Liann's Legacy

The silence of the cabin was a heavy blanket, pressing down on me, thicker and more suffocating than the stench of blood and burnt flesh that still clung to the air. It had been hours, maybe days, since the screams had faded, since the gnawing hunger had been sated in a way that still made my stomach turn, even as a strange, unsettling peace settled within me. Taji was asleep, or pretending to be, his rasping breaths a counterpoint to the frantic drum of my own heart. I couldn't sleep. Not yet. There was too much to unspool, too many threads tangled in the wreckage of what had been my family.

My eyes drifted to the pile of journals, Taji’s frantic scrawls and Liann’s elegant script mingling like poison and perfume. I’d devoured them in the immediate aftermath, desperate for answers, for any scrap of understanding that could anchor me in the swirling chaos. Now, with the immediate, visceral horror of the feast behind me, I needed to revisit them, to sift through the lies and the half-truths with a clarity that had been absent before.

Liann. My mother. The woman who had signed away her rights, who had, according to Taji, embraced the monstrous moniker of ‘sex demon.’ The words themselves felt like shards of glass in my mind. Taji’s narrative was simple, brutal, and deeply ingrained in his madness: she was a betrayer, a corrupted soul who had abandoned her son, who had become something unnatural. But Liann’s words, her elegant, flowing script, painted a different picture. Or did they? The more I looked, the more I saw the ambiguity, the deliberate vagueness that now felt like a calculated performance.