The End of Childhood - Four (III)
Beneath the cloak of night, Seraphina aimlessly wandered outside the village.
Her vacant gaze rendered her akin to a soulless corpse, her desolation and emptiness surpassing even the solitude she felt trudging through the heavy snow in Red Frost territory.
For at that moment, she was subjected to the torment of morality, the torture of faith, and the slaughter of ideals.
Yet at this juncture, the accumulation of all that Seraphina had endured over the days was… even more brutal, an unrelenting cruelty.
It was the destruction of her very self at its root.
The Seraphina reflected in her own eyes and the Seraphina perceived by the world were no longer the same entity.
In the eyes of her beloved, she was no longer the village's finest hunter, nor the hot-tempered child, nor the prodigy who might have had a promising future but had squandered it.