There was a calm in her soul despite the chaos and evil permeated her with all the times he'd made love to her and roughly. She had no idea that evil had infected her too but she was glad to be rid of him.
All of a sudden she became painfully aware that things had changed for her. The people around her seemed to move slowly. they moved so slowly that when she moved through the crowd time seemed as if it would stop and then begin slowly again when she stopped.
She reached out and would circle men and women who ran with fear on their faces from some unknown terror that drove men mad. It wasn't the monster anymore because the monster was dead but rather the lack of monster that left good men to their own devices and left a void for a great evil that had to be filled.
She became painfully aware of the ground beneath her feet as she realized her shoes had melted off. Great cobblestones which should have hurt but the pads on her feet had grown thick and she began to realize that it was not her feet that she now walked with.
"Even in death, you plague me, Roedric," she mumbled.
A voice came from the dark recesses of her mind and spoke.
"You've invited me in sorcerer."
She instantly recognized Roedric's pet name and voice. They had been in the magicians guild together and she was no stranger to magic, however things were happening to her that were not in her normal repertoire.
"I killed you, monster."
There was a laughter in her skull as she felt her self moving away from the town at such incredible speed that the terrifying momentum became like a great vortex that tore her clothes from her.
In the spinning darkness, she saw something come through and run a gaunt gray finger up her naked side.
"You killed the possibility of good. For no man is an island once he's become what we are," said the dark creature in Roedric's voice.
"You see, Contessa, Man is given a second chance only so many times."
"I gave you second and third and fourth chances and you blew them all, Roedric!"
The great laughter reverberated through her again.
"Is that who you think I am?"
There was a silence as she was struck deaf.
"Roedric is dead. You killed him. All that's left is in your mind. You have a construct of what you remember about him but being infected with the disease he had, I am now you. I sound like Roedric because that is what you know to call this disease but your soul fights itself now."
There was a silence when she realized that she could no longer blame Roedric for the way she felt inside. The demon turned into a plague of fingers that crawled up her legs like thousands of spiders. They permeated her skin pours, they lapped at her sex. They caressed each sinew into growth as she began to rise a new.
The phoenix is said to rebirth from flames and the vampire sees each blossom of the night as if he were seeing heaven but this was neither. This was a rage that permeated her newly preternatural soul.
It writhed inside of her like a great snake that struck her heart with a fatal blow filling it with venom.
At twelve feet tall she was only a few feet above where Roedric stood but she was ten times as fierce. Her hunger for blood was fueled by what he had done to her and where she was once broken she filled the holes with rage.
The town stood quiet as a few kingsman went round picking up and fixing the destruction wrought from the earlier scene. It had been two days and there was still blood around the village that could not be scrubbed off.
"Out out damn spot..." sang a village custodian in bemused irony.
The royal blue and ashen flags were no longer waving but rather an eerie calm had struck the town at this moonless night.
There was a slight breeze but they only caressed the banners as much as a poor player whose jokes were told to a deaf crowd.
The giant doors that stood at the entrance to the town looked out into the woods like sentinels guarding a gold filled keep. From the woods, there were noises that befit the night and some that did not; however there was none like the explosion that came from a woman scorned and a demon born.
What thrust itself towards the great stocky doors was not, by any means an average Were. It had the body of a wolf but the wings of a bat and the head of a dragon. It was as if the changeling virus that permeated your average Were had mutated into what the scorned mind could make it.
Each transformation into Were was different as any hunter of them would tell you. That is why the legend varies from place to place but she was more dragon than wolf and as she slithered from the tall oaks, the doors seemed to cower in fear as the rocked back and forth with the wind that came from her movement.
There was first a loud crash as the bolt behind them fractured but held. Then the second crash blew them off their hinges and crushed half a house that stood not 10 feet away. Those inside were killed instantly not from rubble but from the shock wave which shook their nervous system loose and destroyed all life within them.
Her violence permeated the village as some ran from their houses and others simply stayed inside and prayed until they too were crushed from reverberations and falling debris.
Her siege lasted hours as she destroyed the village that failed to warn her. The people that failed to stop her from Roedric's charm.
As the siege ended and the town lay burning in rubble, all 12,000 souls who lived there lay dead in a barricade of rubble.
She sat at the center of the destruction and seemed taller than when the transformation first occurred. The fur burned off of her and the scales of the dragon formed underneath it to protect her from the flames.
By morning a full grown dragon sat atop the rubble and began to slowly shrink to a naked woman lying atop a pile of ashes. Not a soul had told so not a soul knew but as she lay atop the still warm heap of a life she had just burned to the ground, she felt alive again.
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