a story from the recent past.

name: emmanuella mariana amaro rosaria stregaage: ?? (last age placed her at 35 prior to "death")dob: aug 29, 1945

rosaria strega (born emmanuella mariana amaro) was born into a bloodline of religion and divine worship in her small humble homeland of sardenga. the townspeople knew her fairly well as "the dove stuck in [her] cage" for her family's strict ideals and their even stricter grasp on the young amaro girl, who they both mocked and took pity upon. her curiosity and intrigue for things deemed "unholy" in her parents' eyes made her the constant victim in various forms of physical and emotional abuse, accumulating in cruelty until she cut her hair and ran away at seventeen, never looking back from where she came from.

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living from cornerside to cornerside, it didn't take long for her to adopt a life of crime, stealing and finding whatever work she could that wasn't humiliating and kept her from being homeless.It was through her delinquent lifestyle she met the man who she would later fall in love with at eighteen: a lowly gangster with a penchant for terrorizing the towns he stepped foot in through petty theft and harassment. to this day she can never put a real face on the man she once loved, only being reminded of his dark, hypnotizing eyes and his strong, rough hands.

she was his ride or die girl—though deep down her heart only desired the man who claimed to have loved her to settle down with her eventually and get out of the dangerous game the two of them played. such desires never came to be.
overtime, the deeper she sank into her lover's world, the gilded spontaneous rebellion she once had matured into that of hardened survival.

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lying to the cops, getting her hands dirty in more ways than one, it was all in the name of loyalty for her increasingly violent and distant lover, who like her parents was not shy in resorting to open palms and fists whenever he deemed fit. it all reached its peak a couple of nights before her arrest, in an argument that ended in a dead man riddled with bullet holes and a bruised, traumatized woman behind the pistol. no one but her knows what became of the body, but most knew not to ask.

The crime that did her in is a long story that she prefers not to tell twice, but what she's able to tell those who ask are two things: the first that she was without a home, a friend she could trust, and any family willing to take her in; the second being that she was all of that on top of miraculously being "pregnant" with a child she had no way of being able to provide for.

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the first two years of captivity was nothing short of a living hell, between sadistic prison guards and inhumane prisoners. any attempt she made at telling those of her particular situation only garnered her the same mockery and abuse she was used to her entire life, until the summer of 1967 breathed new life: her son.giving birth to her only child changed something in rosaria; it was then her motivation of getting out of prison became less about her own salvation and more about being able to be better for the baby she was forced to abandon.

denied plea bargains and permission to know the identity and location of her child made her more determined to try harder, and eventually that determination paid off in the form of a lighter sentence of 6 years instead of the full ten.
for years she never stopped looking for her son, traveling from coast to inland to find him. a tip from the town's old hag led her to a location that was right under her nose: a church—the only church in town.

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Meeting the man of the church in a confessional, she begged the priest to let her reunite with her son. the priest not only denied her, but already told her the "truth" of her absence to her son, who believed her to have died in childbirth. to tell him any different would've "broken his spirit farther than what is known",
spoke the priest. the woman only relented after his words and his actions proved stronger than an estranged mother's cries for repentance and redemption.the rest of the tale is hazy, even for her. she can only remember bits and pieces between meeting with the father and where she felt herself be unearthed from the ground itself, hands tightening around her neck, in a state her slowly weakening mind could only perceive as hell incarnate.

to this day she still doesn't know how long it was that she had been in there; days, months, years, decades?her feeble mind and body only knew pain up until the day she was found by the priest, barely able to express any emotion in her blackened heart.
it was all in vain anyway, as the village she knew burned to the ground, joined by the screams of those damned by the hellfire below.

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