Paragliding through Paradise Lost

Elias Veyra had grown up in a house where justice was only a word. His father, a high-court judge, was admired in public but monstrous at home. His father tormented him , mixing it with fists and words until Elias's life became a prison gilded in gold. The public was too blind to see the cruelty festering behind the closed doors. He beat Elias when he stumbled, mocked him with the fates of the men he sentenced, and once forced him to watch a beggar plead in court only to laugh as he signed his imprisonment. Elias swore that day he would never be like him.

Then came Anna. She was the daughter of a nightclub singer who had died too young, engulfing her in a life of despair. She was raised by a stepfather who resented her existence and a stepmother who brushed off her existence with a mere brush of shoulders and a dismissive attitude. She carried her wounds like broken glass in her eyes, but to Elias she was a lustrous light. They met at university, clung to each other like lifelines, and built a secret world of love where no judge’s gavel or cruel stepmother could reach them.

For a while, it worked. They dreamed of escaping this atrocity together. They whispered of marriage, of children who would never grow up in houses of hate, their hidden meeting spots, corners by the library were witnesses to their fateful moments, portraying their undying passion for each other. However, monsters do not release their children so easily.

One summer night, Anna and Elias were attacked outside a gala. Elias was beaten and his back was peppered with bullets, left bleeding on the curb, while Anna was dragged into an alley. The man who mercilessly hurt her was the arrogant son of a wealthy tycoon — untouchable by the law. The trial was a farce. The boy walked free, his affluence paving his path towards invincibility. Elias sat in the courtroom as his father, presiding judge, hammered his gavel and smirked while declaring the case dismissed.

Anna broke that day. Elias followed soon after. Sparks of vengeance and detest ignited in them. They might as well morph into the impertinent monsters they came from.

At first, they wept together. Elias's bloodshot eyes, built a fortress of tears in them as he clamped down on his throat, at a desperate attempt to control himself . They raged together. Then they planned together.

If the world worshipped monsters, then they would become worse.

Elias began with his father. He poisoned his whiskey one night, the same brand the man had always forced him to sip as a boy. With pure satisfaction sparkling in his hazel brown eyes, he grinned as he watched his father writhed, gasping, barely managing to utter a word. Elias seized his father’s hair, yanking it back as the old man gurgled in anguish. Elias threw him aside on the floor. His lifeless body lay there, head swollen, while his son stood boastfully beside him — not an ounce of remorse in his eyes.. “Like mother,” he whispered, “but slower.”

Anna dealt with her stepmother, envisioning a dastardly outcome for her. She lured the woman to the nightclub her birth mother had once worked in, locked the doors, and lit the curtains aflame. She stood in the alley watching smoke curl out the windows, her lips trembling as the screams rose. Her pupils dilated as the sight of the incineration reflected in her eyes. "For her,” she told herself, clutching Elias’s hand.

Her stepfather drowned weeks later. A yacht trip gone wrong, the tabloids said. In truth, Anna had held his head under, watching bubbles rise as Elias steered them further out to sea. Their annihilation welled her up with everlasting ecstasy as she was pacified after retrieving her mother's well deserved dignity.

And the boy who had ruined her? His car went off a bridge at midnight. Investigators called it drunk driving. No one suspected Elias had cut the brakes. And it stayed that way.

The city mourned a string of tragedies. Power shifted. Rivals took blame. The press devoured scandal after scandal, overthrowing the underlying foundation backing up every affluent figure, never once looking at the quiet couple who walked through it all untouched.

Elias and Anna moved into his father’s mansion, the very house he once hated. The rooms seemed smaller without the monster inside. His stepmother — too naïve to suspect — welcomed Anna warmly. To her, they were simply two young lovers making a life.

Years passed. They graduated, built futures, and Elias slipped into his father’s robes, taking the judge’s seat he once despised. The gavel felt heavy in his grip, but it fit his palm. Outside, the world whispered of justice. Inside, Elias knew the truth: he had become the very monster he had hated, the shadow he had tried to escape.

And he smiled.

Because monsters, he had learned, were the only ones who ever won.

Anna found herself expecting. Fear haunted her until the day she gave birth to a daughter — alive, breathing, beautiful.

They didn’t know how to be perfect parents. But they knew what not to do: no fists, no cruelty, no silence where love should be.

At night, when their baby cried, Elias sometimes caught his reflection in the nursery window — the stern eyes of his father staring back. He hated it. But when Anna slipped her arms around him and their daughter giggled between them, he let the hate fade. With their newfound elation and a second chance at life with their beautiful daughter, their grotesque murders and haunting memories trailed away into nothingness.

They had become monsters. They had killed, burned, drowned, and lied.

And so, Elias and Anna lived on, survivors cloaked in normalcy, their love forged in vengeance. No one would ever know the truth, except them. And as they smiled at the life they had carved, they didn’t care—they had become monsters, yes, but monsters who had persevered.