hear herself think anymore- she couldn't even remember her name. They were suffocating her and drowning her. Amelia realized the blood was from her trying to claw her ears out. She didn't even know she had been doing it.
All she wanted was to shrivel up and disappear. Never in her life had she been so frightened, so ready to slit her neck to try and make the pain go away; maybe that was exactly what the voices wanted, for her to go mad and kill herself so her soul would never escape Hell. Never escape the forest.
It was dark, with the only light to guide her being beams of ghostly red light escaping through the gaps of the dense tree branches.
The branches of the tree she was holding onto for dear life started to slowly wrap around her and by the time Amelia noticed it had already wrapped itself around her neck.
More and more branches started wrapping around her. "This is it" she thought to herself. After all of this, this was how she was going to die. After she spent her entire life surviving one disaster after another, her death would be a slow and quiet one. Isolated and alone.
She felt like the tip of the branch suffocating her caressed her cheek, almost as if it had heard her thoughts and was telling her she was right. She had not recovered from the last attack. There was no strength in her body, She was too engulfed in darkness-too afraid. It was as if she suddenly weighed a hundred tones.
As she got drowsy and her eyes were struggling to keep open, she remembered the last time she had been in a forest. It was funny how in her life she had once thought that was the most dangerous thing in the world. The fight she got into with Iris the first time they had met, because Iris had called her pack cowards. Amelia had been enraged. But now that's how she would die- not fighting- but begging for it to end quickly.
Hell was something else, and against its wicked tortures that buried themselves deep in your mind; she was no match.
She was not brave.
She remembered the last time She had seen her parents, her sister and her brother. It was before Azrael and Gavreel knocked her out and took her with them. Would her family drive themselves crazy looking for her for the rest of their lives- thinking she was out there somewhere.
As the trees crushed her more, her hand pressed against her pocket and she felt the rock Isaac had given to her before they had entered Hell. The promise she had made him. To stay with him forever. Forever was supposed to be longer than this.
Forever was going to be longer than this.
She was not brave, she was not courageous, she was not a hero.
She was terrified and she would use that fear to survive. The fear of never seeing her family again. The fear of never seeing sunlight, the fear of never seeing Isaac smile.
And she screamed as she pushed against the branches with a wild strength. She would die another day but she'd be damned if it was today.
The vile branches slowly ripped off the trees and went slack. Each one that broke made it easier for her to fight against the rest- until she ripped out the last one.
She took a few steps forward, breathing heavily, taking in more of Hell's toxic air.
Maybe a hero wasn't someone that was unafraid- unshakeable. Maybe it was someone that felt everything, felt the terror, felt the anguish, wanted to give up every step of the way. But carried on anyway.
