The Ophidian Uprising

The Ophidian Uprising

An almost deathly frost hung in the air as Svelte made her way down the well-beaten path of the forest. Her feet left no mark on the path, partly because she was a slither of a thing (amongst her people anyway) like her name suggested, but mostly because she wasn’t using them. Her body glid through the air with the precision of a japanese blade, steeled against the cold, not quite able to adjust to the bizarreness of being out of the water.

She slowed to a halt, now face to face with the reason she had left her home in the first place. As she lifted her head to knock on the large mahogany gates, she reminded herself to not take what was about to happen next personally.

Martha had not always wanted to be a nun - in fact as a young girl she had fancied that one day she might become a pharmacist after watching the man behind the counter measure out her father’s anti-inflammatory medication with a manner of self-importance, placing them carefully into a paper bag before sealing it firmly with a wax stamp.

So it was no wonder that as she found herself here, years later, plodding through the vast halls of St Anne’s Convent to open the door for a late night caller, that she felt disgruntled, wondering exactly how it was that she had gotten here.

However, any remnant of a quarter life crisis was knocked out of her head as she opened the door to find herself staring into the slow blinking vertical eyes of a snake the size of biblical proportions. Before she could open her mouth to even emit a scream, a strange gas filled her lungs, cutting off the flow of oxygen to her brain and her body fell limp.

She had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t use any spellcraft when she met the humans, but Svelte hadn’t been able to stomach the palpable disgust and fear that painted the face of the plain girl who opened the door. And as she watched her muddy brown eyes glaze over with an almost foolish bliss and calmness, Svelte couldn’t help but envy her. The freedom of not knowing the reality of who she was - what she was, had been stripped away from her along with the innocence of her youth years ago.

“Have you seen my sister?” she asked. Her gentle lilting voice came as a surprise to Martha, who it seemed was fighting to regain cognisance - and winning - much to Svelte’s dismay. She had never been so far from the river, nor for this long and the distance was clearly diminishing the strength of her powers. She repeated the question again, bearing down on the girl with an intense, unwavering eye-contact that her mother would’ve been proud of. The girl relaxed once again.

“I dunno who your sister is, love, we have a hundred or so girls pass through here every year”

If the situation had been less dire Svelte would have laughed. Instead every mistake she made, as seemingly insignificant as it would appear to another, increased the ever growing anxiety she felt in her belly. “Ah yes, forgive me” her platitudes were wasted on the hypnotised mind of the girl in front of her and her glazed eyes. “Has a girl stopped by here, with a, uh -” Even now, Svelte found it difficult to speak on what had happened to her sister. The foretold great leader of her people, who had found herself in a predicament so beneath her, so mundane, so disgustingly… human. “Has a girl stopped by your residence who is with child?” Svelte slurred on her S’s heavily now; the strength it was taking to keep the woman in front of her in a docile state paired with the magical excursion to translate her speech from Ophidian to English had become a burden that was proving almost fatal.

“Ah Beatrice, you mean?” the girl cooed dreamily. “Yes, she died last night, she did. You’ve just missed her” she grinned, the severity of what she was saying entirely lost on her.

The words hit Svelte like a blow to the chest.

“But she did leave the child behind, no worries there. God, the struggle to pull him out of her you can’t even imagine…” her wottless chattering faded into the background as a sharp ringing pulsed through Svelte’s ears, like a knife being plunged into her mind, severing all ties to sanity.

Her older sister, her little Nymphidia, was dead. Gone with the same futility and flimsy mortality of a Mortali.

A thundering rage replaced the wrenching pain, and as blood rushed to her head like a storm, Svelte felt a resurgence of her magical powers and she drew herself up to full length, rearing her head.

It was abominable enough that her sister had sullied the name of the great Ophidia by falling for a human being, for a Mortali, but to allow herself to die at the hands of one? A half-breed nonetheless, but the thought of the heir to the Ophidian throne had fallen on account of the inferior race was almost too much to bear.

The filthy male being had pierced the veil of her sister’s natural immortality with weakness the moment he had impregnated her with that child. Venom rose like bile in her throat as she swept past the podgy girl at the gate, whom coincidentally had awoken from her stupor.

The sound of the girl’s frantic screams filled the night sky as Svelte stormed through the courtyard, knocking over a scrawny pear tree in her wake.

“Help! Help me! Save the children! There’s a -”

Any shred of regard for human life Svelte had once possessed vanished with the same speed as she killed the girl, relishing in the reckless abandon that allowed her eyes to flash a cold, luminescent grey, sucking the very lifeforce out of the girl’s limp body.

In that moment it seemed fair to her, a life for a life, much less a life that had stood by and watched as her sister took her last breaths, but somehow it was not enough.

Turning once again, Svelte found herself on a new mission - to find the halfbreed son that had seen her sister out of the world.