Holding a wild rose in her delicate fingers, Layla turned it round and round, almost envying its life and its beauty. In an instant, it was enveloped in ice. "That's much better," she mused softly, bitterly, and cast it aside. The rose shattered where it hit the ground.
Her raven colored hair whipped around her with a guest of wind and she brushed it back behind her ears to keep it out of her face, the cold air it carried didn't even sting. Sitting on that rock, in the middle of nowhere, she was too far gone. All feelings had been swallowed up and frozen over a long time ago.
When Layla was born, that hadn't even been her name. It was some annoying name that her father had given her, because her mother had been a woman and didn't have the right to name the children that she carried around in her womb for months. No, of course she didn't. The kind of world that she had been born into was one that she despised. Woman were only tools of men to do everything for them and to make them children, to carrying on their family name. More often than not, one man would have more than one woman. When a girl was born by any of his women, fathers simply looked at it as a way to eventually raise their financial standing, assuming that she wasn't more hassle growing up then he could sell her for as soon as the bled.
The fact that she was a "late bloomer," was very pleasing to Layla, since she spent fourteen years without such a nuisance. When it happened, however, her father had been quick to jump the gun on offers, trying to sell her off as she was some sort of pet. The evening before her father was supposed to make a decision on where to send her, Layla kissed her crying mother's cheek and told her, "I am leaving, but I am not going where that man wants me to. I will be well." True to her word, she vanished that night from her bedroom, never to be seen or heard from by her family again.
