Yulia
We walked through the woods for some time in a companionable silence. The moonlight shining through the trees and reflecting off the gently drifting snow was creating a beautiful yet solemn atmosphere. However, I could tell that Ashley was getting kind of tired, as her pace had begun to flag and her breathing had started becoming more labored. Eventually, I picked her up into my arms.
As I should have expected, freed from having to concentrate on walking, the little girl immediately began energetically engaging me in conversation.
"Wow. Your chest is really soft. Even softer than Mom's!" Was the first thing out of her mouth.
If I were mortal, I might have choked right then and there, but somehow I maintained a passive expression and a neutral tone as I remarked, "Perhaps commenting on the relative qualities of ladies' chests is not a topic for polite conversation."
"What's polite conversation?" Ashley asked. I could not tell if she was poking fun at me or not, so I answered her seriously.
Except, I realized even as I opened my mouth that this was a more complex topic than I had initially believed it to be.
"Polite conversation is the conversation made between people in public, to strangers and acquaintances primarily, especially at parties and other social gatherings. It usually sticks to relatively 'safe' lines of conversation, such as the weather, how you have been on a surface level since you last met, and what you think of the current fashions." Wow, okay, that sounded inane even to my ears.
"Well, you and I are friends, right? So we can talk about real stuff like how soft your chest is instead of boring stuff like that." Ashley said this quite seriously, and I felt my lips twitch into a smile as I lost my battle at keeping my laughter in.
Soon, we were both laughing fairly hard, and I realized that I hadn't had cause to laugh out of pure mirth in some time. Eventually we both calmed down, and we returned to a sort of silence for a time longer.
"Aunty Yulia, why do you get so angry sometimes? You get kind of scary when you are like that." Ashley innocently asked one of the few questions whose answer might drive her away. However, I could not bear to lie to her.
"When I was young, not quite your age but not much older, I first met the Weapon…I mean Moira. We grew close, and our relationship developed into something quite beautiful…and also quite physical, though perhaps you are too young for those details. However, eventually I had to return home, as I had been visiting from my home country. We did not see each other for many years after that."
"During that time, my family wished for me to marry the son of a political ally so they could cement the relationship. At first, I was resistant, sure the Weapon would return for me. However, they did not. Eventually, I was left with no choice but to agree."
"Our relationship was not a pleasant one, and I for one grew jaded with it. Many months in, I discovered that my erstwhile husband was not especially into women. However, his family had caught wind that we had not consummated the relationship, so that night he got severely drunk and took me violently. In this way, he discovered that I had not come to him pure, though I had not had the intention of being his to begin with."
"After this discovery, he became violent and temperamental, and a few months after that was the first time he sold me to one of his friends. It would hardly be the last." I paused and took a deep breath, so the crimson around the edges of my vision would recede.
"Finally, deciding to get rid of me once and for all, I was sold to a local den of prostitution run by the mafia. Unbeknownst to me, the Weapon had been caught up in both political intrigue and nearly endless battles, and they had at this time finally gotten for themselves the free time to come looking for me again. Many things had befallen them, and their form was more similar to my current one than human. They were worried that when they finally found me, that I would no longer want them. As if such things could be!" I kicked a rock in my distraction and it accidentally blew a hole through a distant tree, which fell not too shortly afterwards.
"They did finally find me, and at first I refused to interact with them except as a business transaction. I knew that they could hardly want me after everything that had happened, most of it irreversible. However, I was very wrong. On both counts, as it turns out. While there was no magic spell to make what happened to me not have happened, it was more than possible to heal the physical damage and remove any diseases that might have resulted. The Weapon purchased me from them, and I have the feeling that if they had refused, they would not have seen the light of day ever again."
"My husband was theoretically a problem, in that we were still married on paper, but the Weapon had a talk with him and suddenly I was a free woman the next day. The paperwork cleared the courts in what must have been record time."
"After that, I brought the Weapon with me to meet my parents, but they took one look at her and labeled her a monster. Apparently, her own parents had done the same, so she was used to it, but I refused to allow them to treat her like that. So I told them everything, in more detail than I have given you. My father had a heart attack that very day, and returned from the hospital a weakened and changed man. My mother blamed me for this, and I was banished from my own home."
"Many other misfortunes befell me, and every time the Weapon would give me a new power to overcome them for the future. At first, I became a Quickling so I could outrun my enemies and my immune system could overcome most any illness. Then, she devised a way to use magic to turn somebody into a genetically augmented supersoldier, and I became physically powerful, faster, with even better reflexes to handle most of the enemies I would encounter. That was when my bones became coated in a matrix of living gold-carbide. I would continue to grow in power as time went on, but eventually a group of enemies set out to hunt me down specifically."
"After I was injured so severely that she found me literally at the very edge of death, I was turned into an Avian-human hybrid, in a way that didn't counter but rather augmented my existing traits. I gained the ability to fly, though I was heavy so I could not fly very high or fast. My muscles became even stronger, with far better growth potential. I became awakened magically, and of course I was faster than ever. However, my senses had also improved, and they told me in no uncertain terms that the Weapon was a threat. So, I ran. The Weapon gave chase, at first, but eventually she decided if I was that scared of her, perhaps it was best to just let me go."
"I punched a hole into a neighboring dimension, which I did not realize had a much slower flow of time, and spent the better part of a year finding myself. Eventually, I sought out the Weapon again, knowing that what I had done had hurt them. Unbeknownst to me, 10 months in the dimension I had been living in was nearly 2 centuries for the Weapon."
"She hadn't moved in all that time. Apparently, if her movement could not bring her to my side, she saw no point in moving at all. Her power had caused the forest she was in to grow to massive proportions, and when I finally flew high enough to find her in the tree she was in, her skin, eyes, and even feathers had somehow been coated in a layer of stone. While she was busy freeing herself from that predicament, the ones who had been hunting me before returned in even greater force."
"I was unable to defeat them, as they were many and I was one, and their weapons were powerful. However, they were unable to defeat me as I myself was powerful, and the time I bought while fighting them off allowed the Weapon to free themselves enough to destroy them. It took months and countless baths and showers for the Weapon to fully recover, and in that time I realized that they might be a credible threat to anybody else, but never me."
"After that, I trained hard so I could grow powerful enough to protect myself. One day, in a bid to see exactly how powerful I had become, I began drilling through a mountain with my bare hands. About a quarter of the way through, there was a severed collapse, and my bones were not the equal of millions of tons of rock. When the Weapon found me, they finally bit the bullet and turned me into a vampire."
"So I was left with the trauma from this and many other things, but now rendered immortal. The years passed, and we grew ever closer, until we married not long after. However, even after my turn I was not immune to people trying to do shitty things to me, and even though I overcame them, they still hurt."
"The other problem, which fed into this, is that the Weapon and I are not fated mates. A vampire without their fated mate is fated instead to slowly lose their grip on humanity and morality, and I am no exception. I have slowly been going insane, left sometimes with no reason inside me but rage. This has made it hard for me to see anything wrong with doing whatever I want in the grips of that rage. I have been trying to focus instead on the love I feel for the Weapon, for Moira, and to channel that rage into destroying stuff that is fairly replaceable. I am sorry that sometimes this has led me to lash out and hurt the people around me I care about. I do care about you Ashley."
I looked down at the little girl who had been strangely silent throughout that explanation, and noticed that her eyes were filled with tears. As I looked, she buried her face in my chest and started sobbing. Without understanding why, I immediately held her more securely and started whispering words of comfort to her in Russian.
When she finally finished crying, I gently wiped her tears and used a tissue to dry her face. Then I set her back down so she could have some more exercise.
Sometime later, after she got tired of running around crazily, she whispered to me "I'm sorry all that happened to you, Miss Yulia."
Of course, it was immediately followed by a couple of crazily lobbed snowballs, but I understood the sentiment to be heartfelt all the same.