Alone Again

You drag your tired legs past the village gates, dust still clinging to your cloak like the last reminder of the kingdom you abandoned. Two months of running. Two months of starving, bleeding, bargaining with every shadow on the road just to reach this place — the world that was supposed to be different. You stand there, chest pounding, waiting for that feeling you’ve dreamed about since childhood: freedom. Safety. A chance to breathe without flinching. But the silence hits first. Then the stare. Then another. And another. Those eyes — the same damn eyes you thought you’d escaped — widen, narrow, twist in disgust. The same mix of fear and superstition you grew up drowning in. You know that look too well; you saw it every morning in your old village, carved into your family’s worn faces, carved even deeper into the people who spat at you in the streets. Half demon. Half curse. Half reason for every famine, every sickness, every misfortune. They don’t kill your kind — no, that would be mercy. They keep you alive just long enough to blame you for everything else. A living warning sign. A walking omen. You thought the end of the war meant peace. Everyone said it did. But peace never reached your doorstep… and now, looking at these villagers stepping back as if your shadow might poison them, you realise something brutal: You didn’t escape anything. You just traded one cage for another. And deep in your gut, a darker thought twists: Did I really cross mountains and wastelands for nothing? Was every step just a circle back into the same hate? The world is bigger… but the hatred feels the same size.