whatever could it be that has brought me to this loss?

If she listened closely, she could still hear her screams.

Weeks passed after her sixteenth birthday and she’d yet to change. She’d thought, privately, that perhaps she was broken, that she wasn’t supposed to be a demon after all. Her body rarely worked for her, why on earth would it start now? Or maybe, she hoped, her mother had some kind of affair with another man, a human, and maybe the odds would finally fall in her favour. She was nothing like her family, nothing like what she was supposed to be. Despite all she knew, how she was taught – she was worlds away from them. She was quiet and clever and uninterested in social games. She understood what it meant to be a Ward but for as long as she could remember, she simply wasn’t one.

Being a demon was a prospect that horrified her. It moved her one step forward as a pawn in her mother’s games – where she’d be flaunted like a fashion accessory before marrying some demon in a bid to strengthen social ties with another group of demons half way across the world. Her life would never be her own, it never was.

Fever came first. Then the pain. Waves that wrecked through her, her veins alive with it, her body, her very being changing, shifting from human to demon. Her parents were on vacation, her brother at university. She was alone with the staff who could do little to comfort her in the transformation.

Her wings were the last thing to break through, floundering helplessly behind her as she lay panting on the floor – shaking with the terrible knowledge of what she’d become. She was not the manipulator, nor was she the tormentor – she was not even, by wild chance, a Rakshasa. She was sickness, the disease.

She was not was she was supposed to be, not was she was expected to be.

Her father was silent, her mother disgusted, her brother dismayed. Her grandfather was summoned.

In the midst of ‘her party’, showing her off, celebrating the change – she stood in the library of her home before her grandfather, shaking with her mother’s threats and awed in her grandfather’s very presence. He was a quiet man but his authority was absolute and no one would speak when he did. She had never met him before now but as he dismissed her family and softened slightly when she told him she was named for his wife, long dead, she grasped at what she knew.

Because she was quiet. Because she was clever. Because she understood what it meant to be a Ward.

She took a risk and made a deal.

She didn’t die like she was supposed to, like she thought she would or how her family hoped she would. She wouldn’t lie down and be swept away like a hasty mistake. Something deep down, wouldn’t make it easy for them.

She was locked in the institution for two years amongst struggling and dying demons like herself, born from families who had too much money and too much pride and not enough love. She ached and cried for what she never had in the first place, cementing herself with the fact that she would never really have it. She learned what it was like to be truly alone, learned what it meant to never be touched, never loved – lessons she’d already been learning for years and years.

She signed herself out on her eighteenth birthday, as agreed, and silently slipped away, turning from everything she knew. They sent the money, as agreed, to keep her away, to stop her speaking out, to stop her bringing more ‘shame’ to her family’s name. She agreed because it was the only way she could earn her freedom, the only way she could survive and have a life of her own, as alone and painful as it would be. It would at least be hers; she could then try to salvage something of herself.

And she got it.

Because she was quiet. Because she was clever. Because she understood what it meant to be a Ward, even if she never was one.

And now she never would be.