I never knew what sin I had committed to be born into such a life. Disorder has always been my inheritance, woven into my existence long before I could speak or understand. Each morning, I fasten a mask to my face not as a disguise but as a shield. It cannot save me yet I wear it all the same to conceal the scar that claws across one side of my face, twisting flesh into a shape that invites fear and revulsion.
Cruelty follows me wherever I go. My peers circle like carrion birds, feeding on whispers and half truths. They laugh. They point. They say my mother is a witch, that I am her goblin her unholy offspring, summoned rather than born. I tell myself these are lies. Still, when a rumor is repeated often enough, it begins to sound like prophecy.
But let me take you to the years before my birth, to a time when my parents still believed the world could be kind.
My father was once a soldier, hardened by war and silence. At twenty-nine he married my mother, then twenty-six, a schoolteacher whose hands were gentle and whose faith in goodness had not yet been broken. Two years into their marriage, my father deserted the battlefield knowing that remaining would one day deliver his corpse home in a flag. He left the army and opened a modest mechanic's shop, choosing survival over honor.
The town branded him a coward. A traitor. They spat his name in the streets and turned their backs when he passed. The hatred grew until it poisoned every corner of their lives, and so my parents fled, seeking refuge in another town where their past might remain buried.
There, they longed for a child.
Months rotted into years. Years collapsed into a decade and more. Every prayer went unanswered. They surrendered their savings to hospitals, to doctors who promised miracles and strangers who sold false hope. Desperation hollowed them out, leaving only grief behind. Fifteen years passed and their marriage cracked beneath the weight of what would never come.
The town noticed. It always does.
One evening, as shadows stretched long and the air grew thick with omen, a woman appeared before my mother. She wore the robes of a nun, though they seemed too dark, her smile too knowing. She spoke softly, promising what no one else could, a child. No payment. No cost.
Hope, when starved, becomes reckless.
My mother rushed home, breathless with joy, and told my father he felt the chill immediately. Why would strangers offer what the world had so cruelly denied for free? Yet the woman's voice was honeyed, her assurances firm. She told them they had nothing to lose so they followed her.
In a strange building they placed my mother within a circle drawn in chalk, its symbols ancient and wrong, scratching at the edge of understanding. The same markings were carved and painted upon her skin. Voices rose in a language that scraped against the soul, chanting words that seemed to bend the air itself. A cup was pressed into her trembling hands filled with a black liquid that swallowed the light. She drank it all.
Then, without ceremony, they were dismissed.
On the road home, the night suddenly felt lighter. My parents laughed,laughed at their fear, their foolishness, their despair. Surely it had all been madness, they said. A cruel performance by delusional women playing at holiness.
They did not know they were laughing at their own ignorance for something unseen had already begun to stir. The ritual had taken root and I was coming.