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[Tyrana]: 64.Xaadn.Chapt
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He heard it call out. It burned his ears, tore through hid mind. He told the others. They flew.
Shivering, Xaadn pulled on some shoes, and brushed the red snow off her shoulders. She needed more snow to clean the blood off her arms, but there was no chance of her lifting the blanket again, and looking outside. She scraped the majority of it off with her fingernails, and her saliva did the rest.
She kept a sweater upstairs as well for when the nights were unbearably cold. (She fell asleep in the attic a lot. She certainly spent more time in it than in her bedroom…) She slipped this sweater on over her shirt to hide the blood that had dripped. She then crossed her fingers, and unlatched the door to the pantry.
She climbed down the ladder, and opened the pantry door, narrowly missing a servant who was rushing with some ridiculous amount of fish balancing on a plate on his shoulder. He cursed, and bolted out of the way in time for Xaadn to slip out and close the door behind her. Once in the kitchen, she tried her hardest to blend in with the vast amount of people, and make her way across the room to the hallway. She got caught in a few paths, and was given several dirty looks, but she mostly got through unshaken. She also managed to slip a biscuit off of a table somewhere and hide it in her pocket. She wondered if it would harm the instrument, then decided if it did, it wouldn’t be all bad. Anything that could make a sound that terrible…
“Xaadn, dear! What on earth has happened to you?!” When Xaadn had turned to avoid colliding with yet another rushing servant, she ran into “Fourteen”, who was one of the kitchen’s grunt-cooks, if you will… The fourteenth, incidentally. She and Xaadn got long okay. She was a lonely old woman, and enjoyed any company she could find. Xaadn looked up at her, forced a smile, and shrugged.
“You spent the night up there again, didn’t you? You have a nice bed downstairs. No sense in freezing half to death… And without supper, if I know you well enough. Here: If anyone asks, just tell them I gave it to you,” Fourteen said, pushing a small pie into Xaadn’s hands. “No worries of anyone stopping you this morning, though, probably. With all the bustle. Now you get to your room. You look as if you hadn’t washed for…”
Xaadn looked at her gratefully and scurried out of the kitchen, down the stairs, and to her room. Fourteen was as close a friend as she had ever had, and was more of a mother-figure than her mother had ever been.
When she was five, she came to live with her uncle, and had only seen her mother three times that year, and they weren’t particularly happy memories. Her mother came, and the whole castle became uneasy. Nalnsyr had never been fond of his sister, and in the last years Xaadn had seen her before she left permanently, she could almost see why. Her mother had become delusional and unstable. She spoke of star carriages, and space portals, and her ‘life before’, which was usually some completely incomprehensib
The third and last time, however, Xaadn came across her accidentally. It was night, and they were wheeling her down the hall, evidently coming from the basement. Xaadn was told several times of how much of an embarrassment her mother was to Master Nalnsyr, and how they couldn’t direct her through the usual doors and hallways, so as not to frighten the Master’s guests. Apparently, she would enter through the basement.
This time she wasn’t walking. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. The restraints held her arms down at her sides, and the sedatives caused her pupils to enlarge, covering the entirety of her eyes. They shone silver in the light from the lamp. Her hair was half gone, and the rest was hanging limply around and over her face. Xaadn was terrified. Seeing her mother was something that frightened her anyway, and though this time, she was… quite calm… Xaadn had never felt so scared.
The servants who were pushing her cart didn’t notice Xaadn in the shadow of the hallway. But her mother did. She turned her weak head toward her daughter, and opened her mouth. A slight crackling sound emitted, but nothing else. Xaadn wanted to run, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t take her eyes off of the living corpse that was her mother.
The servants wheeled her around the corner, and then she was gone. That was the last memory Xaadn had of her mother, and to the day she would die, she would never tell anyone what she saw that night.
Xaadn hastily shut the door to her bedroom, and licked the hot gravy that was streaming down her arm. Seeing no reason to waste time waiting for the pie to cool off, she filled her tiny stomach as quickly as she could swallow, and sat on her bed, warmed and full and happy. Upon checking her pocket, she discovered the biscuit she had swiped had some sort of fruit jam in the center. Surprised and pleased with her sudden bounty of consumable fortune, she devoured this as well.
Although her uncle didn’t care for her like the father he was intended to be, Nalnsyr wasn’t an entirely bad man. He was rather compassionate, in fact, although his… occupation… and his hard life had given him sort of a cold demeanor. He was just about afraid of Xaadn, almost a spitting image of his estranged sister, and having her scuttling around gave him no comfort. She was by no means a bad looking child. She was small, of course, and light-framed. Her eyes large and sad and black as ebony, and her pupils silver, which was unusual, but not entirely unheard of. Her skin was smooth and dark grey, and her hair so white it seemed to give off light of its own. He always saw her as someone who had stepped out of an old black-and-whit