("If I had a voice… I would've screamed your names.")
Lucia had walked the path to the mill many times before, her feet steady on the earth, her mind lost in thoughts of herbs, the weather, or the coming harvest. It was a quiet walk, like any other. But tonight, the world felt different. The air hung thick and heavy, like a storm was gathering just beyond the horizon.
The first step into the shadows felt wrong. But she didn't turn back. She never turned back.
And then, they were there.
Three of them. Men she had known all her life—men who had smiled at her in the daylight, men who had nodded their heads with false kindness. But in the shadows, their faces twisted.
"Out for a midnight walk, are we?" One of them said. His voice was soft—too soft. There was an edge in it. A promise of something unspeakable.
She froze. She knew. She knew what would come next.
But her legs didn't move. Her body didn't scream. Not because she was brave. Not because she was strong. But because the years of silence—the years of being ignored, dismissed, violated in ways that never made sense to her—had shaped her into a thing that could only endure. Endure.
She tried to run.
They caught her easily.
Her heart pounded, but the world around her blurred into a dizzying haze. She couldn't breathe.
They tore at her clothes, and she felt the cold of the night air kiss her skin, but it wasn't the cold that made her tremble. It was the weight. The crushing, suffocating weight of what was about to happen.
She opened her mouth to scream. She wanted to scream. But all that came out was air. She had no voice left—only the hollow ache of knowing that nothing she did would matter. She wasn't real enough for them to care. She was nothing. Just the body they could break without consequence.
The hands were rough and unkind. The laughter was even worse. Mocking her, shaming her for the very thing that was about to be stolen from her.
She tried to shut her mind down. She told herself it wasn't happening. She closed her eyes, wishing for anything to take her away. But no matter how tightly she clenched her fists, no matter how much she willed herself into nothingness, she was still there. Still present. Still violated.
She was a thing.
A thing to be used, torn apart, and then discarded.
---
And when it was over, she was still there. Still bleeding, still broken, still waiting for the moment she could escape. But she couldn't. Not yet.
Her body was a wreck, a reflection of the twisted thing they'd made of her, but worse—her mind felt as though it had been unraveled. What they had done to her was worse than any wound she could see. It was the wound that couldn't be healed, that could never be undone. It was the silence.
She lay there on the cold ground, her hands shaking, her breath ragged and broken. They left her like an empty shell, her dress half torn from her body, her legs numb.
But she didn't cry.
She didn't make a sound.
---
Lucia didn't know how long she lay there. She didn't know how she made it back to the village, didn't know how she stood, didn't know how she even walked. Everything felt as though it was fading—her vision, her mind, her soul. She was floating through the world, detached, as though she no longer had any right to take up space in it.
When she reached the door of the cottage, Mira was waiting, a worried look on her face. She said nothing. She didn't ask. She just knew.
Mira guided her inside, but Lucia could not speak. She could only close her eyes and let the warmth of her mother's embrace be the only thing that held her in the world.
---
But even Mira's touch couldn't pull her from the darkness.
Lucia didn't cry. There were no tears. There was only a sharp, unbearable ache. A hole. A gaping hole.
She felt as if she had been hollowed out.
There were no words. No screams. No sound at all.
And yet, in that silence, something awoke.
It was a feeling—a simmering rage, not in her mind, but deep within her bones. The silence they had forced upon her. The violation they had taken from her. It began to change. It began to burn. To transform.
She would never speak aloud, not in the way they had wanted her to. But she would make them listen.
---
In the quiet of that night, the girl who had been stolen from, who had been broken and left to die inside herself, felt something dark and quiet take shape.
And when it spoke—when she finally understood what was rising inside her—it was louder than anything she had ever known.
- "One day, they will know my name."
- "One day, I will speak, and it will burn."
---
The girl they had broken.??
She was only beginning to rise