The past was just that to Etain.
The past.
And that is where it needed to stay.
Nobody existed that knew her name, knew her origins, any longer. Either she killed them, or the warriors of her clan had killed them. So, should have found it easy enough to lie to herself she had no past.
But it was not easy.
But she still lied to herself.
At least she tried to, with the help of sex, drugs, and anything else that could number her emotions to the point she told people she did not have emotions. Fucking bullshit. But, as long as people believed it, who cared. She had to do a lot of cold-blooded things to make people fear her. And she had the power to do that. But again, lying to herself was not easy.
The past died with the ones that made her human.
The ones that held her humanity no longer had a beating heart, and thus her humanity was buried into the void of her black soul.
Etain had made the plan to just pretend she just came into being. She went back to the villages that knew her face, knew her name, knew her, and destroyed them. She walked into the center of the village and dug her fingers into the ground and let her powers flow. She scorched the Earth. She burned the bodies. She would close her eyes and remember the faces of the people. As they screamed in pain as their blood boiled, as their eyes popped from their sockets, as they burned from the inside out because her power was that of electrical currents. The blood spewed from their mouths as they vomited as their internal organs popped one by one, until the brain realized that the body was dead. Perhaps the soul is trapped in the brain. Perhaps instead of the heart. Because until the brain realizes the body is dead, they could still feel and see, well if their eyes had not exploded. She could still smell the smell of death. Not the burning flesh, though that never went away, but the actual smell of death. Like death themselves came to take the souls of her victims. Maybe that was why she was cursed with life. She already had been gifted life and death did not want her. Death is a blessing that not everybody gets. Or has access to, she had tried to gain access. But failed. Her body healed because the world was made of electrical currents and that is what her body absorbed for her powers.
Why kill them? Because she was an anomaly among her people. Her blue eyes were a white blue, like ice. Her hair was like a blood red-black, and her skin was fair, so fair people could see the cool silverish blue veins upon what parts of her body were exposed. As the veins ran across her body looking much like the electric currents she controlled.
So, to not ever be outed, she had no choice. It was to protect herself. Selfish. Perhaps. But in a world where one’s identity could get one killed by an overzealous hero, or later in the history of the world, humans with no common sense that everybody is different; she had every right to be cautious.
Nobody would really question it. People did not care where heroes and villains came from, they just praised and worshiped the heroes and feared the villains. If nobody gave the information, the mortals did not go looking for the information. It benefited many villains and heroes. But Arc was not a mortal. She had to know the names of those trying to undermine her goals. She had her goals, after all, she could not die. So, why not have something to make the time on this Earth pass without falling into a waking coma.
She thought of anything that could tie back to her existence as Etain. The journals she kept were safe with her, and always would be safe with her. All other evidence she existed burned with her village and the two surrounding it. The ground forever dead because of how she burned the village. In the future archaeologists and anthropologists would come up with many theories why that ground was dead. But, being from the Bronze Age, they would never get answers. For as far as they knew, heroes and villains died out around the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s. The most popular theory was some type of world alternating tragedy. True, it was that, but for one world. Hers.
One thing alone remained.
She knew there was a rock carving her mother had done; they carved it into the rock near the village. It depicted two little girls, with their names carved above them. But that could never lead to her. Not anymore. The names faded with the millennia. But the names still there none the less. And she protected the location. Not as Arc. No, never the villain. But as a standard citizen that had power and owned the land. The land being sold to her identities every twenty to thirty years. Why? She refused to destroy it, as that is where she laid her sister to rest.
The only piece of evidence. And it would be protected. Forever.
But besides that, nothing could exist of Etain.
Though Etain always knew.
She had a lot of guilt.
A lot of anger.
If she had just been there, she could have saved her sister.
Instead, she had thought of her own happiness.
She should have known better than that.
She was her father’s daughter.
The good and the bad.
She should have known better than to leave her sister alone.
She should have known better than that.
She did the leaving, as was the custom in her clan, but her father made sure she felt the guilt and took the blame.
She should have known better than that.
But she bought into the fantasy.
The fantasy that she could be happy.
For that, Etain felt the need to punish herself.
She denied herself emotions.
She would get to the point where she needed to feel something.
Just not numbness.
That is when she took a blade and made thin, shallow cuts upon her skin. The brief pain made all those brain chemicals flare
They would be the only evidence that she could feel.
The only evidence was that she punished herself for the past.
Hidden from the world upon her covered arms and thighs.
Sometimes she would forget she could not die. And she would risk dying just to feel alive, for one microsecond in time. One microsecond of something other than the numbness of grief.
To the world, she had a new existence.
To start this new existence, she just went by Arc. It was a name she heard a village whisper when she passed through and shocked a man for daring to touch her.
She moved from village to village, stealing in the night. She had to survive. She had to live. She had her doubts. Doubts of how she would be known. Everything was against her.
The most powerful heroes were judge-y bastards. The villains were heartless, soulless. So, what was she?
For now, she just questioned herself. She feared the people she was installing fear into would find out she was just guessing the answers she needed. Just going through motions and making it up as she went along. But for now, it seems to work. So, she continued going from village to village, being a minor villain, taking what she wanted. And for a bit of time that worked for her.
She was not sure what she was. But she knew she was not a hero. A hero would lose their life and soul for the world. But was she a villain? She would have burned the world for her sister. For her loves. So, maybe that makes her the villain. She could live being the bad guy. So, right now being the minor villain that just took the bare minimum was fine. Until it was not fine.
Until she knew she needed more.
She needed power.
She was so tired of not having power.
Power would protect herself.
She was done being down on her knees begging for peace.
She was done bleeding for another person’s entertainment.
She was done.
She would give them a villain.
She had always longed to have power.
She had planned on becoming the Clan Leader once upon a time.
She had watched in her village that all the power was with the Clan Leader. That they could do anything. Say anything. Act in any way they wanted. She was just lucky she had loved her loves. Her male lover was the heir to the Clan Leader. And she had him wrapped around her little finger. It would allow her to have him declare her the Clan Leader. And with that, she could have changed the laws.
But that all was destroyed in her father’s greed.
Her father’s want for power.
In her anger.
In her grief.
So, she had to figure out a way to gain power once more.
But it was not going to be easy.
It was in her blood to want power.
She would stop at nothing to have it.
She knew she would have to tear down the obstacles in front of her, brick by brick. But she would make it. She was powerful. She was starting to be feared. And she could put on a mask that could fool the world. After all, she had a mask that fooled her Clan Leader and her father since she was a young child. She hid her powers. She protected herself. She could do it again.
But without power, she could not protect herself.
The first step was knowing exactly what her powers could do. And controlling them, even in her panic.
There were more than a few incidents where she could not get her powers to work to protect her in her panic. Men were barbarians. Taking what they want with no care. Not that women were much better. She did not want to live this way. She did not want to just exist. She did not want to be nameless. She had powers that could move mountains if she wanted. She had powers that could kill the Earth. So, why was she not grabbing the power owed to her?
She needed to control her powers, to have power.
She needed power.
So, why was she just standing there?
Why was she just surviving?
Was she afraid of what it would cost to cross that last line?
Had she not already crossed that last line?
She longed for powers.
She was going to change the way of life for her people.
That dream was dead.
But why was she still standing at the shallow end of life?
She made her choice.
She would no longer hold back.
And nobody would ever make her feel powerless again.
Never.
So, she started to attack small villages; she killed the rapists and abusers.
She fought the monsters, the ones who took with no care, no mercy, but in the process, she would become the monster.
She sat at the base of a bare tree in a cemetery. Nobody walked the cemetery after dark; this allowed her to watch the villages. Burying the bodies was a new thing, before most just burned them. But she did like the idea of burying them. She had buried her sister. Not just burning her like garbage. She sat waiting for her clothes to dry. She did not care she was naked under the moonlight. She sat there in the dark, her eyes glowing and her hair blowing behind her. She watched the village that was her first target. People would rue the day they hurt her.
They would rue the day she lost what grounded her to humanity.
They would no longer witness her good and bad.
A tear fell down her cheek as she knew that after tonight, her hopes and dreams were forever gone.
She would carry the guilt.
The hurt.
And it would fuel her rise to the top.
For now, humanity would only witness her at her worst.
They would only witness her in POWER.
She sat wondering about many things. She was told the gods and Norns controlled their lives. She was told three women held the threads of life. It was not a new concept. She had to wonder about the Norns. Why they put in the pain and heartache into her thread.
She heard the voice in her mind that sounded like her sister saying she did not need to go this path.
But the other voice, the darker one, was louder, telling her she needed power to never be hurt again. And her soul’s grief, the ripped apart pieces of what was left of her soul uses as threads to hold together this black heart of hers, was enough to drown out that light in her soul. The light that was there because of the love she felt for three people in her life. All three gone and that thread that tethered her to the light cut. She vowed to no longer be the Norn’s bitch. They would never cut her thread. She was given life by the Earth goddess, and until the Earth goddess chose to no longer connect to her soul and took her power away, she would live and fight.
And gain the power needed to protect herself.
Come dawn, she attacked the first village.
She came in looking like an angel bathed in light.
Her electrical currents all around her, her blood red hair waving in an invisible breeze. Her eyes filled with the power of electricity.
A Hero.
She smirked as they soon learned otherwise.
She showed her power. She made all fear her, fear that she would come to their village, destroy, kill, steal, and leave devastation in her wake. She seemed to kill at random. But she had watched the village for weeks before attacking each time. She fought. She took on their warriors and won. Those battles did destroy locations, but if people watched, they would have noticed she did not destroy housing. She did not destroy their crops. She went to destroy those who abused their powers to hurt. But that did not make her a hero. She did not want to give them redemption. She killed them. She was not a hero. She did not believe in second chances. She killed. She would release all those from a fate similar to her sister. So, she killed.
It was not pretty, she would burn them from the inside out, watch their blood pressure build as their heads, eyes, brains, hearts, all popped. And it was not long before she realized the electric currents in the body were under her control. She could stop the heart with a thought. She could stop the firings of the brain. She grew in her powers and became the villain. All to protect herself from the ones that took what they wanted with no regard of others.
So, really it was man who was to blame for her being the bad guy.
And since she wanted to survive, she stole. She took what she needed and wanted. So, she fought and battled. She licked her wounds. But this allowed her to be feared. It allowed her to test her powers.
She could be injured and had been many times, but she always healed. Always. The powers granted to her by the Earth Goddess healed her. She learned the hard way that she would always heal.
After she had buried those that held her humanity, she had tried to take her own life. She had tried jumping off canyons. Slitting her wrists. She even tried to stab herself in the head with an arrow. But she always woke up. Healed. And so, she did not care about her injuries as she built her powerbase.
But then she found a much simpler way when she was but eighteen.
Sex.
Give a man or woman sex, and they practically gave her what she wanted. She first tried this with a clan leader and when he passed out after she dominated him and gave him his orgasm; she took what she wanted.
The reason she had tried it out was she had been at the community grouping drinking their ale and he had come up and was obvious in his desire to have her. She knew if they had been alone and not amongst others drinking, he would have tried to rape her. As it was, he was aggressive. She knew what she wanted was in his housing. So, why not try to get there by allowing him sex? She drank until she was numb. Then she let him take her back to his housing. Where she used the ropes to tie him up as she took him in her body. It was not unpleasant. She rode him hard, trying to get him to finish as soon as possible, and even felt mild enjoyment herself. When they had finished, he passed out, and she left town with her prize.
It began a series of one-night stands. A series of ‘relationships’ where she benefited. She gained power. She gained wealth. She even gained a few titles in her life, becoming politically powerful, and even for a brief stint controlling the leaders, royalty, whoever was in power.
All using sex.
She had been able to wrap some of the world’s most powerful men and women around her fingers. She hardly had to attack villages anymore. Her Queen of Evil title had been easy to obtain once she used sex to gain a better position in life.
But she was still a villain. She would cover her face and ravage the lands, killing those who were far from innocent and taking what was of value. She even used those men and women of power wrapped around her fingers, and they too raged wars for her. It was fantastic.
She watched as warriors were drenched in the blood of the enemy. The enemy becomes thus for many reasons, from their inhumanity to just being in the way of Arc’s goals for her powerbase. And with the years going by, she gained more and more power. But standing in the middle of a battlefield, bodies around them, she always rewarded her warrior. Even if it took drugs or liquor to numb her.
It was empowering.
It protected her from the evils of humanity.
It was not long before the name Arc was feared. It was not long before she could walk down a street and be respected as if she were a Queen. And as she closed her emotions off more and more, as she allowed herself to become numb. Using liquors, drugs, sex, she gained more and more power. All to make sure she never had to have her heart ripped out like it was all those years ago.
But at night she could not lie to herself. The nightmares of what her sister must have gone through, of what she had gone through when she had run. So many centuries, millennium, and in the harsh light of her mind, her past was never really over. She just traveled the world, as more and more land was discovered. She had the powers to do so with no coin from her purse.
She was a mess.
But she did her best to lie to herself that she was more than fine, and she was the one in power.
Not her past.
Not her father.
Not her emotions.
But her mind.
She was in power.
She was; no matter what truths screamed in her ears during her nightmares.
She lost her self-control at times running from her past. She knew she had to draw lines in the sand. At least one line. A line she would not cross.
She was a mess.
She was not a fool.
The past was the past.
And she would not let it have control of her again.
She would stop losing her self-control.
She would make sure she did not ever cross her own self-imposed line.
She may not have many morals.
But she did have some.
Never hurt an innocent.
Never hurt a kid.
All those that lost their lives deserve what she would do to them.
It was time for the Queen to rise.
It was time to be her strongest in the moments she felt like falling to her grief.
To be strong in the face of her pain.
To be her strongest when she wants to be weak.
The Queen had to rise.
And the Queen rose.
Pushing the past into the back of her mind.
Hiding her emotions behind liquor, drugs, and sex.
Etain no longer existed but as a memory.
Long live Doctor Arc, Queen of Evil.
Long Live the Queen…
Kris Charles - Author 