Noroi: Ar Saoghal, #1

By Inés Platero Gracia

In Ar Saoghal, two kinds of people exist: those born with no abilities, and norois.

Feared and persecuted, the norois have been forced to live as outcasts for centuries; a situation which only worsens when the Republic of Morkt falls under a coup d'etat led by Bernhard Naden, whose divine manifesto is to exterminate every last one of them.

Under the new regime, having been born with the ability to sense life and others' emotions, Floyd Collins finds himself sentenced to death at the age of six; a fate from which he is saved by the leader of the Sluagh Sith, a noroi resistance network. Leaving everything he knew behind, he has no other choice but to emmigrate to the Kingdom of Geal, where the crown princess, Kayla Lasair, grows up in the shadows while her mother counts the days to marry her off and thus ride herself of the secret which could jeopardize the future of her dynasty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inés Platero Gracia
• Release date: Feb 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9781667470115

Book preview

Table of Contents

Noroi (Ar Saoghal, #1)

Disclaimer: This novel contains explicit language and depictions of violence, which could hurt some readers’ sensibilities.

Prologue | Year 1054 after the Goddesses’ demise

Chapter 1 | Year 1065 after the Goddesses’ demise

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Epilogue

To every single voice silenced under the yoke of violence and brutality,

To all those who have been unfairly stripped of their homes,

And for our planet, whose heart we are gradually stopping.

They demand my silence.

To me, whose yell is my own banner,

Who was born crying as I felt

The storm in my veins.

Isabel Jiménez Rodríguez, Ellos (Them)

De la Jaula al Verso (From the cage to the verse)

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I saw my honey-colored eyes.

They weren’t the same anymore.

I wanted to pick them up from evil.

In sadness, they wandered the world.

Submerged in loneliness they walked.

I went through the sky; it wasn’t the same either.

We change, our backs carrying the destruction we cause.

But those eyes, my eyes.

Didn’t feel mine anymore.

María Segura Ibarra, 37

La Luna Me Enseñó (The moon taught me)

Glossary

Map

Disclaimer: This novel contains explicit language and depictions of violence, which could hurt some readers’ sensibilities.

Prologue

Year 1054 after the Goddesses’ demise

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There were few more revolting places in Ar Saoghal, than the prisons of Morkt. This was a well-proven fact. Among the most grotesque buildings, the worst, by far, was the one at Seyhlam, the capital, which was created with the sole purpose of corrupting the cruelest and most wicked souls. Thousands of criminals, who had lost their humanity, were thrown there to rot, knowing for sure that they would never see the light of the sun again. In better times, few even dared to think maybe those cells were hell on earth itself. A punishment none deserved. But now, this was all he, a young boy no more than six, together with his two-year baby sister, could ever think, dirty and famished, chattering his teeth, trapped between the impregnable walls of this prison.

The stench of human feces still made him retch. Sitting on one of the two rusted iron cots in the cell, with no mattress or blanket to shelter him, and little to no space to move around. On one corner, there was a metal bucket with old human waste embedded, while on the opposite side, another stood there, full of stagnant water. Lit by the cold, dim light of a single bulb, it was as if the two were competing to see which one looked the most sickening.

Dizzy, thirsty and with sandy tongue, the boy still pondered whether or not to drink from those dark and gooey waters. He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

In his brown arms, his sister quivered again, as a prelude to the subsequent weeping. With his red, puffed eyes, the boy swallowed his tears and made himself look calm and serene, as he kept gently rocking the baby in his arms.

The cot’s iron bars pierced his buttocks as knives, but he never changed his posture. The unstable refuge he gave his sleeping baby sister was the only thing which prevented him from tearing his hair down and shriek in panic. He was the older brother. He was responsible for her, just as his older sister cared for him, as their older brother did for her, and as their eldest sister did for him —and all of them.

They had always had one another. When one of them was in trouble, the others would be there for them. If one of them needed protection, the others would always have their back. Together, the five siblings were unstoppable, untouchable. Or that was what the boy believed, before seeing how his older siblings were bailed out from the cell, one by one. And how none of them ever returned.

He hadn’t even heard an echo of a laugh in hours. When those men with their foreheads marked with a circle of ashes, took them out of their beds at midnight, they kept saying they were chosen to take part in a game. If they cooperated, they could have a chance to win. Just as his older siblings, the boy knew those men were lying, right from the start. Even if the darkness prevented them from seeing the men’s guns, tucked under their suits’ folds, they sensed the violence etched in each one of their muscles, their blind, dogged determination. They had no time for mercy or remorse, much less for games.

As if they were unrestrained echoes, the boy could sense the other youngsters who were jailed with lies and an iron grip, right through the narrow walls of his cell, frightened as he couldn’t allow himself to be. His baby sister still wasn’t mature enough to realize the meaning of the dread and nervousness encroaching her, even though it was alien to her, but she could feel it as much as him, nonetheless. Guided by despair, the boy imagined a stout barrier around the babe, just as their mother had begun to teach him a few days ago. And slowly, very slowly, his sister relaxed again.

The boy let out a labored sigh. His sister’s deplorable state ashamed him. Her auburn skin was darkened by the prison’s filth. Dressed with her one-piece pajamas and the little socks her grandmother had knitted for her, the cell had already reduced the clothes, which guaranteed pure coziness in better times, into rags. Her diaper was full, grazing her delicate skin, as the guards didn’t even provide anything to use to clean her. Restless, the boy didn’t even want to think that, anytime now, hunger would only aggravate the pain, and a sensory barrier won’t be enough to keep her calm anymore.

He figured his older sister was taken away hours ago now. With her last words, she promised she would find their parents and they would get them out. Yet the door never opened again since then.

Until it suddenly happened. The steel door made a deafening screech, and two men came in, blocking any way out. They didn’t look particularly strong, but their black uniforms, and the ashen circles on their foreheads made them, in the boy’s eyes, the most dreadful, powerful beings in Ar Saoghal.

Just like when they took their older siblings away, the men said nothing. They walked towards them with hieratical, stone-cold expressions. No matter how much he tried to get a feel of their presences, the boy just found an impregnable wall of thick ice. If not for their human faces and their straight walking, the boy would have thought they weren’t human, or even alive.

With no reservations, one of them forcefully took the baby away from her brother’s arms. Under his rough grip, which broke the bubble her brother had erected to guard her, the little girl let out a shrill bawling.

Before the boy could even protest, the other guard took him, pressing his side with his big, rough fingers and carried him under one arm, like he would a mangy dog.

I’m her brother! the child objected. I have to protect her! Please, let us go! We didn’t do anything!

Silence, demon, was the man’s only answer.

The boy tried to free himself, as he was about to be separated from his sister. Still weeping, the baby extended her little arms at him, closing her fingers, as if trying to pull an invisible string which kept stretching more and more with each step. Her golden eyes were fixed on her brother’s, fully open with hopelessness.

I’ll come back for you! the boy finally said. I promise!

His captor made him stand before a third man in black. Against his imposing height, and unable to hide his frustration, the boy felt as if a humongous beast was before him. Far from his older sister, he was completely speechless and frozen in place, as he finally realized how much he relied on her before. There was no mercy or a sliver of doubt in that man’s eyes. The circle on his forehead, completely fixed on the boy, so pitch-black it seemed to devour light, felt like a piercing third eye which had no need to blink.

With his hand covered by a leather glove, the tall man vehemently pushed the boy, demanding him to walk, taking him further from his sister’s weeping and the two captors. Stumbling once, the boy walked through the endless corridor, blinded by the intense light that rained down from the ceiling. With not a single window in sight, several doors echoed with the prisoners’ punches and yelling. With each step, he felt closer and closer to tripping and falling on the hot filth all over the ground.

Gathering courage from the air seeping from his restless teeth, the boy turned to his new imprisoner.

Why...? Why are you doing this? he stuttered with his hands on his chest.

Without lowering his head, the man imprinted his leathered hand on the boy’s head, forcing him to turn forward. The conversation had ended.

As ice melting from his shoulders, the disheartening anguish extinguished the last embers of resistance. I want to see mom, he began repeating to himself, unable to say a single word. Could she be waiting for him and his siblings, wherever they were taking them? How longer his baby sister would take? When would they let them go home?

Turning around the last corner, right before them, a door materialized, from which the radiant morning light illuminated those reeking hallways. More men awaited, with their foreheads marked and their guns holstered at their thighs, at their cruel hands’ reach.

Without words, as if those men had the same mind, the boy was handed over for the third time. One of the armed guards made him turn by pressing his shoulder and faced four children who, without him noticing, were walking behind him.

The cells left their mark on each and every one of them, but the older one, who looked somewhere around fourteen —just like the boy’s eldest sister— still had energy and guts to resist. The black-clad men didn’t hesitate to punch him until he was whining on the ground.

The girl after him, a little younger, had her pajamas ragged and stained with blood and wet filth. Swollen and darkened, her face looked unsettling. Each time she breathed; a reddish bubble appeared from her right nostril. Her eyes were nothing more than a pair of slits, and was unable to walk straight, making her long, dark, unruly hair fall on her face as a thick drape.

The boy wanted to look away, but to no avail, wondering if maybe his eldest sister had met the same destiny. Or one even worse.

After her, a boy and a girl walked together, their eyes overflowing with tears. While the boy had his pants stained with his own urine, the girl looked like she was missing a patch of her short hair, as if it was torn off by the root. Neither of them looked older than the boy.

Not giving them time to rest, the men dragged the five children to the raging sun. As the first one to leave, the boy started sweating, although his feet kept snapping, frozen. With his eyes half-open, he tripped as a cascade of emotions fell on his head and shoulders, soaking and crushing him with suffocating force. 

Driving him to the ground, his captor kicked him, his boots coated with iron toecaps.

On your feet, you demon shit!

The boy tried to stand, but he just couldn’t. He couldn’t feel his limbs. His bones echoed with hundreds of people’s feelings. Too intense. Too many...

Another punt momentarily made him feel his body, but the result was the very same. Moments later, out of patience, he grabbed the boy by his collar and threw him at a fourth guard before returning to his post.

Floating in the stranger’s hands, the boy tried to visualize a pillbox around him, where that web of emotions couldn’t assault him, but it was in vain. He could only erect one wall when all that desolation, hysteria and euphoric madness took it down as if it was made of silk paper.

Not minding the convulsing boy at all, the fourth man put him atop an atrium, as if he was a trophy. Then the boy could see, with his own eyes, where the overwhelming currents came from.

Under his feet sprawled the Seyhlam Justice Square. So wide the exits were barely visible, it was so crowded in this fateful morning. The public’s heads, turned towards the stage, were so close to each other that the many faces were like an amorphous blur to the boy’s eyes. Their mouths, spewing mad, ravenous curses against him, made each one of his hairs stand on end.

Men dressed in black, from head to toe, with their hands glued to their assault rifles, formed a perimeter, roughly two meters between the platform, and the mob. They were moving around the crowd, as worms squirming their way in a rotten apple, leaving traces of fear and wariness in their wake. Next to the entrances, vigilant of whoever came or attempted to leave, there was no place to look at without them present, hidden in their anonymity, arming their hearts with quiet brutality.

A nauseating stench filled the air. Flies buzzed in ecstasy, filling the air with their flapping. At first, the boy considered the possibility of him and the other kids being plagued, and that was the reason why the mob yelled at him with so much hatred. Were they really to blame? Had they no idea of all they had to go through?

But the eyes of men and women weren’t fixed on them. Wheezing and burning from something other than the sun, everyone’s gazes fell at one side of the stage, where mountains of broken dolls piled up on the square’s cobblestones. 

In a sick joke, the puppets were dressed in pajamas, in no better conditions than those worn by the kids now facing the raging audience. Not a single body was adult; all of them mirrored a grotesque youth. Their faces, swollen and bruised, had red, dry, empty eyes. Crimson collars encircled each of their necks, and the flies, fighting among themselves, jumped into their gaping mouths. 

The boy closed his eyes tightly, wondering why such a scene disturbed him so. He told himself they were just dolls. He couldn’t sense them. They weren’t alive.

The hot rope’s touch made bile rise up to his throat. Not even looking at the boy, the fifth man firmly fastened it around his neck, after which he could barely breathe.

The stage’s platform rumbled with sobbing and cheering, so loud the sixth man’s voice was barely audible, despite his voice being amplified in the square’s every corner. Flashes from several cameras blinded the boy, bewildered as his name was uttered time and again through the loud speakers, over the heads of thousands of attendants.

To his right, the older boy still resisted on his platform, twisting and turning with his hands tied to his back, yelling at the mob. The older girl faced ahead, without seeing a thing, mirroring the broken dolls with an unnerving realism. The other kids cried and yammered, heartbroken, desperately calling out to their parents with snotty noses. Each one had a rope tied around their necks, and a marked man behind them.

... but first, we must eradicate every last link of the chains that have repressed us, even to this day, the sixth man recited, as the speakers’ volume rose. For that, in the name of our new leader and new Head of State, Bernhard Naden, you are hereby sentenced to death by hanging. The crimes you all have committed are as follows: being descendants of the Scion of the Destroyer, and being Scions of the Destroyer yourselves. As the Holy Scriptures state, only once there remains not a single one of you, unnatural abominations, can our proud nation truly prosper and rise better and stronger than ever, under the designs of the one and true Maker. Long live Morkt! Long live Naden!

In perfect sync, the clamor echoed from the people’s mouths, reverberating in the bones of the sentenced with the strength of a thousand war drums. The sixth man pulled the boy’s rope once more, making sure it was firmly tied, then went back to his original post.

As if a spark ignited among the fog that drowned him, the boy realized he was going to die.

Before even realizing the meaning of life, the boy already knew what death was. He had felt it hundreds of thousands of times before. When his classmates caught flies and butterflies, ripping out their wings and legs, and leaving them to die once they lost interest. When, driven by visceral panic, the neighbor crushed a spider climbing up her window, as it devoured moths and mosquitoes, trying to seek the warmth of her home. When the pigeon hatchlings were thrown to the ground, expelled from the nest by their own mothers, with an uncertain promise that their siblings will survive that way.

His world, sensible and terrible, was always scarred by the most volatile, the most unjustified, the cruelest death. But he kept wondering. He couldn’t just accept his life coming to an end, as if swallowed by the earth, never to be remembered again. He couldn’t wrap his head around nothing remaining where there was everything before.

I want to see mom, he sobbed, only allowing himself to think of her. He eyed the crowd, looking for her familiar face, hoping she was there to take him, his older siblings, and his baby sisters, home. Take him to safety.

A seventh wave of tattooed men closed in with heavy steps of death. The boy scanned the audience from right to left, from left to right, the clock ticking his life away, droplets of sweat dotting his face.

Mom! I’m here! the boy yelled at the sky.

His feet weren’t touching the wood anymore.

Short and tender, his fingers grabbed the rope that was crushing his windpipe and vertebrae. Trying to reach for some foothold, invisible to the human eye, his legs moved desperately. The wind blew at his face, mocking him, and the rope violently crackled, its grip was unbreakable, and its touch was blazing hot.

He was about to die. The boy knew he was going to die. But he was still alive. And it hurt.

He tightly closed his eyes. There was no parent, no sibling there to save him. He didn’t want to know if the other kids were still fighting with their waning strength, or if they hanged like another set of broken puppets. How much time did they have before they were thrown to those piles of lifeless limbs and vacant eyes? How much time did they have before the flies lay their eggs on their cheeks? How much time before another batch tried those rope collars on?

The boy’s consciousness almost faded. Too heavy, his fingers fell to his sides. His round, young face, embraced the shadows encroaching beyond his gaze.

He could never save his baby sister. His last words to her would remain lies. And that hurt even more than the thought of losing his life. Because he was her older brother. He had to take care of her. He had to protect her from those men and their immutable ashen eyes. He had to get her out of this place and return to their mother, who would surely sort all this out.

But he couldn’t.

There, before thousands of eyes, he would cease to exist.

Just like his older siblings, he had failed.

With a surprised whistle, the ropes broke off. The boy’s feet crashed on the stage before falling on his back with a loud thud. The rope, suddenly limp and inoffensive, fell from his neck. Oxygen entered his squeezed lungs, and floated before his lost gaze. He felt weak, unable to move for seconds which felt like an eternity. But he was alive. He knew from the stage’s rumbling, the wood’s heat and the mob’s awe.

Beside him, the other sentenced fell at the same time. The older boy rocked his body, trying to rise his body, his hands still tied. The girl remained on the floor, catatonic, her eyes piercing the sky and her chest barely puffing with her weak breath. The younger girl was unconscious. The younger boy was crying, contorting on the floor, shrieking.

It felt as if time had frozen. The men with the ashen eyes remained in place, as if unable to make their own choices before an unexpected situation. The audience held their breath as the men clad in black yelled at one another, tense and confounded.

As if awakening from a heavy lethargy, steel boots walked towards the hanged. An instinct, stronger than the boy’s will, made him drag himself, trying to escape before he was caught again. The older boy creeped towards him, panting and gritting his teeth, as if trying to shield him from the marked men. With no way of knowing what would it get them, the boy pulled the other’s restraints, trying to loosen them up. The men were one step away from them, dark like the night sky, but his fingers were so weak he couldn’t undo the noose up, despite desperately trying.

The air vibrated, cut so much faster than human eye could ever see. The marked men were sent flying behind, crashing against the prison’s front with a loud crunch. Leaving a red trace on the white paint, they fell on the platform. None of them rose again.

The mob went into a panic, in perfect sync. There was none who could calm such a stampede of chaos and frenzy. The fences fell and the exits collapsed. The commotion caused more black-clad men to hurry to the stage, only to face a group of five: five women made of metal, tall and stout like sequoias, right in front of the kids, protecting them with a fierce stance.

Letting go of the older kid’s bindings, the boy felt an overwhelming pressure in his chest, as he witnessed how the metal women advanced towards the frightful men, as if it was second nature to them.

Just what the hell’s going on? the older kid exhaled.

The boy had no response. The women who were protecting them appeared from thin air, and levitated as if gravity had no effect on their deadly bodies. There was no rifle shooting, or man fighting, who wasn’t reduced to a bloody pulp. Nevertheless, he was more disturbed by the fact that the women were as empty as the broken dolls piled up among the flies.

Behind him, the distance between the stage and audience was disappearing. The black-clad men desperately emptied their rifles, letting the people charge at them, cobblestones in hand.

And over all of them, floating a couple of meters above the square, with her arms extended to her sides, was a sixth metal woman. Like the marionettes protecting the kids near the gallows, she didn’t have an expression on her silver face, but the boy could sense the human inside. She was the one pulling the strings, preventing death from taking them. Only her.

The boy stood up, tightening his fists and rocking his body. This was his only chance. He had to save his sister. He had counted the doors he had to pass by, and the corners he had to turn around to return to his cell, and he knew no black-clad man had time to worry about a kid like him. It was now or never... and it had to be right now.

Hey! Where are you going? the older boy yelled.

But the boy had no voice to answer. Jumping between a marionette’s legs, he dashed towards the prison. Suppressing his fear of the place and the revolt he felt just knowing he had to return, he looked ahead.

But before he could take a step into the prison, a pair of cold hands grabbed him by his arms and lifted him up, just like someone ripping out weed from their garden. The boy turned around, only to see a hollow woman holding him.

Let me go! My sister is still inside! I have to save her!

He hadn’t uttered the last word yet, when the woman’s torso divided in half. There were no bones or organs inside. Just steel. Not giving him time to complain, the woman took him inside, just like her clones were doing with the other kids, while controlled by a single entity. The metal closed before him, as tiny vents opened along the cold, steely shell.

The boy knocked the solid metal time after time. He was still bellowing that his sister needed him. She was the one who needed saving. He had promised her. And, while the woman of steel, deaf and unruffled, took off to the endless sky, the boy kept yelling inside her. He kept clamoring for his baby sister, who he left behind, abandoned in a home that, in just one night, wasn’t theirs anymore. 

Chapter 1

Year 1065 after the Goddesses’ demise

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That night, before the inevitable disaster, Kayla Lasair was barely able to sleep. Under the satin sheets, she rolled a thousand times, incapable of ignoring the pressure she felt on her chest, behind her eyes and her nape. She had been counting the seconds, hoping to fall asleep out of pure boredom, but she felt even more overwhelmed as time went by. She tried to remember the last thing which made her laugh, but her memory denied her that luxury. She had tried to cry, but she had no strength to do even that.

Another Day of the Goddesses was upon her, when the first daylight shyly entered through the crystal walls of her spartan dormitory, and Kayla was exhausted. With her face half-buried in the thick eiderdown, she eyed her bedchamber, clinging to its immutability. Just her bedside table, a closet with clean changes of clothes, the two chairs used for her morning lessons and her wide bed, with its thick curtains, dared to claim some space in the vast chamber. The ensemble didn’t transmit any warmth or personality. The azure shade of the thick crystal, which made up floor and walls around her, harassed her, dancing even beneath her eyelids, all day long, with no rest, and no escape.

They didn’t even bother knocking the door once. Quiet like ants, five retainers, with their whole faces covered by ruby-colored masks, scurried along the lounge. Kayla closed her eyes as they went towards her. She didn’t open them as they set her coverings aside, making the chill bite her through her nightgown, giving her hairless skin goosebumps. Surrounded by her own darkness, she felt tense with vertigo, as she was carried eight steps from her bed to her bathroom.

She didn’t resist when the retainers undressed her. Nor when they put her in a steam bathtub. Her puffed eyelids slowly opened, like a flower ready to wilt, and she let a deep sigh out from her chest.

With their sleeves rolled up to their elbows, and their masks right in place, the retainers vehemently scrubbed her with their brushes, almost like they wanted to tear her skin off her bones. Their hands weren’t cruel, but their touch caused cracks and cramps on the young girl’s anchylosed limbs.

She didn’t wrest for control. She didn’t drive them away. She tried to remember, not so long ago, she respected herself enough to wash herself, but each day, it was harder for her to think she couldn’t rely on Royal Palace service for just about everything. After all, should they stop coming to bathe her every morning, the princess of Geal would limit herself to soaking in the bathtub, praying to the Goddesses to help her not to drown.

There was one time when one of her tutors mentioned one of the most common signs of teenage was an acquired sense of independence and intimate privacy. Kayla couldn’t remember the man’s face —and she never got his name— but, if she could, she’d commission an artist to make his face known in all of Ar Saoghal, just to prevent the charlatan to keep spreading lies.

Already fourteen, the only thing Kayla felt was an unbearable weariness, which seemed to haunt her all day long, a huge apathy towards anything besides eating or sleeping, and an undisputed dependency. She didn’t feel like ‘blooming’, or ‘maturing’, much less a ‘woman’. If anything, she felt ready to braid a head of silvery grey hair and spend her days sitting on a rocking chair, gazing at her garden under a wide umbrella.

After scrubbing even under her toenails, the masked retainers took her out as if they were catching worms with their bare hands, so roughly she thought she’d discover new bruises in the next few minutes. Without delay, they combed her orange curls, from the roots to the tips of her very long mane, which reached below her hips. The towels were suddenly gone and she was soon smothered in a cloud of cologne, which made her nose itchy with an aggressive imitation of roses and jasmine, just before she was guided out of the bathroom, never bothering to cover her naked figure. And no one uttered a single word. No one said anything.

In the middle of her bedchambers, her mathair awaited, followed by her entourage of medics. Surely, she had to wait no more than mere seconds since going through the door’s braced arch, but the Queen’s lips were already showing impatience, and her protruding nails were practically scratching the transparent fabric which covered her arms. She met her firstborn with a bitter smile.

There you are. Why the deadpan face? Do you disdain everything we have to do to make you look like an almost decent young woman?

Kayla blushed, but avoided burying her chin on her scrawny chest, and freed herself from her servants’ grip. Her overloaded tendons hurt, and pain took over her whole body, but she stood on her own feet, straightening her back, handling herself with deep breaths.

Please excuse me for my appearance, your Majesty, Kayla said, unable to hide the tension in her voice. I wasn’t able to sl...

Get on the scale.

The girl tightened her dried lips. With two heavy steps, she got on the loathsome scale the medics had brought into her room, around which they all stood, forming a crescent moon. Trying to avert her eyes from the digits on the display, Kayla chose to fix her gaze on the Queen of Geal’s appearance. Her nose bridge trembled once, but she managed to hide her amazement.

Katarina Eala always looked like a living abstract or surreal painting. From the complex patterns formed by her long, golden locks —that never ceased to defy gravity— to the intricate and overloaded dress which broke her ribs and lifted her non-natural breasts up to her collarbone, there was no inch of her not readied to be exposed.

That morning, her hair formed a smooth and fluffy crown of waves and curls around her head, her forehead pulled so backward that moving her neck an inch must have been an agony. She wore small gold nuggets crimped into her curls, giving them a showy glimmer, and her neck was surrounded by pearls from below her jaw to her narrow shoulders, where they met with a tight dress of light purple shades and transparencies. Her sleeves flared as they went toward her wrists, reaching the upper half of her long, flowing skirt, which she had to drag wherever she went. In the middle of winter, the fine fabric seemed to freely float around her small waist.

The Queen’s face was also part of the set. Deep bluish shadows colored her eyelids, emphasizing her emerald-colored eyes. Her thick lips were covered in a scarlet so intense she looked like she had blood for breakfast. Golden tattoos went over her perfectly-sculpted face, synching with the shape of her crown, and her immaculate nails, sporting the same shade of golden, were long and sharp, like rose thorns.

The numbers on the scale display kept going up. Kayla’s nervousness was too obvious, as her mathair tapped the floor under her skirt, as if such a torture wasn’t her very own idea. The physicians kept their heads lowered, fervently looking at the holographic numbers, clutching their digital notepads in their burly hands. A tune coming from their screens revealed the final results. The Queen clicked her tongue, which made her nighan’s chest sink. Her tattoos almost came to life as her face became red with indignation, right to the scalp.

How can this be? the Queen demanded an explanation, turning her steely gaze to Kayla.

The girl trembled and bit her cheeks.

Ten and a half ounces more than last time, my liege, a doctor simply said, eyeing her notepad and the scale, making sure the measurement was reliable and accurate.

"Ten and a half ounces... Ten and a half! You had to lose six pounds! How did you get so fat, you shameless whale? It was Petra, right?... She’s been baiting you in the kitchen, like a rat. Like a big, fat, nasty rat! What kind of man will ever want you with numbers like those? Tell me!"

With each accusation and rhetorical question, the Queen pricked Kayla’s bare ribs with one of her pointy nails. The girl’s teeth kept grinding her already chewed cheeks, feeling dizzy with the mixed taste of saliva and blood. She managed not to cry, but couldn’t stop trembling, stronger and stronger. She looked at the physicians, but none of them dared to stand up for her or even look at her dissimilar eyes.

She was alone.

As always.

My bones, your Majesty, Kayla muttered. They’re growing.

So what? Katarina snapped.

Well... the girl flinched, regretting she ever mentioned it. "My bones... aren’t normal."

The Queen drove her nails into Kayla’s jaw, and the young woman had enough common sense —or perhaps the lack of it— to avoid trying to step back. It would have been too hard to hide the deep scratches she could have left. Her mathair’s face widened before her, hindering her breathing with her strong perfume.

You think I don’t know you’re an abomination? she hissed bitterly. "You left me scarred for life. You think I don’t regret not having an abortion when they realized you were an anomaly? You were born a monster, and, like the monster you are, you’ll never let anyone change you into anything else, right? Right?"

For as long as the princess could remember, the Queen was an expert in making herself the victim in any situation.

Kayla kept her composure, her eyelashes became salty with tears unshed, until her mathair’s nails left her chin. Katarina glared at her nighan some more, daring her to break down or contradict herself.

Realizing it was a waste of her precious time, Katarina turned back with a show of fabric, jewelry and reflections, then left the room, with the doctors and the detestable scale on tow. They had yet to disappear when the Queen was already demanding ideas to make her nighan lose weight fast.

With not even a sigh, the servants reached for Kayla to get her ready for the day. But the girl raised one hand, stopping them.

Go away, she ordered. Disregarding her, a retainer dared to put his hand on her shoulder, and not knowing where did she get the strength from, Kayla pushed him back. I said go away! she stressed as loudly as she could allow herself.

That time, her five retainers didn’t hesitate to do as she said. She had to admit; maybe she did have a rebellious streak every now and then.

Embracing herself, Kayla’s will faltered, as her fingers wrapped her skinny biceps. The tears she had been holding up finally came out. Dragging her flickering feet along the thin crystal, she managed to blindly