The vampire's personal witch

"I want to be free," Seraphine whispered, her voice trembling as the weight of despair crushed her soul. "I can't live like this anymore. Anything-anything is better than this. Gods, demons, anyone who can hear me... If I have to be a slave, if I have to sell my soul, so be it. I'll do it. Please, I beg you."

Her pleas echoed through the void of her mind, hollow and unending, a desperate cry swallowed by the darkness.

Poor little Seraphine.The cruel words hissed back at her, slithering through her thoughts like venom. A toy to be broken, a wasted existence-was that all she was? A pitiful girl scorned by her peers, cursed by fate to be born to useless parents, and made her useless in turn.

Who asked her to be born a lowlife? the voices sneered. Who asked her to endure useless parents and a life devoid of value?

The bitterness tightened around her chest like chains, "You're so useless!" The words still cuts Seraphine like a blade."You can't even master the simplest spells. How do you expect to survive?"

Vile curses rained down on Seraphine as she silently wished for her parents. An orphaned witch, she had become the punching bag of the witch's union. Seraphine had never had a friend, never known love. The only affection she had ever received was brutally torn away when her parents died when she was just ten years old. The world seemed determined to deny her any joy.

And fate, in its cruel way, played a twisted joke on her. At her awakening at thirteen, when most witches would have felt their powers surge, Seraphine was left with nothing. She couldn't cast a single spell, rendering her even more useless in the eyes of her clan.

"Another day of beatings, huh?" Seraphine mused to herself as she dragged her broken body to the witch healer. The healer, in her cruelty, always made her wait outside with her wounds festering before finally calling her in. By this point, Seraphine could no longer summon any feeling. Her life had come to a standstill-no movement, no flow-just stagnant, staring into the void.

"I'm used to this," she tried to convince herself as she tried to hypnotise herself into sleep, she needed to have the strength to drag herself to healing after the usual rounds of torture.

She awoke to the sharp pain of a kick to her already sore, aching back. Instinctively, she wanted to scream, cry, to finally fight back, but she couldn't. Instead, she bit her lip and stood up, tears brimming in her eyes as she fought to hold them back.

It was the doctor. "Why don't you just run away and spare us from the sight of you? I wonder why the witch elder insists on keeping you alive." The doctor's voice was laced with raw cruelty.

Seraphine said nothing, just bowing her head. She had already come to terms with the fact that they hated her for no reason-no reason at all. "I might as well run away," she thought, mustering up the courage she had been cultivating for years now. She had held onto a shred of hope that the world might show her a little mercy, After years of being brutally tortured, all that was holding her from breaking down was the love her parents showed her even until their deaths.

Seraphine's parents had been murdered by the Witch Elder himself, under the guise of "purging the weak." She had watched helplessly as they were torn apart, their pleas for mercy drowned in the laughter of the witches. The Witch Elder, a man with eyes cold as obsidian and a heart twisted with malice, had smiled at her through it all, promising her the same fate if she proved as useless as they had. And indeed she had.

She had been taken in by the witches not out of pity, but as a twisted form of amusement. Had been adopted by the parents they brutally killed, she'd literally never known her real parents. Her lack of power was an embarrassment, and they relished tormenting her for it. From the moment she entered the witch's union, she was the subject of scorn. The youngest witch, Calista, particularly enjoyed tormenting her, using minor spells to ignite her skin with small, painful burns or freeze her fingers until they turned blue. Calista would mock her constantly, her voice filled with venom. "No wonder your parents are dead. They were weak, just like you."

Seraphine had nowhere to escape. The Witch Elder had bound her to the union with a blood curse, ensuring that every attempt to run would result in agonizing pain. The few times she had tried, her blood would boil, leaving her convulsing on the ground as the witches watched and laughed. The curse etched into her skin pulsed with a sickening glow.

Even the healer, a woman meant to mend and restore, Doctor Anise, treated Seraphine with sadistic delight. Instead of healing her wounds, she would force Seraphine to endure excruciating pain, slicing her skin open with enchanted daggers and then slowly knitting the flesh back together, all while whispering venomous words in her ear. "Your suffering brings me joy, little witch. You're nothing but a toy for us to break."

The nights were the worst. Seraphine would often wake up to find Calista and the others standing over her, casting binding spells that would hold her still as they took turns tormenting her. Her body was bruised, bloodied, and broken, but her spirit... her spirit, they told her, was meant to be irreparably shattered, the more she cried, the more her tears were relished. Not all members of the Witches union tormented her, they simply treated her with indifference, which she would have chosen over her current fate rather be ignored all her life than be tortured, sadly life doesn't offer choices.

After receiving her treatment, Seraphine returned to the small shed where she had been forced to live, unable to stay in her parents' house. Which had been burned down after their miserly death. She packed what little she could and waited for midnight.

And when the time came, she ran. She ran and never once looked back. But time will tell if indeed the blood curse that tied her to the witches Union would turn against her.