Scars marred her thin legs, earned from running without rest, from fleeing a terror no one else had ever been meant to witness. Women fleeing was nothing unusual—it had become almost ordinary. But Florence, who had known captivity all her life, understood the difference between habit and necessity, between rumor and truth.
The shattered glass beneath her feet, the height she had leapt from, the brutal impact she had endured—these were not acts of recklessness nor quiet defiance. They were declarations of survival. Her body ached, her breath burned, every movement sent pain trembling through her bones, yet she pressed on. Freedom had demanded its price, and she bore it willingly, even as the world beyond her escape remained shrouded in uncertainty and fog.
But it was a choice she claimed as her own. A choice made without certainty, without promise—yet one that carried the fragile hope of rescuing her from the morbid life she had endured within that hell masquerading as luxury.
"Lord Eulothorne has long since abandoned sanity. He will scour every city, turn them inside out if he must, just to find you. I do not wish to intrude upon your life, my lady, but I beg you, run. Save yourself. The Oberons are already on your trail, and they will gnaw at you until nothing but bone remains. Do not allow them to kill again."
Florence read the letter written by the handmaid appointed to her. Her appearance was a ruin—unfit for a noblewoman. Dust clung to her skin, her hair lay greasy and tangled, her face streaked with grime. One shoe was missing, the other worn thin to the sole. She looked like someone who had run without stopping, chased by something relentless.
She lifted her gaze cautiously, her expression framed by the narrow crevices of the city's stone posts. This was not the pursuit of a husband searching for his wife; it was the instinct of a predator stalking prey.
With scarcely any resources left, Florence felt cornered. Escape now seemed nothing more than a fragile illusion. She cursed herself for fleeing without thought of survival, the letters her handmaid gave could not fill her stomach, quench her thirst, nor shield her from the cold. She was immature to have just gone off just like that, but what could she have known? Her rights does not include stepping out of the Oberon manor. In the brief moment she fled the manor, fear had stripped her of reason. She had never known the world beyond gilded walls.
Summoning what little courage remained, Florence forced herself to stand. Her legs, frail and thinning, trembled beneath her weight. Hunger, exhaustion, and terror ravaged her body, none of the joys expected of a woman barely in her twenties. Marrying into the Oberon family had elevated her status, yet doomed her just as swiftly as the moment she said "I do." Monsters, she learned too late, were not confined to nursery tales beneath the bed; sometimes they lay beside you.
In that instant, she lost all she had ever possessed—her innocence stolen, her dignity crushed beneath cruelty. Her naivety dulled her capacity for rage; it rendered her timid, incapable of hatred. The sorrow she felt traversed more than her capability to hate.
She dragged her tiny frame forward, driven by instinct alone as she cautiously walked around the drenched city that night. Encounters she wished she couldn't have gotten got to her in a form of harassment. Yet on the little string of light she held on to, her darkest days still wary her but her tears would not fall, she no longer had the strength. Hours had passed since she fled the manor, though it felt like mere minutes. She had believed escape would end her suffering. Instead, it had only begun anew.
When tears finally welled in her eyes, Florence collapsed. In that moment, her breath ceased, just as her will to endure had slowly faded. Freedom brushed against her only once, fleeting and cruel, like a snap of a finger, her moment to be free was short-lived.
"Florence…" A soft voice stirred her like a false dawn. Thinking death had come to claim her, Florence yielded willingly; she would choose the streets, the dark, even oblivion, over obedience. Oppression had sharpened her longing for escape until it rang louder than fear itself.
She believed death was the quickest release. She could not have been more mistaken.
In her fading moments, footsteps became the final sound she recognized—achingly familiar, and no less horrifying for it. The patent leather shoes clicking against stone were the same she had polished until her fingers numbed, the same measured stride. The frock coat he wore was one she had pressed again and again, until the cast iron burned her palms raw. There was no mistaking him. The last face she would see in death belonged to her tyrant of a husband, Eulothorne.
"Endings were never meant to be kind to you, Florence," he murmured, a smile curving slowly across his otherwise severe face.
The cruelty of his farewell lingered long after her breath faltered. Even as life slipped from her, she felt him watching, savoring the moment as she dimmed beneath his gaze.
Summoning the last remnants of her will, she forced the words from her throat.
"If I am granted another life… it will be you who kneels and dies at my feet, Eulothorne."
He answered only with laughter—low, untroubled, and utterly convinced of her impossibility.
All her struggles, all her desperate striving, had yielded nothing. Her lifeless body was discovered and dragged back to the Oberons' estate, a silent prize rather than a wife. The news, not shocking at all, became deaf to her husband's ears. No laments were offered, no candles burned in memory. She was not mourned, she was merely recorded as dead, a name erased with cold indifference.
Her mother, who had long fled the moment her brideprice was secured, never felt the weight of grief upon learning that her daughter had returned as a corpse. To visit would have been an embarrassment, a stain rather than a mourning. Her sisters did not dare to suffer either. Florence had been nothing more than a commodity to them, something traded away for silver. They had long anticipated her death, and its price had already been paid: a sum sufficient to ensure that her passing would not be mourned, spoken of, or grieved in any form.
Her funeral was empty, a hollow ritual conducted by priests whose faith felt false. Even the sky seemed to weep in mockery as rain poured endlessly, like the tears that were never shed for her. She was buried hastily in a coffin wrapped in rose thorns, as though suffering must accompany her even in death. The thorns pierced her lifeless form—a final punishment for daring to flee control.
Her death shocked no one. Her handmaid, forced into flight herself, never knew how bleak the ceremony truly was. The parish stood silent; hymns sounded distorted, almost wicked as if the holy songs were made to sound devilish. The stained glass dimmed, and the priests wore black, not white as if burying a great sinner. The casket was sealed immediately after hurried incantations spilled from their mouths.
The echo of the lid was heavy, deliberate, as though meant to imprison her forever. It was locked tightly, as if they feared she might rise again. Florence was denied a death befitting a human, condemned simply for marrying into the Oberon family.
They say the dead relive their lives in the seven minutes after death. Florence did not. None of her memories mattered, every year she had lived was torment. She had never known a life untouched by fire. So if it were true, Florence had nothing to look back to even if she was still breathing.
Her grave lay in barren soil. No flowers bloomed there, save for stubborn wildflowers clawing through dry earth. Her husband remarried an heiress, and Florence was forgotten more thoroughly than she ever had been remembered during the span of her dull life. Time passed, yet nothing flourished upon her land, as if the corruption that consumed her had soaked into the ground itself.
The chains of her coffin never rusted. She remained frozen in time, trapped within a box they forced to fit her already petite body. Though long dead, her suffering endured. To the Oberons, she had been nothing more than an animal—alive or dead. Hers became the most wretched death to count without criminal punishment.
"Florence..." The whisper gripped the air tighter, as if an invitation for something that was endlessly denied.
And as if the world had not already torn her apart, it had more planned.
It found interest in burning her a second time.
"Florence…" The whisper once again drifted through the air. Stray dogs whimpered in response. Fate, ever cruel, loosened its chains and rewound time—back to a beginning far more grotesque than before.