Amity was about to lose it. Any second now and she’d snap and do it. Her dreams would come true. Just a few flicks of her wrist, a sentence, and it’d all be over. The torture. The agony. The waiting. The denial. She would finally have done something about it. She just had to…

“Oh, is Mittens getting annoyed? Remember to breathe if you are.”

Amity’s eye twitched as she stepped away from her locker. All day. All day long, Edric and Emira simply refused to go away. Brushing her teeth? Why not have spiders come out of the tube of toothpaste? Getting dressed? Turn everything invisible so your little sister came to school with parts of three different seasons’ uniforms on. Every class? Make sure to be there to escort her to her next one!

Unfortunately, she hadn’t had to bring an abomination with her for class so she didn’t have anything preformed to command to snap their necks. If she had though- Why was everything getting blur- “Gasp!”

Edric and Emira both burst into laughter as their sister remembered to breathe, out which only got an angry yell out of the serious girl. She then gave her brother and sister the dirtiest look she could as she hissed out, “Okay, what will it take to get you two to leave me alone?”

Edric pouted for a moment while Emira leaned in to better look Amity in the eyes. “Oh, you think you’re ready for that?”

Amity rolled her eyes before putting a hand on her hips. “Whenever you two get like this, there’s always something you want so spit it out.”

Edric slipped behind Amity and gripped her shoulders. “Oh, can’t we just wan-”

“Just get on with it!”

Edric and Emira jumped at the sudden shout before looking at each other. She was just right. Finally. Emira’s creeping smile let Amity know they wanted just that sort of reaction from her which didn’t make her feel better. In fact, it made her shake as she had to make sure not to lose it. She listened though as her older sister said, “It’s simple. You stay in Professor Ovelia’s classroom for seven minutes without screaming, asking to be let out, or passing out. Otherwise, restart. Or telling us we’re allowed to play with you for the rest of the week.”

Great. There was going to be a monster there or something. “Fine. Just get it over with.”

The twins grinned before getting behind her and helping make sure their little sister didn’t try to run from her fate. Not this time. Of course, getting her there was the easy part. Amity knew better than to try and get out of her ‘deal’. It usually just meant more fodder for the twins to use against her in the future. In fact, she thought to herself as she glanced backwards, she wondered if that’s what they wanted more. They’d seem more annoyed at her for weeks now. If she didn’t know better, she would swear somehow she had done something to them. Weren’t they happy with her just having finally given in and kept her screaming about them skipping class to herself? Maybe… Maybe she’d finally...

No. They never did anything about them. Emira and Edric were lucky like th- “Ah!”

The twins waved down at Amity as they closed the door to the classroom and shouted, “Remember, no screaming!”

Amity rubbed her head as she slowly picked herself up. Could they be any more annoying? “You know,” she said with a smirk at the door, “I can do a lot in just seven minutes.” She just needed to see what she had to work with and she could figure out just how gooey her newest creation would be. Then again, maybe they chose this classroom to make sure she wouldn’t be able to get back at them too well.

“Amity! What brings you here?”

Oh. That’s why they chose this room. She’d been thankful to not have seen her idiot so far today but now… Amity brought her hands over her eyes before taking in a long, shaky breath. “Hey Luz. What are you doing here?”

Luz stepped next to her with a creased brow and a small frown before placing a hand on Amity’s shoulder. “I, uh, kind of got into a scrap with the teacher’s pet yesterday so I got punished by having to spend all day in here fixing it. Did you know Ovelia kept a giant spider? I didn’t.” She then came close, very close, to Amity and whispered, “Are you okay?”

Amity rubbed her palms into her eyes before finally moving her arms back to her sides. She then barely stopped herself from jumping away from Luz. She couldn’t scream after all. Couldn’t enjoy… Her voice was a lot more tense as she glanced away. “Yep. Just fine.” She then felt her familiar rub the blossom in her ear, let it soothe her, and turned back to Luz. “They told me they’d leave me alone though if I stayed in here nice and peacefully for seven minutes so I guess you’ve got some help for now.”

Luz giggled at the comment, even as her cheeks burned a little, before getting back to sweeping as she said, “I guess I’ll need to re-explain to them how Seven Minutes in Heaven works, but I am happy for the help.”

Amity tilted her head as she let her hand slide to the antiseptic on the table. That would make for a good acidic starter for her abomination. “What are you talking about?”

Luz hummed a little as she continued to work. “They asked me about any human party games I knew and I told them some of the classics. Truth or Dare, Spin the Bottle, stuff like that. I was surprised at how few of them they recognized actually. You’d think something like asking people questions was pretty normal.”

Great! They’d been bothering Luz too. Probably only so they could torture her better. Maybe they were part of why Luz had gotten into that scrap yesterday. Then it’d be her fault that she had to be stuck in here all day. It felt like Luz was always having to do something because of her nowadays… “We have both of those so they were probably just pulling your leg.” She then paused and added, “Though I don’t know the one you mentioned.”

Luz giggled a little before stopping briefly to lean against her broom as she tried to play it cool. It’s not like they were actually playing it after all and Amity wouldn’t even if it was offered to her. She was too cool for that. “Well, it’s pretty simple. You pick two people at random, put them in a room, and leave them locked up for seven minutes. And then, hijinks ensue!” She added a little flourish to the last part through a set of jazz hands before giggling. “Usually you also turn off the lights though.”

Amity sighed before saying, “You shouldn’t have said that,” right before, as if on cue, every light in the room went out. Luz merely laughed at it but the darkness hurt Amity. At least when she could be seen she had to put on a brave face. Pretend like she had any control over her life still. Instead, she spent an entire day being tortured by her siblings who claimed to care but never helped if they didn’t get something out of it, tired from the work she did that they seemed to always ignore, and now they decided to pull some sick joke and force her and Luz to be together like this? In a party game that was, as Luz put it, meant to lead to hijinks? Their whole life was hijinks, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter if her and her friends had to suffer for their fun.

Luz was quiet until she saw a purple circle form on the door to the classroom. “Uh, Amity, are you sure you’re okay?”

Amity didn’t say anything as she pulled a magical thread from the circle she’d made to the hand sanitizer she’d grabbed earlier. Once connected, the magic began consuming the soap and she began working on the next string. A good abomination mage could summon one from nothing, sure, but you always got better results if you gave it some base properties. Acidity to help unbind its cells to make it shift better, something hard, even if it’s easily broken like chalk, to make it more solid when it made contact against a target, and the forever go to material of almost any sort of floor or wall to be used as a pseudo skeleton for it. Three strings, three items, ten second for absorption, and then-

Thump!

Emira and Edric looked down at where the sound had seemed to come from before Emira opened her mouth. Before she could say anything through, she noticed the magical circle that was now glowing through the flimsy classroom door. The twins looked at each other before leaping away. They barely dodged in time for the fist of the abomination not to smack one of them directly in the face. Neither ran though. They’d expected to be attacked when she came out but for Luz and her to work on the creature or trap together. For her to have summoned something already… Emira looked over at Edric and whispered, “Think we went too far?”

They both ducked as the abomination swiped at them. They both then noticed that Amity chose then to book it past them. No words. No further commands to her creation. She’d sicked it on them and left. Edric spent a moment watching his sister before throwing himself to the floor to avoid the abomination’s head. Edric then looked to his twin to ask, “Think,” before beginning to get to work at putting the abomination down.

======+++++======

Odalia bit her cheek as she made her way to Amity’s room. Edric and Emira had gotten home maybe five minutes ago and they’d tripped over each other to tell their parents to go check on ‘Mittens’. She wasn’t used to the twins being so worked up about anything, let alone in a full blown panic about their sister. Any hardship of hers was usually one of those things they treated as a joke. The two seemed actually scared though. Then again, Alador had forced an answer out of them for what had happened and they’d talked noncommittally about having maybe pushed their sister too far. Maybe they were hoping they’d be treated better if they admitted to their crimes before Amity did.

Alador was too busy to come check on her though. Theoretically, she should also be downstairs helping him, but when her twins even said they’d sit and work if it meant getting something done, Odalia knew better than to waste the chance to speak with her little Ami. Still, she needed to be ready in case Amity was okay so she brushed off her dress before standing straight, evening out her expression, and knocking on her daughter’s door.

“Go away.”

“It’s your mother, young lady.”

There was a pause after that before Amity’s voice came back. “What is it you desire, mother?”

It was disconcertingly quiet compared to how she normally spoke and Odalia had to stop herself from saying anything about how she wasn’t supposed to mumble. All part of that ‘softening’ they were trying to do with Amity. “Edric and Emira just got home and seemed to think you might be upset.

The pause this time was even longer than before, enough so that Odalia could feel herself getting annoyed. Amity knew better than to keep others waiting, especially family. If she needed that time to think though, she would have it. It’s not like her daughter taking an extra five seconds to think was going to hurt anyone. When she spoke though, there was a definite crack in the poor girl’s voice as it wavered and struggled to even come out, “I don’t want to think so please go.”

Odalia sighed at the desire. She didn’t have any magic to do something like that and most such spells were on the more dangerous side of things. In fact, some of the most dangerous things on the Isles would play with one’s mind and memory. Amity likely knew all of that though since Odalia expected her to have looked more into that blossom she liked to wear after she got it.

Wait.

The elder Blight threw open the door to her daughter’s room as her blood turned to ice. Amity sat across from her in the dark. Her curtains were drawn shut, the lights turned off, all while the small girl had one of her larger abominations hug her… right next to the Blood Blossom. The Blood Blossom who shifted ever so slightly in the shadows like it did while it was feeding.

Odalia threw her hand up and took control of her daughter’s abomination before commanding it to pull Amity away. Amity had opened her eyes from the pain of one of the thorns being ripped from her arm to get her to wake up. “Ow! What the hell, mom?”

Odalia shook in fury as she had the abomination stand Amity up in front of her. “I don’t think you get to speak, young miss. You know how dangerous what you were doing was?”

Amity ran a hand across the gash on her for a moment before sniffling a little, even while she obviously tried to look tough. It was a little hard to do though when one of your arms had multiple lines of blood running down it and she looked like if the abomination let go of her she would collapse. “Of course, but I wasn’t being stupid about it. My abomination had its hand acting as a membrane between me and the blossom so it didn’t properly connect to me, I had standing orders for it to pull me away every five minutes and that if I didn’t react, they were to bandage me and put me to bed for the night.” Amity turned away as a new set of tears came down her cheeks and she whispered, “I-I thought you knew I was too strong for anything like… like that.”

Odalia curled her hands into fists as she fumed away for a second. She would have thought Blights knew better than to hurt themselves, ‘safely’ or not, but she was apparently wrong about that. The mother shut her eyes before beginning to try and rub her temples as she calmed herself. Why would Amity be like this? She was stronger than this. She wasn’t a fool like Emira or Edric. But then, she’d thought the same thing about her twins before they turned against her and their sister.

She slowly stepped closer and had the abomination push Amity so that the young girl now had to fall into her arms. Odalia quickly wrapped her up before beginning to shush in her daughter’s ear. “I know. I know you are. I just got scared, especially after what you said.”

Amity spent a few moments unsure as to what to do exactly. It felt it’d been years since she’d been held like this, and even longer since she’d sought it out. After all, she was a Blight. She was supposed to be strong. Not some whimpering child. She wanted it so badly right now though as she grabbed her mother’s dress. “I… It just… Every day, the cracks keep growing. Where I’m supposed to go feels like it dims. I’m… I’m Amity Blight. Not…”

Odalia slowly moved her daughter to the bed before sitting down with her and beginning to stroke her head and beginning to use magic to heal her arm. “Shush. You don’t need to talk right now. We all have these sorts of days and you’ll be okay after it.” She then paused, knowing what would come if she stopped it there, before whispering, “Even Alador needed me like this sometimes during his early days in court, and you’re not even that old yet. So please, let us help.”

Amity opened her mouth to call her dad not a real Blight before stopping herself. All of Odalia’s children knew how furious such statements made her, but even more was that Amity didn’t want to think about it right now. She wanted to believe that her dad being weak excused her for being that way too. At least for one night. That it was okay that she was a bad Blight right now.

That did bring one thing to mind though. She started and stopped the thought perhaps a dozen times and could feel her mother shift how she sat each time she went to speak. It wasn’t until maybe an hour later, and a second set of bandages on Amity’s arm, that the young girl finally spoke again. “No one… No one liked you marrying dad, right? Well, what if… What if I said I might like someone who’d be even worse for us than him?”

Odalia winced at the fact that she knew who she was talking about but she doubted it’d be good to press who that someone might be right now. She’d be even happier to have not done it when later she got the full story from the twins but for now she merely ran her hand through her daughter’s hair. “I would say things have changed since I married your father and… And that I would support you. No matter who you chose, I would just want you to be with someone you loved.”

Amity looked up. She expected to see some sort of lie in her mother’s eyes. Something that told her that she didn’t mean it. That she’d maybe imagined the words. But this was one thing that Odalia had decided on long before some stupid, scared human stole her little Ami’s heart. She wouldn’t abandon her child for who she loved. Not like her mother had done to her. It was something she hadn’t even told Alador though because she didn’t, well… She didn’t want to look weak.

Odalia reached down and gently squeezed Amity’s cheek. “Your father and I have a day in about two weeks when we could see about getting you something to wear whenever you might ask this hypothetical someone out. And,” she said after a tense breath, “I’ll stay quiet about what you should pick unless you ask me so it’s you they see, not me.”

Amity smiled as finally her defenses burst. She couldn’t handle any of this anymore and she began to sob into her mother’s chest. It was all too much for the young girl and it still took her almost an hour to finally get herself to sleep in spite of how exhausted she was. Once she was tucked in though, Odalia walked over to the Blood Blossom, frowned and then turned to the abomination in the room. “Take this to the basement. I won’t risk my daughter hurting herself again, or the human from grabbing the blossom it will likely soon make.”

She then looked towards the hallway and narrowed her eyes. With a quick circle, the rug in the hallway was yanked forward and Edric fell face first onto the hardwood floor. Emira poked her head into the doorway a moment afterwards and then waved at their mother. “Oh, uh, good timing on our part I guess. Um, how is she?”

Odalia narrowed her eyes at the two before she stepped out of Amity’s room and closed her daughter’s door quietly. She then looked to her other children. Edric went to speak but she merely held up a single finger. The elder Blight then gestured to the abomination that was currently moving the Blood Blossom.

The three followed the creature for a few minutes until they were to the entrance to the basement. Both Emira and Edric looked into the darkness as the door was opened for the abomination but Odalia didn’t appear to have any intention to go down herself. At least, not yet. Instead, she looked to her twins and said, “You’re lucky that she didn’t bring you two up by name or that you didn’t wait to come tell me something was wrong.”

Edric and Emira obviously relaxed slightly from the news but Odalia didn’t let them off the hook so easily. “That doesn’t mean I don’t still blame you for her getting hurt. After all, Amity understands what it means to be a Blight and you two are beginning to hurt her in your disregard of such things.”

Emira obviously had to stop herself from rolling her eyes while Edric bit his cheek. The boy was the first to actually speak though as he said, “We wouldn’t have pushed her so far if we weren’t trying to help her. You should kn-”

“Did you even consider that it would be too far before she began to cry?”

“Of c-” Emira was cut off by Odalia’s intense gaze swapping to her. She opened her mouth to speak again but this time the words got caught in her throat. They wouldn’t quite come out. Wouldn’t quite cover for her this time.

Just as Odalia expected. “She worries about what being a Blight means. What her actions will make others think and what they may do to her future. Two things that I know you two butbut how often do you think your blatant disregard for your talents or status hurts her? Even when you two aren’t with her?”

Both twins hung their heads as Odalia turned on her heels. She didn’t look at them at this point as she said, “I will only allow you two to continue helping in all of this because I know you’ll do so to try and make up for what you did today. However, I will not put up with you two holding your sister back anymore. If you two continue to hurt her and make her worry, I will make sure that she no longer has a reason to think of you.”

Both of the twins swallowed hard before nodding. They were deathly pale at the threat because they’d heard the old family stories. Stories of Blights just… disappearing. Most weren’t true of course, and even Odalia would need to come up with a plan to act on this if they called her bluff, but they didn’t know these things. They only knew that only the abominations usually went in and out of the basement and cellars so they could hold anything. Anything.

Odalia stepped away as Emira and Edric looked to each other. Neither wanted to say anything but they were also already trying to think of what to do about today. They had been all afternoon. After all, their dumb fun was supposed to be just that. Dumb fun. And yet when it came to Amity, things kept going wrong like in the library.

Edrick blew out a long breath of air before crossing his arms and asking, “Pancakes?”

Emira grinned back before saying, “Pancakes.”

By the fifth day of being made pancakes, Amity started skipping breakfast at home so she didn’t have to deal with Emira and Edric trying to treat her.