My name, gran always reminded me, was never to be spoken aloud.
I had almost forgotten it when the man with the scarred face tore my shirt open. He stopped and stared at my chest. He saw not the small mounds that had barely begun to blossom, but the star-flowered birthmark between them. Hyacinth, he mouthed, his eyes wide and fearful.
We fled that night. I was thirteen.
I had almost forgotten it again, when the drunken stable master laid his hands on me. My emotions were raw, at fifteen, and the star-flowers blooming from his torso and mouth meant we would flee once more. The chilly night air was heavy on my tongue. Hyacinth.
The eve of my seventeenth birthday was the day I destroyed the world.