Welcome to Gaia! ::

Kirbeh-chan has finished chapter 17.

It's really long.

You're welcome.

But she isn't sure if she should put it up. It's rather freakier, morbider, and depressinger than chapter 16, which I should have put a warning on. And stuff happens.

So, warning--rated PG-13 for violence. And for the not-so-subtle deadly faults of the mortal race.

And let me point out first that everyone has a story. Ametris isn't just about Kamile and Everan. So even if you don't care about Vix or Dirstei or Shima or Marli, their stories are important, because it's who they are and how they act. And how they act is obviously very important to Kamile.

[And I will explain once more that Luci is pronounced Luchi, because you'll get confused.]


Chapter Seventeen: Tortured Hell

Kayle turned Marli onto her back and propped her head up with his book, arranging her arms neatly at her side. Marli drifted in and out, keeping her eyes tightly closed, trying very hard to focus on Kayle’s voice instead of the nightmare visions hidden behind her eyelids.

“It’s okay, Marli…just calm down….”

He pressed something damp and cold against her cheek, of which she was very grateful.

“Just breathe, Marli, you’re okay.”

“Kayle,” she choked out, wanting to tell him all she had seen, demand some explanation, but she didn’t get much further than his name.

“C’mon, Marli…take a deep breath…that’s it.”

His voice was very reassuring—quiet from years of library-whispers, calm from some vast store of patience that must have been passed down for millennia. She obeyed and took a few deep, slow breaths, but the panic still rose in her, threatening to choke her.

“Everything’s fine now,” Kayle reassured her. “The healer missed after all—waste of good medicine if you ask me—and she’s calmed down a bit. Pilori isn’t hurt either. They did find blood on the blanket, but…well, it’s nothing, I suppose. She probably just cut her arm on the glass, I don’t think it was serious….”

While he told her this, Marli closed her eyes and breathed deeply in and out, trying to reclaim her gift of speech. Her heart stopped racing after a minute, and her body fell back into its natural rhythm.

“Kamilé’s in the graveyard,” she managed, after a long time. “She…I don’t….”

“The graveyard?” Kayle sounded confused and very much alarmed. “Should I go get h—?”

“No, DON’T!” Marli shouted, her voice thin and shaky. “Don’t,” she repeated weakly.

“What happened?”

Marli gave herself thirty seconds or so to regroup her thoughts and calm her breathing, and then pushed herself up. Taking a few more deep breaths to calm her dizziness, she then explained exactly what had happened, her voice betraying her fear.

“There is something wrong with her,” Marli finished, shaking so hard that she could barely stay up. “I don’t even know if she’s innocent after all….”

She pressed her palms against her eyes to stop the tears before they came, and contain them if they did regardless.

“That’s an awful thing to say, Marli,” Kayle objected, though he too looked concerned. “We already said she couldn’t have done it. She’s just…she lost her brother….”

Marli frowned, thinking hard. “It’s that,” she decided. “Everan dying. That did something to her…made her act funny…maybe—?”

Suddenly she jumped up, and nearly fell back down again from the nauseating spinning of her head. Ignoring this, and ignoring Kayle’s protests regarding her fragile health, she strode into the nonfiction section of the library. The healing section was across the room, about ten feet up; she climbed onto the ladder and started scanning the shelves.

“What are you looking for?” Kayle called up to her in his semi-loud library whisper. “Look, see, the books about burns and broken bones and all that are already down here….”

“Found it!” she said triumphantly, leaping gracefully onto the floor. Ignoring Kayle’s cry of surprise at her abrupt descent, she showed him the book. “More and Less Common Mental Illnesses. Perfect.”

And again ignoring his questions and protests, she flopped down on an armchair and flipped earnestly through the book.

“What’re you looking for?” Kayle asked her.

“What she’s got. Let’s see…she hasn’t been herself, she’s been kinda…out of it…what would you call that? Detached, maybe…loss of memory…and then there’s that whole ‘possessed by dead people’ thing….”

“Marli, she’s not—”

“No, this isn’t it,” she cut across him. “Or this,” she added as she turned the page. “Hmm….”

She flipped patiently through the book until she reached somewhere close to the middle, and found a likely possibility.

“Here!” she said excitedly to Kayle. “Look, I think this is it…. ‘Severance, [KV] discovered 2080 when yeah, yeah, who cares…. After a tragedy such as the destroying of one’s house or city, death of a loved one, or some form of abuse or personal attack, a victim may find themselves unable to handle the mental stress. In order to handle the situation, the victim will in a sense hide inside their mind, stowing carefully away the thoughts and memories of events that cause them pain, in a sense, “severing” themselves from reality, and presenting a different image to the world to take care of their affairs. This is not permanent, usually only lasting as long as the aftermath of the tragedy persists or the pain of loss continues, but it can have lasting effects on the victim if they are deluded into thinking that their “other self” actually exists. Severance is sometimes confused with the impossibility of having more than one personality.

‘The effects of sealing away certain memories is that all other memories may become unclear or lost, and the victim will have problems recalling relationships with others, trusting even those known well, rationality, anger or fear, speaking or listening, and may seem listless, forgetful, suicidal, or detached.’ Kayle, this is it!”

“Severance?” he repeated doubtfully. “I dunno, Marli, I’ve never heard of that before….”

“Of course you wouldn’t, it has to do with tragedy and what do Ametrisans know about that? This all fits…but I don’t know if we should go to Elder Srai with this, it might actually work against us instead of help….”

“Yeah, especially that little bit about rationality and anger. She won’t interpret that very well.”

“I…I dunno….” Marli hesitated, feeling a little guilty with herself. “Irrationality…Kayle, what if, after Everan was killed…?”

“Kamilé wouldn’t do that,” he said at once. “She never would.”

“Kayle, she got angry with me in the graveyard…it was scary, I thought she was going to tear me apart…and I think her eyes turned red….”

“What?” Kayle snorted, exactly the reason she had left this out the first time. “C’mon, Marli….”

“Would I lie about this kind of thing? I…I don’t know, Kayle…it’s possible….”

“Well, why don’t you find Srai’s witnesses and ask them about it?”

“Yeah….” Marli’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! Great idea, Kayle! And if Everan was still there…”

“…then Kamilé couldn’t have done it,” Kayle finished firmly. “We’ll get right to it in the morning.”

“Oh…no, I have to teach, sorry.”

“It’s okay. The witnesses probably won’t like you anyway, they’re pretty mad that you’re on Kamilé’s side…I’ll take care if it.”

“Thanks, Kayle…well, I’d better get home….”

She yawned widely as she headed for the door, but once it had opened two inches she groaned and slammed it again.

“Stupid rain….”

“You can stay here, if you want,” Kayle offered, hiding his face behind a book once more. “There’s plenty of room.”

“Yeah, okay.” Marli looked around for a blanket. “I’ll just…sleep on a couch…where’s a blanket?”

Kayle found her one, and she thanked him and made to leave. But then she stopped.

“Kamilé…” she said guiltily, glancing at the door. “I left her…she’s still out there….”

“We can’t do anything now,” Kayle placated her. “It’s storming outside. And besides, what makes you think she’ll still be there?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“She’s eleven, it’s a graveyard on a dark, stormy night, and Everan isn’t buried there. If I was her, I would be long gone by now.”

“True,” Marli admitted, feeling relieved, then a little guilty again. Nothing could drag her back to that place until it was bright daylight once more.



In a tiny house deep into the forest, all of it but the first room underground, a fire glowed in the stone fireplace, and the table was set for dinner. There were five places at the table, but only one person sat at it; Vix, leaning on his elbow, cheek in hand, absently picking at the delicious-smelling concoction his mother had made. She bustled around in the kitchen upstairs—though she moved softly, taking care to be quiet, she still made the only noises in the entire house, other than the scraping of Vix’s fork as he swirled his potatoes around and the raindrops and occasional thunderclap.

His mother came in, the red-blonde hair he had inherited falling out of its long braid. “Stay quiet, honey,” she said softly to him. “Luci’s sleeping.”

She’s always sleeping, he muttered to himself, knowing he would never say it out loud. Luci’s…condition…had already given his mother too many worry lines on her forehead, made her shed too many tears.

“The healer said….” His mother stopped as her voice quavered, swallowing before she began again. “The healer said she should be asleep for a long time after she takes her medicine, so don’t wake her up in the morning, either, all right?”

“Okay, Mom,” he said listlessly.

“Eat your dinner, honey, it’ll get cold.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“And I washed your blankets, so you can sleep in your room tonight—”

“I don’t want to sleep in there, Mom,” he snapped, slapping his fork onto the table. “Ever again.”

“But, sweetheart,” she said, confused, “it’s your room….”

“No,” he muttered to his food. “It’s Rhoen’s room.”

His mother said nothing. Vix knew he had brought her to tears, visible or not.

Finally, she spoke. “Is something wrong, Vix?”

He wanted to deny it, but she would see through it, and he couldn’t cause her any more worry. But he couldn’t tell her about what had happened in the square today…he decided to get as close to the truth as he could.

“They let that girl back in school.”

“What girl?”

“The one that killed Dad and Rhoen.”

His mother froze; he saw it out of the corner of his eye. She carefully kept her face expressionless as she replied, “Did they, now?”

“Yeah,” he said tonelessly. “Professor Marli says that the Elders say she didn’t do it, but they’re idiots.”

“Don’t talk about the Elders like that, honey,” she said automatically, her eyes distant and hard. “Why did they change their mind?”

“Dunno.” Vix’s voice was hollow, disguising his anger towards that girl…he could still see her when he closed his eyes, and even though she had seemed frightened and hurt, as harmless as Luci, hatred still boiled through his veins. Not only had she killed half his family, not only had she upset his mother this much and been near his sister, but she had also said gods-knew-what to Luci, feeding her whatever lies, giving her false hope. He forced himself not to feel guilty, even a little—perhaps he should have assured Luci that there was nothing to worry about, but it wasn’t worth lying to his only sibling left.

His mother muttered a string of curse words that were not meant for his ears. But the last statement she made was completely audible, fuelled by an uncharacteristic emotion—grief for her son and daughter, fury for her husband.

“That girl needs a good stoning,” she muttered, unknowingly the first person to say that in thousands of years.

Vix picked up his fork and shoveled a piece of potato into his mouth. “Huh,” he said around it, so quietly that his mother couldn’t hear. “Great idea. Thanks, Mom.”



Before Marli made her way back home, about half an hour before dawn, she peered cautiously around the giant root at the graveyard. She wanted to wait until noon, possibly, when the sun would be high, but this was the best lighting she could get without being late and unprepared for her class. The muddy grass squished under her feet as she hesitantly edged further in, until she could see the entire expanse of the graveyard.

Not a soul. Or a living soul, anyway.

Feeling an odd, confused mixture of apprehension and relief, she hurried back to the schoolhouse.

The first thing that greeted her when she opened the door was Kamilé.

This time she really did scream and jump, and just barely stopped herself from running away. The classroom was dark and gloomy, the furniture looming eerily in the half-light like solidified shadow. A wide, thin array of pre-dawn light fell onto her—she was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, swaying back and forth and staring at the ground. As she looked up at Marli, the tears drenching her cheeks caught the light. Her eyes were wide, a misty silver.

“Everan wasn’t there,” she said, in a tiny, strangled voice. “He…he wasn’t there….”

Marli was lost for words, shock still pouring over her like continuous downpours of icy water.

Kamilé touched the back of her hand to her temple, and for the first time, Marli noticed that her face was covered in blood.

“Hurts,” she whispered, dropping her open palm—it too was leaking blood.

Marli stared at her; in this light, bleaching of her of color, rendering her to a small figure made of light and darkness, she might have been a tiny, lost spirit. Her eyes were blank and almost white, her teardrops glittered like little crystals, and she still swayed back and forth, back and forth, as if she could not stop moving or she would disappear. Marli fought the urge to slam the door and run, shaking violently.

Kamilé watched her, tears making tracks in the blood on her cheek.
Blood. Ghosts didn’t bleed. And if they did, would it be dark, dark red, black in this light, or would it be silver like the little tearstains…?

Marli realized as she and Kamilé continued to stare at each other that she would have to break the silence first. Otherwise, they would stay here and watch each other until one of them fell asleep, the sane one (as Marli referred to herself) used her common sense and ran off, or until the…the kids came….

Aw no, Marli thought, the kids.

They would be here in an hour or so…Kamilé didn’t seem capable of moving. What would they do if they saw her here, sitting and staring at them with blank eyes, soaked to the skin, with blood covering half her face and hand? Their reaction couldn’t be good. As absolutely frightened as Marli was of her right now, it didn’t seem right to leave Kamilé by herself, or let her be attacked…she was still just a little kid….

“Umm…” Marli said quietly, unsure of what to say.

Kamilé watched her expectantly, blinking half-dried blood out of her eyes.
In the end, Marli decided to say nothing. She crossed over to the closet, never letting Kamilé out of sight, and grabbed the adhesive bandages, some medicine, and some fluffy white material to dab it on with. And again, she found herself bandaging Kamilé up, picking tiny shards of glass out of her forehead and hand, while the tiny girl stayed perfectly still, never once complaining about the pain or anything else, though she seemed to be annoyed that she could not sway back and forth.

When she no longer looked like a reanimated corpse (the newly risen sun helped) Marli stood up and put her things away.

“You can’t stay there,” she told Kamilé firmly, who still sat placidly in the center of the mat. “The other kids won’t like it. Go on, go sit against the wall.”

Kamilé looked at her like she was crazy, but when Marli glared and pointed she grudgingly stumbled to her feet and nestled into the farthest corner, leaning the side of her head against the wall and staring off into space. Marli thought she might be crying again.

The kids arrived in twos and threes, throwing unsettled glances at Kamilé before they sat close to the front. Vix stopped dead in the doorway when he saw her, fists and jaw clenched tight, taking deep, shaky breaths. He turned to shout at Marli, but she merely fixed him with a cool, expectant glance, and he swallowed, controlled himself, and sat as far away from her as he could get, as if the mere idea of her was contagious.

When all were present, Marli perched on the edge of her desk and gazed down at them all. “Well,” she said brightly, “I never asked you all—how was the Festival?”

They stared at her like she was insane.

“You know—during the day.”

A few people mumbled that it was okay. Several more agreed in silence.
“Yeah, I thought so too.” She beamed. “I found out lots of things I never knew, especially about merpeople and dwarves, you never hear about them as much, do you?”

The kids nodded, still hesitant to warm up to the topic.

“What parts did you like best?” she asked them, leaning forward as if she desired nothing more than to hear them speak. At the moment, admittedly, it was indeed all she wanted; she remembered being so excited that the Festival was being held here, so her kids could see all of it. Of course, in the midst of the less-than-pleasant results, she had completely forgotten her lesson, and though she had written it down, it was now no more than ashes.

“Food was good,” a small boy offered, and several agreed.

“Merpeople are weird,” another piped, with another chorus of agreement.

“I liked…the Heart,” a shy girl spoke up, and everyone in unison nodded their heads, the strangest look in their eyes, as if remembering something confused and overwhelming, but wonderful.

“The Heart of Ametris is a very old relic,” Marli told them. “It was given to us by Haenir, who received it from the gods themselves, right after the worlds ended. It’s a symbol of unity, and balance. And it’s very, very powerful…dangerous in the wrong hands….”

“And it was stolen,” Vix completed, his voice shaking with anger. “And used to kill everyone…by her!”

The class followed his narrowed eyes to Kamilé, who was sitting very still, as if she had fallen asleep. Marli called their attention back with a sharp voice, thoroughly annoyed.

“Stop it, all of you! Not a single one of you could have been able to use that thing, no one I’ve ever seen in Ametris could!”

“What are you defending her for?” Vix shouted back at her, his voice tight and choked. “What do you care? What reason’ve you got to believe her when no one else does?”

“Because unlike the rest of you, I actually consider her a mortal being!” Marli was furious, and made no effort to restrain her emotions from her voice. Eyes widened as the children stared at her, surprised at her enmity. “All of you ignored her and her brother just because they were different, they looked strange…. Maybe if all of you had paid a little attention to them none of this would have ever happened!”

“So she burned down the city as revenge!” Vix said angrily, though the tears shining in his eyes were not angry tears at all. “She killed everyone to punish us!”

“No!” Marli said hotly. “If you knew her, you’d know she wouldn’t ever do anything like that—but at the very least, if the two of them had been off playing with all the rest of you, if you had let them, maybe one wouldn’t have been hurt, and the other would still be alive!”

There was a shocked silence; no one had been told that the girl’s twin, the little boy that sat silently in corners and read, that finished his work—so much harder than anyone else’s—in record time, that never said a word to anyone in living memory, only smiled when his sister was around, was dead. No one had even noticed his absence.

“I’ve been watching them for years, and I’m tired of it—no one liked them because they were orphans, and they looked different, they had strange hair and strange eyes and were always too dirty and too skinny. No one ever thought that they needed help, or at least a friend or two—no one would have begrudged them a little extra food if they had realized how starving they must have been. And now one is dead, and the other is being blamed for everything that’s gone wrong, simply because no one would bother to defend them—I am, I don’t care what she looks like, no child would do anything like that, or could, even by accident!

“Did none of you ever wonder why I look so young, why I don’t have a family, where I go at night? I never leave! This is where I live, I’m fifteen years old, barely older than some of you, and I don’t have a family anymore because they all died, in accidents and tragedies just like this one! But I never went looking for the people who did it—I could have, I saw them run through my city, burning everything and killing anyone who got in their way, I knew who they were. I never even thought about it, not once, it would have been so easy to track them down and make them pay, but I didn’t! What good would it do? Who would it bring back?

“Sure, the person who did it ought to be punished, but fairly—not like this, not by so much hatred pouring in from all sides, knowing everyone wants them dead! She’s eleven years old! Some of you are that young, can you think up any way at all that you could start a fire that big all on your own? Can you older ones imagine anything? What makes you think she could? She’s just like all of you, she’s hurt and sick and she’s lost family, she never meant to hurt anyone, and she never did! Why don’t you all concentrate on something useful, like rebuilding the city or just doing your damn homework and leave her alone!”

Breathing rather hard, she glared at them all, daring them to object. None did, most of them bearing the familiar expression of a guilty, scolded child. The older ones stared off into space, their thoughts unfathomable, although the oldest girl’s eyes were misty and looked slightly wet.

“Go take a break,” she told them. “Fifteen minutes.”

They jumped up and hurried out of the room, those who were afraid of her wrath pushing and pulling at those who weren’t. Only Kamilé stayed behind, her eyes closed, pale and very small, looking to Marli like a spirit—the ghost of another life, the phantom shadow of her old, happy self, thrown in a corner and left to fade away.



As soon as he had closed the door behind him, Vix turned to the small crowd of students.

“You didn’t believe her, did you?” he challenged.

The children looked at each other, confused, eyes wide, not knowing what to believe.

“Yeah, she’s right, the kid is different. We all knew it. They looked funny, they acted funny—the other one was a genius, and she can’t even read. There’s always been something strange about them. I dunno why, but it can’t be coincidence, what everyone saw, and her being involved. There’s proof that she did it, people saw her. And if she did, it couldn’t have been an accident—she killed all our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, and she destroyed half our houses, and our forest.”

A tremor or anger ran through the crowd; our forest. Their hearts beat in time with the center of the earth, the Great Root. Every tree that died before its time took a piece out of them, a very small piece, but agonizing, as if the tree had cried out in pain. So many elves walked around wincing in pain these days, their hearts hurting over the lost trees, hundreds of them. The children were the same.

“They say that every elf that’s ever lived has half their soul in themselves, and half in a tree. I’ve always been told that there’s a tree exactly my age that fits me, and when I die, I’ll become it, that’s why trees live so much longer than people. Mortal souls and tree souls come from the Great Root, don’t they? She has to know that. Everyone does. She knew if she attacked the trees—the Great Tree, the Soul of the World, even!—then she’d get us all without a fight. She hates us, she always has, she hated everyone but her brother. She wouldn’t care if she killed us all, I know she wouldn’t.”

“But what about her tree?” a small girl asked quietly. “She would want to protect her tree!”

“Maybe she knew where it was, knew it was far away and safe, or maybe she hurt it—that’s why she’s sick—or maybe she killed his tree, that’s why he died.”

None of them had ever bothered to find out Everan’s name.

“But I think,” he continued, a livid scowl on his face, “that whatever she is, she isn’t an elf. I don’t know what she is. She may have our ears, and she may act like us, but she isn’t one of us at all. She could have just been raised to think like us, but she isn’t an elf, she can’t be.”

“Maybe she’s a human?” someone suggested tentatively, making a face along with many others.

“I don’t know what she is, but she doesn’t belong here. She killed my brother and my dad, she’s been messing with my sister…. I don’t care what Marli says, I want her out of here. Are you with me?”

Scattered voices in the crowd nodded and said, “Yeah! Let’s get rid of her! Let’s do it!” and, feeling outnumbered, the unsure quickly nodded and raised their fists as well. In a matter of seconds it was unanimous.

“Yes,” Vix said triumphantly, a nasty smirk on his face as he clenched his fists. “There’s no way she’ll get away with this, no way in hell.”

“But, Vix,” inquired the dark-eyed girl, “how’re we going to get rid of her?”

His smirk widened, and he arched his eyebrows. “We kill her, of course,” he told them matter-of-factly. “I have a plan.”



The plan echoed in everyone’s mind as they trooped back inside, pointedly looking away from Kamilé’s motionless figure. They sat on the floor, gazing obediently up at Marli as plots of pure malice swirled through their heads.

First we’ve got to weaken her. I don’t want anyone getting hurt, if she can start a fire like that she may be stronger than she looks.

“Did all of you think about what I said?” Marli demanded, glaring at them. The only thing she had managed to do in the past few minutes was produce a small pile of worksheets; the time, it seemed, had not been long enough for her anger to subside.

They nodded as one—Vix had warned them about this.

“I’ve got some work for you to do, don’t worry, it’s not hard. You’ll divide in groups of four and compare what you saw at the festival with each other. It’s all right if you can’t remember, but I want you to try your hardest, all right? Here we are….”

She read four names off of the topmost sheet of parchment, the four oldest, who stood, took the sheet from her, and took a quill and an ink bottle from a shelf before retreating to a patch of sunlight. Marli read names off of several more worksheets, from oldest to youngest, and the little groups that followed did the same as the first. Only one grouping received any reaction at all:

“Talin…Marazi…Kamilé, and Lanæ.”

Talin made a face at being the only boy amongst three girls, but then he realized that he was stuck with one girl in particular that might be kind of interesting. He beckoned the other two girls over and sauntered over to Kamilé’s deserted corner with them following in his wake.

Don’t do anything big in front of Marli, Vix had told them. When you’re inside, just go for mental attacks—pick on her, make her feel unwanted. Shouldn’t be hard.

“Hey,” he told her imperiously. “Get up.”

She glanced up at him, eyes misty and distant, and then returned her gaze to the wall. She was hardly expected to recognize him as the boy who had made her cry at the Festival—even Marli had forgotten, so it seemed, in light of the less-than-ideal aftermath. She did feel a certain familiarity, however, that reminded her painfully of Everan at his best, when he tore down all the walls and showed her that he really cared about her, as more than a brother.

“Hey!” Talin insisted, nudging her with his foot.

She’s injured. Use that to your advantage. You can make her hurt without drawing attention to yourselves at all.

Kamilé winced as his foot nudged a half-healed burn, screwing her eyes shut to keep the tears back. Talin smirked, and the girls tittered, no more on Kamilé’s side than he was.

“Ah, whatever,” he sneered, swinging his foot at Kamilé’s arm, still wrapped in its sling. She gripped her knees like a lifeline, lips pressed tightly together to smother the scream attempting to escape. “We’ll just sit here.”

He folded his legs and sat a fair distance away from her, the two girls settling side-by-side next to him. All bore the same smug expression. Kamilé turned away from them, pretending they did not exist. In her mind she was somewhere else, somewhere by the ocean (which she imagined as a wonderland where anyone could breathe underwater and do what they pleased, filled with crabs—fish with long teeth and frog’s legs). Everan was there, of course, unharmed…in fact, he was clean and his stomach was full and he was happy....[KV1]

“Move, will you?” Talin’s voice jerked her back to the present. She winced as she remembered the pain, glancing at him out of the corners of her eyes. He sighed exasperatedly and pushed her hard, and with a squeak she fell over. She felt like a turtle on its shell—with only one arm and an aching back it was difficult to push herself up. When she finally managed to sit up again, she saw that Talin had spread the parchment in the space where she had been, and the other two girls crowded around it with him, trapping her in the corner, removing her from the group while never fully exposing their backs to her. She curled up, half hidden behind the bookcase, and watched them warily as they slowly struggled through the questions on the sheet.

“‘When did the Great War end, and who ended it?’”

“Oh, that one’s easy, Talin!”

“Well then, you do it, Lanæ!”

“Um, okay….”

There was a moment as she scratched an answer with the quill, and then she read the next aloud.

“‘Why do chosen exist?’…Huh?”

“How’re we supposed to know that?”

“’S what it says, I dunno!”

“No way, stupid, gimme, she can’t…oh, you’re right.”

“Told you! what’s the answer?”

“How would I know? Just put something….”

“Like what?”

“Um…. ‘The chosen protect everyone.’ See? Easy.”

“You know Marli hates short answers, Talin…” Marazi complained as Lanæ wrote it down. “We’ll get in trouble.”

“Who cares? What’s the next one, lemme see…. What the—? ‘How does one tell a chosen apart from his or her kind?' What is all this for? She never told us this!”

“Well, how do you tell them apart, Talin?”

“How should I know?”

“Ooh, I know…don’t they…they have wings or something, right? And they glow, like a god!”

“You’re an idiot, Marazi.” [KV: Actually, Marazi really is an idiot.]

“He-ey! I am not!”

“If they had wings we’d know them right away, but there’s supposed to be one here…or there was one here, guess they left during the fire too….”

“Maybe the answer is that you can’t tell them apart?”

“But Marli said there were no trick questions!”

“Maybe that was a trick answer!”

“Shut up, Marazi! How do you tell chosen apart? C’mon, guys, think about i—”

“They’re marked.”

Kamilé felt the words slide out of her mouth, annoyed. She wished they would shut up, they were hurting her head with their useless arguing, and it was so simple too, even she knew it…when had she learned this?

They stared at her in shocked silence, quite taken aback by not only her voice, but the cold edge it had adopted. She didn’t like them at all…she really hated them, for a reason she could not explain....[KV2]

Talin broke the silence first.

“What did you say?”

“Chosen are marked.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I dunno. They’re marked. Write it down.”

“Don’t tell us what to do!” Talin told her sharply. “What makes you think that’s right?”

“It’s easy! Everyone knows it!”

“No they don’t, we don’t!”

“But it’s right!”

“No it isn’t, you just made it up!”

“Did not!”

“Yeah you did! You made it up ages ago so you could play some stupid game, you pretended that scar on your head made you special—it’s just a cut, I’ve got lots of them!”

“It is not!”

“Bet your brother gave it to you,” Talin went on unmercifully, grinning as her eyes widened in horror. “Bet he pushed you or something and told you all that, ‘chosen are marked’, so you wouldn’t know, he lied to you!”

“He wasn’t lying!” Kamilé told him, but her voice was weak and shaky; she felt close to tears. “He wasn’t!” She would have known…wouldn’t she?

Talin gave a nasty laugh. “What was his name again…Everan, right?”

“Shut up,” Kamilé gasped, as an icy blade sliced through her heart. His grin widened.

“Everan,” he said again, relishing the way she recoiled and winced. “Everan, Everan, Everan, Everan….”

“Shut up!” Kamilé pleaded, but her voice was growing fainter as her breath escaped her and more refused to come….

The girls took up the chant as well, giggling as they said his name over and over again: “Everan Everan Everan Everan Everan Everan!”

“Shut up,” she moaned, but she could barely hear herself. All three of them laughed.

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Talin said triumphantly, watching he with malicious eyes. “Everan’s dead.”

Kamilé burst into tears, to the delight of them all, including a few others that were watching; still laughing cruelly, they left her where she was, hidden in the shadows behind the bookcase, choking on sobs and with tears pouring down her face, where she stayed long after the groups split up and some other student started planning her next torture.

And once we get her outside…we’ll make her life HELL.



“Kamilé?” Marli called softly, peering into her corner. She saw Kamilé’s boots sticking out of the little alcove between bookcase and wall. “Kamilé, come on out. It’s midmorning break.”

Kamilé had not yet run out of tears, and was quite unwilling to try and decipher the words of a stranger, especially if it meant leaving her hiding place. She ignored her.

“Kamilé? C’mon, now….”

Kamilé stayed where she was.

Marli sighed and stood, and a moment later a loud scraping noise made Kamilé jump; her teacher had resorted to a method rather like someone coaxing out a naughty cat, and was slowly shoving the heavy bookcase towards the wall. Kamilé cried out, scrambling out of the rapidly shrinking gap. Marli scooped her up before she could resist and set her on her feet.

“Go outside,” she said sternly, pushing Kamilé gently towards the door. “You need some fresh air, I’m sure.”

Kamilé whimpered, trying to duck under Marli’s arms and escape.

“Now,” Marli insisted, keeping her hands pressed against her back as she marched Kamilé to the door. When Kamilé still protested, she opened it and scooted her into the light. “Go on.”

And before Kamilé could run back inside, Marli shut the door in her face.
The professor waited patiently, sure to meet some resistance. Sure enough, seconds after she had pushed Kamilé outside, the knob rattled. She grabbed it, holding it still as the hand on the other side tried frantically to turn it.

Mistakes number four and five.

The turning stopped, and she heard footsteps outside the door. Satisfied, she made her way back to her desk.



The door clicked shut behind her, but Kamilé made no attempt to reopen it. The weight of dozens of eyes pressed against her back. Her breaths small and sharp from fear, she half-turned.

Rough hands grabbed her and held her tight, and before she could let out a sound another clamped over her mouth. She scrabbled for the door and found the doorknob, but more hands grabbed her wrist and shoulder and locked her into place. Her scream faded into a muted whimper and died.

Someone approached, and a hand grabbed her braid and pulled; her eyes were forced from the hands restraining her to the slyly grinning Vix standing in front of her.

“You made a mistake when you attacked our families,” he told her, venom intermingled with every syllable. The look in his eyes mimicked that of a snake closing in on its prey…and she was a tiny, helpless rabbit with tied hands and no escape. “I warned you, I told you that you’d pay. You had your chance, but you didn’t take it. Now….”

He left the threat hanging, his fingers flexing slightly in a suggestive manner. Before he could carry out his threat, however, a boy beside him snarled, “Lemme at her, Vix, I can tear her to pieces—”

“No,” he said sharply. “Not yet—hey!”

Disregarding him, the boy rushed forward, and before Kamilé could do more than close her eyes his heavy fist hit her around her face, once, twice, and then slammed into her stomach. Blow after blow rained down on her, and she was forced to stand there and let them, screaming inside her mind, and the boy screaming as well:

“THIS—IS—FOR—MY—MOM—YOU—WEED!”

“No, idiot!” Vix said, and then the blows stop; her head spun, and she had no idea if she was sitting or standing, awake or asleep, blind or just closing her eyes. She struggled to regain focus as Vix and the boy argued.

“Geroff, Vix, get off, she killed—”

“I know, but you can’t start on her here, Marli can see through the window!”

“I—don’t—care—”

“Shut up, she’ll hear you, calm down!”

Muttering incoherent curses under his breath, the boy finally fell silent, and when Kamilé blinked again Vix swam into focus. He glared at her for a moment, and then a smirk lifted the corners of his mouth, though it did not reach his cold, death-filled eyes.

“You three,” he said to the boys holding her, jerking his head towards the woods. “Take care of her.”

Laughing gleefully, the boys obliged, half-dragging, half-carrying her into the thick trees; as she struggled, racked with pain from their unmerciful hands, she distinctly heard Vix say, “Hey, don’t worry, man…you’ll get your chance, you all will….”

And then the trees swallowed her up, and all she could hear was her own frantic shouting that never left her mouth, and through it, the sound of the boys trudging through the debris of pine needles and cones atop the carpet of grass. Her own footsteps were erratic, clumsy, and most of the time her feet dragged. One boy still had her hair in his unrelenting grasp, and he yanked on it when she resisted until she stopped; another had his firm hand clasped around the back of her neck, shoving her relentlessly onward. Both arms were held tight, her left still in its sling but the throbbing shoulder in the grasp of someone none too gentle; her right was twisted so tightly behind her back that she feared it would break.

After several minutes of dragging, struggling, and pulling, they came to a stop at last; the boy grasping her injured shoulder and covering her mouth let go of her and muttered something to the other two. She could not hear what he had said; the moment she was free to she let out her pent-up scream, long, loud, and shrill. No one stopped her, and when she had run out of breath, they laughed.

“No one can hear you, scum,” one of them told her. “You can scream all you want.”

“Hold her still, will you?”

“Hey, I wanna go at her, let me!”

“I’ll let you, but you gotta hold her first!”

The boy let out a dry laugh. “No one’s gotta hold her,” he said, and then in one movement he pulled Kamilé out of the other boy’s grasp, grabbed a fistful of her shirt, slammed her back against a rough tree, and punched her hard across the face. When her ears stopped ringing and her cry of pain died away, the boys were still laughing.

“See? She holds still all by herself.”

And then blows deluged onto her again, and she heard herself screaming one word throughout, losing herself in the throbbing, agonizing darkness, but no matter how loudly she shouted his name he would not come, and the boys only laughed as they struck her again and again, everywhere between her eyes and her stomach, and she drowned in the pain and forgot to scream eventually; after an eternity she fell to her knees onto the ground and blacked out.

When she came to nothing had changed; she was still their captive, they were still standing over her, discussing in calm, light voices.

“…too bad she went out so fast, we’ve still got ten minutes left of break….”

“It’s all right with me, I was gettin’ tired anyway….”

“What do we do now?”

“We’ll go back just when everyone’s going in, no one’ll notice her I bet….”

“Yeah, that’ll be good. We’ll wait here I guess, anyone got anything to eat? I’m starving!”

“Yeah, I do…what d’you want? I’ve got some fruit…some bread and cheese….”

The voices faded, and the next thing she knew they were dragging her back through the forest, and her head and heart and every bruise from their fists ached and throbbed so badly that had she been able to, she would have cried…. There were sounds now aside from their footsteps, Marli’s voice calling loudly over the babbling of her students. The three boys dragged her into the heart of the crowd, and under their cover, pulled Kamilé inside and shoved her out of sight.

She opened her eyes groggily and saw them hurrying away, fearful of capture. She was back in her corner, stuffed out of Marli’s view. She felt tears gather in her eyes as she rolled over, facing the wall…she had called him and called him…why hadn’t he come?



When Marli eventually found her after school had ended, curled up in the corner and deeply asleep, she draped a blanket over her and sent the cat (a frequent visitor to the schoolhouse) to keep her warm. Kamilé’s back was to her; she never saw the bruises, or the stains on her cheeks, the ghosts of falling tears.

She woke up in inky darkness, black with watery streaks of silver shining from the full moon. There was a warm blanket over her. She did not know to miss the cat’s presence, quite unaware that it had been there at all aside from a slightly stronger warmth against her back. She wrapped the blanket around herself and crawled out of the corner, her head aching too much to stay still.

The schoolhouse was very still, moonlit but pure black in the corners. No one was there, but she heard breathing…. She looked again and saw that the closet door was slightly ajar. Not entirely in the mood to walk, she shuffled and scooted over to the door and opened it further. Marli was lying on her bed underneath the window, breathing deeply and steadily in a way that indicated undisturbed sleep.

Something touched her legs, and she jumped and thought to scream—but then she saw the lithe cat in the moonlight, fur glowing brightly and tail erect. The cat rubbed against her again and then slipped away, dumping herself neatly over and licking at her paws. She scurried over to her and sat beside her, cross-legged, and the cat leapt gracefully into her lap.

She remembered her sadness, but did not want to examine it further to remember why it was there; she was hurting enough already. She scratched the cat absently behind her ears; she purred and rubbed her head against Kamilé’s arm. She couldn’t help smiling at the cat, ecstatic at the slightest bit of attention. But the smile quickly faded.

“I thought he’d come,” she whispered to the cat, barely knowing what she was talking about. “No, I knew it…if he was here he’d make ‘em pay, wouldn’t he? I bet he’d kill ‘em…but I…I don’t….” Her voice sank to a tiny sigh. “I don’t want anyone to die anymore.”

Tears welled up in her eyes again; she brushed them away, but they refused to retreat. The cat, bewildered by the pause in her scratching and petting, looked up, and in a moment seemed to understand. She licked her hand, where the burns were still healing. The sensation stung slightly, and the cat’s rough tongue caught at her skin, but it was comfort, and it brought small relief, a little healing for the wounds that hardly mattered anyway.

“He didn’t come back for me,” she told the cat, her tears falling faster and thicker now. “He didn’t come save me…he said he’d take care of me…b-…but…he….”

It was no use. She started crying harder than ever; too tired to hold herself up, she lay on the floor and curled into a tiny ball, covering herself with the blanket. The cat was submerged as well—and cats in general do not like to be trapped in small spaces—but she chose not to attempt escape, but to continue licking at Kamilé’s wounds, first on her wrist and arm, and then on her face. Kamilé knew, without quite understanding the exact science, that sticking a cut or burned finger into your mouth was a good idea, even if it stung for a little while. Sometimes, a wound had to hurt even worse before it could heal.

She fell asleep long before the cat finished licking the wounds on her face, after which she stretched out, laying against her chest, and kept her warm. And in return, Kamilé’s arm unconsciously, in sleep, moved her arm, and fresh air and moonlight washed over them both. Eventually, the cat, too, closed her eyes and napped.

It started to rain halfway through the night. Marli saw this when she woke up in the morning, and then saw also that Kamilé and the cat had disappeared.



Kamilé was still very wet when midmorning break commenced. She clutched the tree branch tightly with her legs and arm, resting her heavy head on it, glad for the sunlight and the warm, gentle breeze. It had rained in the night, and the wind had rocked the tree branch back and forth and whipped rain onto her with painful intensity. She hadn’t known it would rain.

The cat had sat in the tree throughout the storm, in a small alcove in the bark, and had somehow managed to keep dry. In the morning she leapt down again, preferring the ground, and sat in the shade and licked her paws. It was a comfort to know she was there, watching over Kamilé, not exactly waiting to catch her if she fell, but bearing the same intentions.

This tree was familiar. Kamilé remembered it, and had suddenly wanted to be in it at around midnight. She could not remember exactly what it had to do with her, why she had once been in it, but she did remember that it had an excellent view of the little clearing that the schoolchildren played in, and a wonderful advantage of near-invisibility, unless someone stood directly beneath her and looked straight up, and part of her was sticking out. The tree was an oak, which meant plenty of wide, strong branches. It bore happy memories behind the curtain of leaves.

She had been sleeping on a familiar branch on and off since the rain stopped, and had quite forgotten that there was school today, and what exactly this meant. What it meant was that a score or so of children that loathed her existence would pour out of the schoolhouse and spread out everywhere, making escape impossible—or more accurately, as Kamilé viewed it, an outburst of noise that disturbed her from her nap. Annoyed, she peered owlishly over the branch—and then just as quickly snatched her head back.

A few boys were gathered at the foot of the tree, lounging against the trunk, talking casually and watching one of the smallest go after the cat. He would reach for her, and she would stalk a few paces out of his reach and sit down again, unconcerned. He did it again, and again, and the cat was forced to jump out of his reach; she hissed, very much displeased.

“Aw, just leave it alone, will you?” another boy said. “’S too fat to be any fun anyways.”

He shrugged and consented, sitting with his fellows in the shade.

The boy that had spoken, the boy chasing the cat, and another one sitting on the ground; those were the ones who had hurt her yesterday.

They were talking, laughing and joking, but she couldn’t hear them; her heart pounded in her ears at the thought of what they would do if they found her, and she frantically ran through various, useless plans of escape. They had trapped her, and if they saw her there was no way for her to escape. She was only two branches above the ground, not daring to move up or down…if they looked they would definitely see her….

The cat sat huffily a small distance away and licked herself with great dignity; the boys no longer paid attention to her. If she held her breath she could hear what they were saying….

“…seen Vix today?”

“Yeah, I talked to him yesterday, he’s at home.”

“Why? He sick?”

“No, his sister. She’s gotten worse. He said he had to take care of her.”

“Oh, that’s too bad….”

“But if he’s gone, what about the plan?”

“We carry on without him, that’s what we do.”

“Hmm…hey, I’ve been thinking….”

“Yeah?”

“Well…what if the plan doesn’t work?”

“It’ll work. It’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, Vix knows what he’s doing.”

“Come to think, how does he know all this?”

“He’s smart, he reads a lot. He gets ideas.”

“But the girl [KV3] isn’t here today, what if she never comes back?”

“If she never comes back, stupid, then the plan worked, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, doesn’t matter if she’s dead or not, ‘s long as she’s out of here for good.”

“What if we see her somewhere besides school?”

“Then we get her there.”

“What if it’s like, in the middle of the street?”

“If it’s in the square the Elders will take care of her, and anywhere else we can handle her fine.”

“The Elders can’t do much, though, just banish her, and she’ll just come back….”

“But if she does come back they can kill her.”

“Yeah, that’s true….”

“I just want to know, if she only comes every once in a while this won’t work, she’ll heal up soon and then it’ll be no good….”

“Vix said if she doesn’t come back in three days, then we forget about beating her up and just kill her.”

“How?”

“Yeah, how? We can’t just stab her or something, we’ll be caught….”

“He said he knew how. We’ll know when it’s time.”

“But it’ll be out in the forest, right? Where no one’ll find her?”

“’Course. It’d just be stupid here….”

“You know, if we keep hitting her we might just beat her to death.”

“Maybe that’s the plan?”

“I dunno.” The boy speaking leaned his head back and sighed. “If—”

His eyes widened, and so did Kamilé’s; they were staring right at each other. She gasped and hid her head again, but then the boy’s cry rang in the silence:

“She’s up there! She’s in the tree, spying on us!”

Shivering with fear, frozen to the spot, frantic thoughts flew through her mind, willing them, almost trying to force them to go away, disregard her presence….

A hail of small, hard objects rained against the tree’s trunk and the branch on which she rested, one grazing her arm—rocks, pinecones, and acorns. They did nothing but distract her from something that became apparent in a heartbeat—the tree shook, and when she looked down she saw that two of the boys were climbing the tree to get her. Horrified, fear filling her mind, she leapt up, but there was no escape; the boys grabbed onto the branch she stood on and shook it as they clambered up, and she felt herself falling. Before she lost her balance she jumped, landing on a branch below, but slipped—her hand grabbed at the branch and held her up, dangling feet from the ground, but then a tall boy leapt up and snatched her ankle, and she fell—and they had her.

“Back again?” the boy holding her said scornfully. “Idiot.”

Two of them grabbed her and pulled her up, and though she kicked and struggled and tried to scream through the hand over her mouth she could not break away. They were all so much taller than her; they towered above her, their lips curving into malicious grins.

“Haven’t you had enough, girl?” one of them asked her as he struck her hard across the face. Her mind numb with fear, she could only continue to struggle, weakening with each passing moment, trapped in this hell until something came to save her…but if he hadn’t come before, why would he now…?

She could sense the other schoolchildren crowding around them, eager to watch, those with dead family pushing forward while those with no particular grudge hovered in the background. For beings that despised and feared fire most of all, elves possess quite a lot of their own; minor offenses would be forgiven easily, but when family and forest fell at another mortal’s hands, there was blood to pay. Long forgotten in Ametris’s millennia of peace, the anger, driven by love and loyalty but more deadly than the deepest hatred, was something unfamiliar and indescribable to the elfin children, but they accepted and fueled it without hesitation. Mortals forget. Blood does not.

Their plans of weakening and killing, overheard moments before but unregistered until now, finally made sense to Kamilé. Her.

She had never been more afraid in her life.

But suddenly, something became infinitely more important than fear.

A violent hissing and spitting rent the heavily silenced air, and several of the boys surrounding her jumped; there were shouts and more hissing, combined with a high-pitched but savage snarl, and then a cry of triumph brought two boys into the center of the crowd, one holding the mother cat’s flailing forearms in each hand. The cat tried to bite and claw and kick, but she was just as trapped as Kamilé.

“Cat went nuts,” the second boy explained. “But we got it.”

The tall boy saw the recognition in Kamilé’s eyes as she stared, wide-eyed, at the struggling cat. He smirked. “Didn’t know you had a pet, girl,” he told her, sarcastic pleasantness barely covering the malice hidden in his tone. “That’s too bad.”

NO! Kamilé tried to scream, but it never left her mouth. The boys got the message regardless, but it only urged them on.

“No!” another girl’s voice echoed her thoughts. “Hey, don’t hurt the cat!”

“Yeah, it didn’t do anything!” agreed her friend. “And look at it, it’s gonna have kittens!”

“She killed everything we care about,” the tall boy hissed, his flaming eyes boring into Kamilé’s. “Why shouldn’t we?”

Her heart thudded in her ears, frantic and wild, forgetting its pattern in her panic and fear. Her eyesight dulled slightly as she began to struggle again, so hard that another boy had to join the two holding her—a red mist crept up from the depths of her mind and clouded over her eyes, and in a way she was blinded, but in so many others she was sharper, clearer, better…thoughts of blood and vengeance filled her mind, and she bit and kicked in a frantic effort to free herself, not to escape, but to attack….

The tall boy saw this, and grinned.

“Hold that cat still.”

But then another sound rang out over the voices of the crowd, and the yowling of the furious cat, and the pounding in her ears and screamed curses and battle cries echoing in her mind, rang out only because an impenetrable silence fell the instant it sounded—

The door of the schoolhouse opened, and a voice said loudly, “Excuse me!”

Even before the words were spoken, the tall boy was muttering frantically to the boys holding her: “Get rid of the girl, now!”

They had quite a job forcing her backwards, hidden from Marli by a wall of children large and small, but they did, keeping her silenced the entire time, and then Marli’s voice rang out again.

“Break it up, now, please, that’s right…what’s going on? And what are you doing with my cat?”

The boys stuffed her into a bush in their panic to return and make themselves look innocent, lest Marli catch them; her head hit the ground hard, and Marli’s words registered at the same time, as well as her presence. The cat would be fine. The red mist leaked slowly out of her sight, leaving a blind numbness and the sensation of being completely exhausted, drained of energy. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe, filled with fear and horror at what had just been done, said, and thought…by her own mind….

“Your cat got loose, Professor.”

“Yes, I see that. How kind of you to catch her for me. Now would you please put her down? She’s very fragile at the moment. Kittens, you know.”

A shifting of movement as the cat was set on the ground, and then a vicious hiss, a yelp, and a low curse.

“Oops,” Marli said calmly. “She’s not very social. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t touch her.”

There was a pause, filled with the awkward shuffling of feet that accompanied guilt, as Marli apparently looked around.

“Is there somebody missing today?”

“Um….”

“Lots, Professor, ‘cause of the fire….”

“No, besides them. Someone isn’t here today.”

“Yeah, Vix is gone…his sister’s sicker, he had to help….”

“I see…but there’s someone else…hmm….” Another small pause. “Where is Kamilé?”

“Who’s Kamilé?” someone offered innocently.

Marli made a noise that gave sound to her expression: eyebrow-raising skepticism.

“She wasn’t here today, Professor,” someone else supplied.

“Nope, wasn’t here,” a few more people echoed.

“Of course,” Marli conceded. “I remember. Thank you. And as interesting as my cat might be, no more huge gatherings, all right?”

There was a chorus of affirmatives, and Marli told them, “Break ends in ten minutes,” before the door closed behind her. Immediately the schoolchildren started chattering to each other, spreading out into their respective places in the clearing.

Kamilé heard the footsteps and panicked, knowing that they were coming for her. The sounds of heavy feet approaching proved her right. Without a moment’s hesitation she jumped up and ran for it.

Shouts echoed behind her as the boys gave chase, their heavy feet pounding the earth; she felt them gaining ground on her and pushed herself harder and harder, but so did they. She swerved sharply to the right; they skidded to a halt, changed direction, and charged after her again. Her leg throbbed violently, and she tripped with a cry of pain and fell heavily; she pushed herself back up, but she was too close to them, far too close. She ran blindly, dodging trees by an inch, hoping, praying for rescue….

And then her foot caught a rock and she went flying again, slamming into the ground with a force that left her breathless, and even as she fell she knew she wouldn’t be able to get back up again. She lay sprawled out on the ground, not daring to breathe, fear pulsing through her like icy blood….

But the forest was silent. No one was nearby.

Had she outrun them? Or had they turned around? Would they be back…?
The questions slid out of her mind as she closed her eyes…she was so tired….

She fell asleep without even knowing it, and when she woke up, it was almost morning.


KV: Severance is rather like Dissociative Identity Disorder in our world. Google it.

KV1:In case you weren't aware, a full stomach=happiness to an orphan.

KV2: It might be obvious to you, but Kamile is unused to hating people.

KV3: You know how when you get an abortion, they call the baby a "fetus" and an "it" so you won't feel bad about killing it? Same thing here, with the "girl" stuff.

Can I go beat up those mean little kids. mad

No, that wasn't meant to be a question.

I like the part with Vix and Luci, though. I have to admit, I thought you killed her in that italicised part. I was gonna beat you up.


Poor Shima. Elven peer pressure.

I diiiiiiiid.

*Prepares to beat up kids after chapter 18*

*Sigh* It's always sad when you get attached to your characters. Makes it harder to kill them and not bring them back.

So do I-Ay-AY! Everaaaaan! gonk Kamile needs youuu~

heart for Ch. 17, 'cept for the Kamile-bashing. That was like, anti-heart. Not for the writing, just 'cause I like Kamile.

Ametris on Fictionpress!

Clicky Clicky!

Woo!

I have writer's block on the best part. stare I blame whatsisname for being distracting, and parents for breaking me from my mood. (~O.o)~

XD

KNow how that is. This is why that random poem is still not quite alive.