8 Her Sickness

The heat inside the cottage was draining everyone's strength. The Chieftana was already in bed, two hands gripping the clothing that was hung on a beam of wood attached to the ceiling, specially made so she can find support in such a painful struggle. She was screaming loud and painful and in the background you could hear the Messa praying, or more like casting demons away.

It was the most grueling hour. The Chieftana was screaming in agony with each long excruciating contraction. The maidservants had to hold her steady while someone had to use the flat of her hands to help push the baby out and yet nothing was happening. She should have delivered by then yet the baby wasn't cooperating.

"The Devil was trying to block the baby from coming out!'' The Messa announced when he saw how the midwife and the maid servants were having a hard time with the child's birth. "Bring me the sacrifice!"

Someone brought a dove in front of the Messa. It was white one and it was strangely cooing as if singing a lullaby, above the Chieftana's screams. The Messa took a sharp knife and immediately slashed the neck of the cooing bird. The cooing stopped in an instant and blood gushed out from its neck. Its once white feathers were all covered with its own blood then and as if its death wasn't gruesome enough, the Messa threw the bird's body in the fire and casted something together with it.

Just then , the Chieftana's contractions intensified and her screams became torture.

"More Chieftana, more," The midwife called in her between her screams, "The child is almost here!"

Soon the woman in bed let out a blood-chilling scream, then another and another until she reached the end of her ordeal.

"Chieftana!" The maidservants cried at the sight of her collapse weakly in bed. She was still conscious but had no more strength left. She had bled too much and with the amount of blood everyone saw, they knew she's not going to last long. They started gathering beside her as some held her hands. She was a well adored Chieftana and her maid servants were like her children, and so they cried and prayed for her to live.

"Waaaaah'' The lusty cry of the infant took everyone's attention away from the Chieftana. It was a girl and the sight of her gave everyone more scare than the one they had earlier!

"Highest God what child is this!" The midwife let go of it immediately and the child fell on the soft bed. There was still blood all over her but no one dared to touch her and hushed her cries away.

The child, to everyone's fear and shock, not only had a sprinkle of fire red hair in her crown. She was all covered in red spots too like fresh wounds. Her face was mostly covered by it that made her look slightly deformed.

"She had the signs of the devil!" The Messa howled and stepped back terrified.

"That is not a Chieftana's child!"

"That is a devil's child! The devil had brought forth a spawn!"

***

Crescent woke up to the sound of her own sobbing. She was dripping wet with sweat and was heavily breathing. She had those nightmares again of a woman giving birth to a monster. When her breathing became steady, she brushed her hair back over her shoulder and mopped her cheeks dry. She rose from bed, walked a few steps to the kitchen and took a big gulp of cold water.

She turned to look at the clock, 2:49 AM.

"As always," She thought. She was still shaking then, of fear, as her nightmares always come with that. She wiped her face with her right hand out of frustration and turned to one corner of her room where she grabbed a small box and sat beside the window overlooking the big bright moon.

"Luna" she whispered unconsciously and stared at the moon for a while before she pulled a wax nylon string from the box and started weaving. She's starting a new dream catcher again, probably the two hundredth dream catcher she ever made for the year. This was her therapy for her nightmares. Whenever she's being hunted again by those gruesome dreams, she weaves dream catchers to shift her focus and calm herself.

She doesn't know what those dreams are, nor what they meant. All she knew was that, those dreams whenever it comes to her, flashes like they were real. As if at some point in time, it happened and that she was a part of it. She had sought help already and had been to many therapists yet the only answer they could give her was that her brain had suffered severely with the accident she had three years ago and that was causing her trauma. It was explained that to cope up with such trauma, her brain was creating unreal memories and hallucinations.

At one point she believed them. Three years ago, she had a car accident and she had been in a coma for two months. When she woke up, things for her had never been the same and the nightmares started coming one by one.

However as time went by, she felt like her dreams were more than a product of her trauma and everything around her turned into an irreconcilable mess that what was left with her was her desire to run from it all. That was one of the reasons why when she received an internship abroad, she packed her bags up and dared not to think twice of leaving home. At least in this foreign country, apart from her job that was keeping her schedule full, she can also breathe away from people that were making her more sick than she already was.