Edana walked through the marketplace, making sure that the hood of her cloak was covering her head enough so that no one would recognize her. So far no one had. Then she heard a voice behind her.
"Demon!" the voice yelled, "Dragon girl!"
She ran through the Town Square as others began screaming the same thing. But she wasn’t a demon. She had no connection with dragons whatsoever.She wasn't a wildmage; she couldn't talk to animals. Or dragons, she told herself. There had just been that one dragon, and that was so many years ago...
Edana Crelof was seventeen, nearly six feet tall with black hair and eyes the color of polished gold. That was why they hated her. It was said she was not her parents’ child, that she was a child of the dragons. Her parents had loved her despite the rumors, but that didn’t matter now. It didn’t matter, because her parents were dead. They had died in a fire, a fire that the rumors said she had caused. And no one had hated them. They had died,and she had been alone, alone with no one to protect her from them.
She ran to what had once been her parents’ house, though now it was practically destroyed. She sat in the warmest corner of the burned hut,and cried. She never cried, never when they could see her. Maybe that was why they hated her. A heart made of stone, they would say, She’s possessed,only a demon would have so little heart.
She remembered how once they had not been as hateful, when her parents were alive. She had even had a friend...
She remembered Darva, the only friend she had ever had. Darva had been kind, smart, beautiful, the only person who had cared about Edana. Darva was older, two years, three at the most, more than Edana. But they had been the best of friends. When Edana was… eight, she remembered, they had met.They never left each other’s sides, despite her friend’s parents’ punishments and superstitions caused by the “Demon-Girl”.But Darva was dead; she had died playing with Edana only three years after that…
She shuddered. Only she knew the cause of her friend’s death. They had been climbing a tree, like they always did. Edana had always been better at it, for, though Darva was older, Edana was at least two inches taller. They had seen a snake, Darva had reached out to touch it, and fallen. Darva had always liked snakes. Then she looked into the creature’s eyes, as golden as her own. It had flicked its tongue, as though it were mocking her.
She had hidden in the tree, after realizing that her friend was dead,for four days. She had been silent when they found Darva’s body, when they came looking for her.
“Must be dead,” she remembered Darva’s mother saying, before she started to cry, “Serves that demon right for killing my daughter!”
Her parents had found her up there, they had protected her from the others who hated her even more than they had. But now they were dead, and there was no one to protect her. She wanted to escape, but she had nowhere to go.And they thought that she was the cause of her parents’ deaths.
She cried even more. They would always hate her, and she would have to stay there with their hate until it killed her.
