An'owyn

Stubborn to the End

“Why does your Mother not love you Cerelia? Nor your sister? She refuses even to look at you both.”

Smirking, the willowy figure of a girl stopped leafing through her book for a moment. She propped her feet, clad in purple silk slippers, on top of the table on which she had been studying and looked expectantly at Cerelia, sat at the table next to her. The wooden surface creaked a little, the sound echoing either age or shoddy workmanship – perhaps both. Every wall was lined if not with ancient-looking bookshelves then with cracked, crumpled parchment – maps, recipes, primers for languages of which Cerelia had barely even heard.

The cramped space and uncomfortable humidity made her uneasily claustrophobic. Dust motes hovered in the air, slowly floating towards the grubby windows as if trying to escape the stifling atmosphere.

“Tramp, listen to me when I’m talking to you.”

The girl unexpectedly slapped her hard across the face, vivid silver eyes glittering with ferocity and disgust. Her full lips stretched into a playful, satisfied smile as Cerelia’s head jerked to the side with an irrepressible yelp of shock and pain, and she leant back into her seat, beams of sunlight managing to struggle through the dirt-encrusted windows to reflect off her shining mane of violet hair. Barely older than Cerelia, her skin gleamed with youth even in the muffled gloom of the library, her eyebrows drawn like two dark, decisive brushstrokes against her dewy skin.

Piles of tomes and age-old scrolls were strewn across the desk with as much respect as heaps of rubbish, their pages stained with age. A strange, spindly metallic object held up a test tube of moss green viscous liquid that gave off occasional puffs of smoke. Verishia barely appeared to notice a cloudy purple orb, set in its ornately-decorated holder, resting precariously on the edge of the table as if to drop off at any second, apparently more interested in taunting the other girl like an animal in a cage.

Cerelia gulped and managed to mumble, “Mother loves me, Verishia. She is ill, that’s all. She loves Xan too,” her eyes staying focused on the cluttered, crimson velvet-clad surface of the table to ward off tears - the harsh handprint on her cheek burnt almost as sharply as the sting of humiliation.
“Is that why she beats you, Cerrie? Because she loves you so?” Verishia grinned, placing the book in her lap on top of the heap of others. Her tone was childish, mocking, waiting for an excuse.

An excuse that wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t rise to it, wouldn’t give her that satisfaction.

Carefully, Cerelia stood up and replaced the chair under the table, flinching slightly as surprisingly strong beams of light shone into her eyes. Silently, she went to the creaking, heavy wooden door and left without looking back, pointedly ignoring the intense heat of Verishia’s eyes on her back.

Her mother loved her, under her harsh, bitter exterior. She knew it. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, anyway.


~~~~


“We won’t care for them when you have gone. They will have to find another refuge. We refuse them.”

The Night Elf woman stood by the door shook her head briefly, barely wasting the effort. Her long navy hair flicked slightly from the motion, a perfectly trimmed mane that gleamed in the fading light of the afternoon that struck her cheekbones, highlighting the elaborate markings over her eyes. She was flat, expressionless - the portrait of a woman whose beauty was unmistakable yet captured by an inept painter. She eyed Darlaniette without emotion, merely waiting for the response. The seconds drew out, each one slightly more prolonged than usual.

“It’s not like that would surprise me. However, you’re mistaken. I don’t intend to go anywhere.”

Darlaniette had been losing strength day by day, the tendrils of Fel taint having spread effortlessly from under the bandage along the length of her arm, to begin work at her chest. The black bruise-like marks were clogging her veins with the cloying sweetness of decay and inside of her body - not that she would accept it - her injuries were killing her. Her sickness was now clear within moments to all who saw her, her complexion devoid of any colour except the thin lines of black that spread like some foul, polluted plant, taking foothold on every inch of skin it conquered. The slightest of movements made her gasp for air, a fish out of water, and the heavy shadows under her eyes hinted at the nights she lay awake, wracked with sobs and spasms of pain that mercilessly woke her from any slumber she managed to find. Sunlight burnt her eyes now and her voice scraped along eardrums like fingernails on a blackboard, from misuse and agony.


The woman at the door allowed herself to frown slightly. Clad in an exquisitely-cut robe of fine turquoise material, the embellishment around the neckline and sleeves caught the light, flickering from moment to moment. She paused for a short time, before answering, “You’re fooling no one. I doubt you even fool yourself with that reckless line – the same recklessness that appears to hound you. First, two children out of a careless encounter and then your pitiful attempt to fight a demon… It would be amusing, if it weren’t so tiresome.”

Darlaniette appeared almost to flinch, a tinge of blush rising on her cheeks, yet her mind was too dulled by weariness to allow a sharp response, her tongue too weak to support it. The other woman, sensing no further amusement in the taunting of such frail prey, continued to speak.

“The Priests have all said the same, that you will not last the night. Will you really go against that many opinions? That would be stubborn, even for you.”

Darlaniette gulped noticeably, the action sending shudders of discomfort down her spine. Beads of sweat congregated on her forehead from the exertion of propping herself up against the headboard of the bed as she whispered, “They really say I won’t last? Unanimously?”

The woman shook her head with something bordering on amusement, glancing up at the figure in the bed with eyes like molten silver, “It is surprising you have managed thus far. Do you see now?”


Stubbornly, she offered no answer.


The Night Elf at the door arched an eyebrow, glanced over her shoulder and nodded. Upon opening her mouth to speak, her words flowed fluidly across the air like a sheet of silk, faintly melodious, “Cerelia is here. She was adamant that she could come see you, very strong-willed to the point of stubborness. Considering her parentage, I was frankly surprised that anything of merit could come from her.”

“And… what of Xanthiaz?”

“I came across her by the lake, but she showed no wish to visit despite my rather blunt explanation of the situation.”

“As always, then. Bring Cerelia through,” Darlaniette managed to reply before another sudden, irrepressible fit of coughing. She reached out to the bedside cabinet and managed to recover something from the top drawer, amongst wrinkled handkerchiefs and assorted trinkets. A small, woven purse.


Tentatively, the fragile figure of the young girl appeared in the doorway, her vivid blue hair dulled by the cloud-dimmed light filtering through the blinds. She edged her way along the outside of the room until she was stood by the bed, a tiny crease caught between her eyebrows. Holding the purse against her chest until her coughing subsided, Darlaniette weakly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

A smear of red-brown blood contrasted dramatically to her deadly pallor, dramatically coloured like a line of expensive lipstick, as she curled back under her meager bedding into the foetal position, her breathing labored.

“Dor, promise me one thing. Remember all that I’ve done for you, think on how I’ve cared for you, and do me this one favour,”

Struggling with the contents, she emptied a large handful of gold coins into her hands, the overflow spilling onto the ragged bedsheets. There must have been… fifty perhaps, and the other woman tilted her head curiously, a glittering of greed lighting in her gaze. She opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off. Surprising, how quickly the faint, rasping voice made the Night Elf in the doorway fall silent.

“Take this money and go with your sister. I don’t care where you go or what becomes of you Dor, but you will make sure that none of them benefit from it. After all they have done, they deserve nothing. Now, take it.”

Flinching instinctively as she reached out to take the coins from her mother’s hands, the noise of metal on metal, in Cerelia’s eyes, had no place in this room where her mother suffered and fought the only battle she could never win. After the initial recoil of automatic revulsion, a faded smirk found its way onto Darlaniette’s thin lips, the maliciousness in her eyes barely more than a spark.

More and more coins were scooped into the oversized satchel pockets until Cerelia could no longer ignore her mother’s life dwindling before her eyes, hovering like the faintest unstable mirage in a haze of sickly green and grey. Clinging onto her mother’s hand, as though the strength of her grip alone would keep her in this world, the little girl bit her lip hard, puncturing the skin with a sore red-raw mark that went unnoticed.

Streaks of lilac, peach and lavender light shone through the tiny cracks in the shutters as sunset approached – her mother had detested the light the past few days, suffering intense migraines – painting themselves abstractly across the bedclothes and the emotionless, statuesque figure of the stranger with her back to the window. Eventually, she spoke, her words sharply edged with cold, self-righteous anger.
“So, you use your daughter only as a tool by which to achieve your own means, even after you have gone?”

Yet from the bed, there came no sharp response or mocking answer. Just the sobs of the child as the tears dripped ceaselessly down her nose and cheekbones.

Outside, the sun drifted below the barren horizon, the sky now full only with a thick layer of stormy grey clouds. The last of the shades of peach, pink and blue slowly died out and filtered from the sparse interior of the room, leaving the scene set in depressing grey scale. The shadows were darker, the only light coming from the dying, flickering wax candle on the bedside table.

A line of molten wax rolled down the side of the candle, its path navigating obstacle after lumpy obstacle until eventually, reluctantly, it stopped – cold, stiff, dead, just like her mother.

And as the black strands of poison spread across her chest, running through her heart and squeezing around her ribcage in snake-like, malicious curves, accompanied only by a daughter she never loved and one of the many Elves who had shunned her, Darlaniette’s chest heaved in a final tremor of pain, before she felt no more.