Days turned into months that then turned into years. My hurt yet numb body was exhausted from dealing with that monster’s lust, and so was my shattered soul. I tried to run away on a weekend, where the queen summoned him to her home, the royal palace, but he came earlier than expected. Terrel caught me and trapped me in his grasp, preventing me from ever leaving. He chained me at the lowest level of the mansion, in the old and dusty cellar filled with ancient wine bottles. It wasn’t long until sunlight became nothing more than a warm sense of nostalgia that, from time to time, embraced my gelid skin.

   Within the intense smell of alcohol and dust, alongside a pitch-black darkness that held no end to its existence, unknown things came to me, horrible things – things that even the purest light wouldn’t be able to purify. I heard someone or something, who knows, speaking to me, reaching out from their endless despair. Wicked words in a hoarse voice, holding no beauty or kindness behind them, echoed within me over and over again.

   Who did they belong to?

   Were they my own?

   Were they someone else’s?

   However, the answer was too far for someone like me to find. At a certain point, all that remained was a strand of faith that my core ruthlessly clung itself into, hoping they were nothing more than the servants of God, coming to pick up the soul of my undeserving being.

   Finally, on the night of my 18th birthday, I died. Somehow, a fire started and spread at an extremely quick rate within the mansion grounds and a sense of relief came over me once those precious warm flames passed through the half burned down cellar door. Soon, my body would feel their embrace, and, at that point, reality finally hit me.

   I was going to die.

   Despair and rage ran wild in my mind, blaming everyone for their sins, blaming everyone for my sins. Even though dead had always been my desire, now survived a tingling sensation that eagerly crawled up and down my body, freezing me in place.

   Fear. I never wanted to die. All those depressive and suicidal thoughts were lies that my mind had shown me to try to remain sane in the middle of the insanity of this house, of that man.

   I wanted to live.

   I wanted to see what other girls saw, play around with my friends, read books, write, paint... there were so many wishes that had yet to be fulfilled, surely things couldn’t end like this. But no one came to rescue me, not even my so-called husband. As my strength began leaving my body, there was only one person to blame.

   Why didn’t Father come...? I questioned myself repeatedly, to justify this overwhelming emptiness that ruled over my soul – yet it would take a blind fool to not know he never cared.

   Much to my surprise, my soul woke up in the body of Ophelia Criswell, a few days after her birth, a small and frail baby whose inner being belonged to an 18-year-old girl. Confusion ran through my mind for days, if not months, but then, as I saw my older sister’s distant gaze on me, it was easy to comprehend that this was neither a dream nor a nightmare. It was just plain inhuman.

   I was reliving my life once again, as if once hadn’t been enough.

   To prevent my soul from entering a spiral of madness, my rational brain assumed that this was nothing more than a gift from the angels who pitied my horrific death. You have suffered once, now change your future and live happily, is what I imagined that these ethereal beings said to me and so, like a true believer, my life was run by following their commandments.

   During my 2nd life, I tried to cleanse my image by befriending people around me, but it was all in vain since my own kin married me off to Layton Verne, the second son of Marquess James Verne. Just like fate, the clocks kept on turning and time kept on ticking. On the night of my 18th birthday, he appeared; an assassin who mistook their target and killed an innocent bystander in her bed with the panicked flames of what was supposed to enlighten the path in the depths of night.

   I woke up in the body of a newborn baby, again.

   Several feelings of anger and despair consumed me as this was not a gift from the angels but a blessing from the Devil himself.

   Most memories from my 3rd life were fuzzy, but there were some events that I could still remember. Because of my behavior, Duke Criswell wasn’t able to marry me off to some nobleman, but somehow, that dreadful day came to pass.

   No matter what I did, my life would always end on the night of my 18th birthday, engulfed by the blazes of Blasphemy[1] as the Devil laughed at my misery. It did not matter how the story played out: if I ran away from home; if I didn’t get married; if I tried to take my own life... I would always die being consumed by those flames on that horrible night, not before, not after.

   Surprisingly, my mother survived during my 9th life, and, through her, I finally learned basic manners and etiquette, among several other things, like reading, writing, sewing... For the first time, my body learned what the warm embrace of someone who really cared about me was like - I finally comprehended what the word “family” stood for. Even then, my hope of living was completely shattered as a couple of days before my birthday, my mother’s cold and pale corpse laid on the floor, allowing all the leftover sanity, reason, and logic within me turn into nothing but pure madness.

   I, Ophelia Criswell, the second daughter of Duke Criswell, the Cursed Child among the high-nobility puppets, am currently living my 10th life in this unstopping yet sadistic carousel. Stuck, within the grasp of the time frame of a mere clock that insists on rewinding the time magically, just to please itself with my pain and misery.

   Throughout my lives something is always the same: even if my path is constantly changing, my outcome has already been set in stone. Simultaneously, it is impossible to know if this sickening loop will ever come to an end after greeting the flames of Blasphemy one last time, yet, one thing is certain: the knowledge of a 177-year-old lady is stuck within the body of a 15-year-old child.

   For over a century, I clung to a specific way of living, focusing on a strand of hope that something would change, that someone would save me from this God-forsaken cycle but now, that peculiar blind faith that kept me walking within a straight and rightful path was gone.

   I will never be someone else’s tool again.

   I will let no one abuse my body as if I was their property.

   I will live the way I wish to live until that day arrives.

[1] Blasphemy: Hell.