aconite:// a case study

def:// a valueless plant growing wild.
 // an undesirable or troublesome plant, especially one that grows profusely where it is not wanted

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There are things that should not exist. Things born wrong, in a way that goes beyond words, beyond magic; beyond flesh and bones and blood. Things born empty, things that are hollow and vacant. 

Aconite Maikoa thinks that perhaps she is one of them. 

In a kinder world, Aconite’s hollow and empty places might have been filled with love and light. She would be the kind of person who smiled and laughed freely, a happiness that was given rather than the kind that had to be nursed out of the dark. Aconite would have a heart that beat properly rather than the mangled, hollow thing that ached just underneath her collarbone.

In the world she is actually born into, the first emotion Aconite learns is hate. There is the hate from a mother who never saw her after trying to suffocate her: Hate because Aconite’s very existence ruined her.

Aconite’s mother was cold and cruel at her very best but Aconite only ever knew her at worst. Aconite’s childhood was listless and nameless, as she trailed after her mother from one small town to the other - selling potions, ointments to cure any ailments. Aconite, at first, did not recognize anything wrong with their relationship ; her mother called her Girl and she in return called her Miss - a working relationship - dependent on each other for food and shelter rather than love and affection. In time, she began to associate her mother with mallow like the flower. In the language of flowers it speaks of being consumed by love, aching for it and that’s what Aconite saw - a woman consumed by love and now had to deal with the bitter consequences and ruination - and that was what Aconite was. A bitter consequence. Ruination. A silhouette that followed her mother like a second shadow. 

Aconite’s mother hated her and she realizes it much like someone wakes up from a dream - slowly and then all at once. And it’s with that realization that hate begins to fill in Aconite’s emptiness, little by little.

Then comes the acrimony: the sort of withering, bittered spite that builds slowly over the days, months; the natural byproduct of hate. If hate is the soil in which Aconite was planted in, then it’s the bitterness that feeds her until she blooms - beautiful, deadly - a weed. A valueless plant that despite all odds, despite the fact that it is not wanted - it grows anyway. The roots of her so tangled and twisted in the soil that it bleeds into every aspect of Aconite’s life.

By the time Aconite turns ten and is released to the care of the wide, empty world, all of her potential has been filled by rage and hatred.