Prologue
In the dim corridors of Evi’s school, Evilea Lilase pressed onward, her footsteps echoing in the silence like grim, steady drumbeats. She walked with her head down, hair a silken veil over tear-stained eyes, pretending not to hear her name as it chased her down the halls—a brittle whisper at first, growing sharper with every step.
“Evi!”
Evilea flinched, her lips trembling. The familiar nickname, now a thorn pressed into her heart, made her quicken her pace. She clutched her books tighter, knuckles whitening, as the urgent call grew louder.
“Evilea Lilase! Stop right there!”
She froze, breath fogging in the chilling air that flooded the corridor, swallowing her whole. The world around her faded into a tapestry of shadows and silence, except for the voice—a stranger’s yet intimately her own—reverberating through the darkness.
Why do you run from your destiny, Evilea?
Shivers traced down her spine. “This... isn’t mine,” she whispered, sobs rising like a storm within. “I don’t want a bitter end. I don’t want to die.”
But the darkness pressed in. Another voice—her own but twisted—sighed, its echo a threat and a curse bound together:
“Don’t want a bad ending? But... you were painted for misery, sketched for sorrow, sculpted to shatter on the sharp end of fate!”
A tremor seized her. “No—please! Let me just be. Let me choose...”
The voice tightened around her, a noose of cruel prophecy. “Ahh, but the ink is dry, little lilac. The script has long been written.”
“No...no!” she cried, breath splintering into desperate sobs, a poem of panic on her trembling lips:
Let there be light in shadow’s dome,
Let not the lilac rot alone.
If hearts can bloom from broken clay,
Let me have dawn, not just decay.
A mocking, hollow laughter answered her, resonant as a bell tolling for the doomed. “So helpless, so eager to escape! But aren’t you meant to suffer, to gather nothing but pain and empty echoes?”
Her hands balled into fists. “I don’t want to gain nothing! I won’t wear the shackles fate forged for me—I refuse a life written in gray ink and ended in blackness!”
“Even if you don’t wish to fall, you will.” The voice was relentless. “Even if you don’t wish to hate, you shall. Your purpose is poison, your soul is salt in wounds—Evilea Lilase, reaper in disguise. Lilac flower, bent for only one reason—to kill.”
Despair warred with defiance in her chest. “Stop your nonsense! I am not your villainess—I will not be a tragedy stapled to the footnote of another’s happiness!”
But the voice only cackled, blending into the void. “Why, then, does fate hunger for you? Why does suffering carve your path, when others glide to peaceful ends? Why are you the only soul condemned to break, to crumble, to bow to despair?”
At that, she could answer only with tears—crystal, silent, falling into the hungry dark.
For a moment there was silence, aching and raw, as the weight of her lament shook the walls of her heart.
Then: “Because, Evilea, you are the villainess in this tale!”
“No!” she gasped, denial shattering in the hollow space. “I am not—”
“You are the wrecker of hearts, the architect of agony! Even your name—the evil lilac—means doom, means death, means suffering cast down like rain on all you meet. Even the softest petal can carry the sharpest poison.”
Between the heavy, suffocating silence, Evilea’s voice rang out—a whisper, not of defeat, but hope:
If villain is the cloak you wrap me in,
Let me line it with wild defiance.
If I am the lilac, let me flower not for poison,
But for the fragrance of my own chosen dawn.
With that, she broke into a run, the darkness howling behind her, but her heart beating—fragile, wild, refusing to yield to the twisted chorus of doom. She ran, and with every step she told herself:
“It’s not true. It’s a lie!”
Again and again, until her faith became her shield.
For even if the world called her villainess, Evilea was determined to script her own ending—one blooming not with sorrow, but with possibility.
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by___lilispouts_2
