Bonus Chapter - The Ruined Girl

Before Delphina became a teenager, on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, she made three wishes. She knew that was childish, but that was what the last evening of being a child was there for, wasn’t it?

So she took a piece of paper and wrote them down.

1. Get another name. ANYTHING!!!!!

2. Become different.

3. Become someone else.

Two of those were nearly the same, but she didn’t dare to write her real third wish down. Instead, she took off late at night, and just as the nearby church clock was striking midnight, causing horrible distortions in her hearing aid, she burned that piece of paper on top of a grave while whispering, “I want to raise the dead”.

Two of those wishes came true the next day; the other two had to wait ten more years.

Delphina had always hated her name. It started when she was very little, and she just couldn’t get it right. Her mother tried to hide her annoyance at the little girl being unable to reproduce her own name for weeks, but Delphina felt it anyhow.

When she entered preschool, the other kids made fun of her name, even though she now could say it properly most of the time. It wasn’t that bad in the beginning, but when the teachers noticed her difficulties, and she got her hearing aid, it meant she heard all of the whispering and laughing.

It didn’t get better at school, but she joined in with the jokes, openly showing her hate by making dolphin noises whenever she was in a bad mood and someone addressed her by name.

Mostly, she could keep it in check, but there were occasions when her anger boiled over, especially on her birthdays. So when her parents put a cake in front of her, with thirteen little candles and “Dolphina Love Day Grey Fox” written on it—not even the baker could get that monster right—and started singing “Happy Birthday Delphina Loveday Gray Fox, Happy Birthday to you”, she stood up as if to blow out the candles.

Then she pretended to slip and slammed her head into the cake with all the force she could muster. The hospital let her go home the next day, although she had a whole list of follow-up appointments already scheduled.

Two days after that, when she went back to school for the first time, the other kids and teens didn’t make jokes about her name. Many of them stared, but they were quiet. The gossiping and whispering behind her back started the next day. “Look, that’s the girl who took her own eye out with a candle. On purpose,” they would say. There had been other rumours, but she stomped them quickly.

Was she proud of how she had become different? No, but the other stories were worse than the truth.

Later, she couldn’t remember when or by whom it it been started, but by the end of the year everyone called her “ruin”, or “the ruined girl” behind her back. She liked the sound of that but had another spelling in mind. From then on, she was Rune.

Two wishes down, two to go.

“Your spell has taken fruit,” a dream whispered to Rune. “It’s been ten years in the making, but now it is ready. Do you still want to become someone else and raise the dead?” A smile showed on Rune’s face, making her look diabolical in the alarm clock’s red light showing 4:03. Rune never bothered with daylight saving time.