≾erpentine

[Boots]

When is that moment a person finally decides to give up? Is there such a thing as so much pain that the woman, the man, the child simply shuts down? I've often wondered what was going through my mother's head that night, a woman who bore three children under the pale eye in the sky, completely on her own.

The woman lay on her bare back, her forehead slick with sweat from the heat of the roaring open fire pit, and exhaustion, her long dark tresses clinging wetly to her heavily rounded, naked form. All too quickly her face contorted with pain, a scream unleashed from her lips. She panted, rolling her head to look at a pair of twin babes with distant green eyes, they clung to eachother, both covered in her blood, sleeping peacefully while she howled in pain along side them in the dirt.

 They did not have names yet, nor did they have any idea what kind of lives they would lead, only the blissful innocence and, coincidentally, ignorance of a child.

"I am your stars, I am your moon, I am your sky and trees." She croaked, before staring up at the stars with intent, her hands moving over the last figure nestled inside her belly.

A final heave was given as the third came bashing his way out into this world, and as the woman looked up to the sky, it seemed to her that the fire answered her call for release, the flames shooting high into the sky with her, letting her fly and be at peace with her ancestors. It was beautiful, and rather poetic in a morbid fashion.

A disfigured baby clung to his mother's corpse, making so much noise that her family, a tribe of wandering Vistani came to inspect, and upon finding only their dead daughter, and three bloodied and dirtied half blood babes, sighed with disappointment. They could have left them there to die from the cold, to the wild, at the mercy of the animals that prowled there, but they did not.

And so began the rather chaotic story of a young half-blood named Nadya.

[Boots]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAGAoy5WZWY

My name is Nadya Melusine.

I have been told, on several occasions, that I dance with death.
But a dance should not be feared, a dance should be celebrated, and enjoyed.
That is what I do. I enjoy myself, as much as I possibly can.

I was born a bastard, two minutes after my sister Kezia, five minutes before my brother Emil- to a man who loathed children, and a woman who disappeared the day she tore us kicking and screaming from the insides of her womb. I do not remember my parents, or perhaps I do not wish to. Raised by my mother's kin whom informed us bitterly that she had passed on, I learned most of the ways of her people, yet I never felt.. truly part of their family. They kept us as outsiders, constantly reminding us of the tainted blood that ran through our veins, the brightness of my eyes, the curl of my hair. It was wrong to them. And so, without realising it, it also became wrong to me.

In my younger years, kindness was a term used rarely, and love did not exist. Such a bleak existance for children, I almost felt sorry for us. Alas, strength cannot be forged without struggle. And struggle we did, until mine and Kezia's fourteenth year.

We had stopped in a small village just outside of Borca, where I met a funny man with sharpened black horns sprouting from his balding forehead, and a spaded tail that flicked lazily between his gangly legs. We traded our stories, and I felt my heart going out to him in a foreign sense of familiarity. This creature was an outcast, he was like me. I struck a deal with him that night, under the moon. The very next day we would meet, I with my siblings and he with his.. hat, and we would leave together.

I admit, the idea of leaving our only family, however indifferent they were towards me, sent a pang of worry through my torso. But it was the right thing to do, it was what I needed in order to find the place where I could belong. We did it, too. As dawn bloomed along the yellow and pink sky, I tied my cloak around my shoulders and hefted my pathetic amount of worldly possessions onto my shoulder. Along with Kezia and Emil, we travelled into Borca itself, and that is where we began to find others like us. Lost souls, different and not knowing why they were not accepted like others. We took them in, each and every one that we found.

And soon enough, we had our own family.

[Boots]

["Welcome, welcome! To the Cirque de Luna! Yes, yes we understand you are all quite excited but please! Try to keep calm until the end of the show.."

Nadya awoke in a cold sweat, sitting up to paw at her damp forehead and pull the ropes of dark hair hanging from her now sweat covered head into a long braid over her shoulder. Outside her tent, it had begun to snow. She stepped barefoot onto it, wincing at the cold surrounding her feet. She cast a sad glance around at the blackened patches of grass, the ruined high tops, and closed the tent behind her as to not wake her horribly injured twin.

She dragged their emergency supplies out from under the safety of one of the remaining high tops, and tore the material from the tents inside it, sitting with a needle and thread. She worked long into the early hours of morning, repairing and replacing all they had lost, a foul expression playing on her features at the events of the previous evening...]

Our first performance, while it began as wonderfully as we had hoped, took a horrifying turn for the worse. Kezia and I danced and sang, tapping our belled tambourines and enticing those who watched, while Tomas and his beast put fear into their hearts. Even the brave ones seemed reluctant to go near his pet. I danced with it, as I do often, bowing to the eight legged giant as it bowed it's hulking body in return..

And then, the painted man appeared, stunning their large crowd with tricks of magic that neither Kezia, nor I had ever seen before. Now, in our line of work a fine line is drawn between fiction and reality. When The Mime performed his nasty trick on my newest friend, all was still for a few moments. Was it real? Was he pretending? And then she fell.

Gwenn, dearest girl of fire and snow who does not know her true place in this land yet, cried out in agony as I dashed to her side. The rest of our Cirque immediately leaping to our defense, quick to reassure the crowd that he was not one of ours, he was not one of ours! I managed to lay her down inside my tent, tearing open her blouse to palm at her stomach, where she said the pain came from- but there was nothing.

Peering up at Tallulah's doubtful gaze, I realised with a sinking feeling that there was only one thing to do. Helping the girl to her feet I swept an arm around her, Tallulah following my lead and taking the other side, and together we helped her stagger into the Vistani camp close by.

Only a few hours before we had started that evening, a woman approached us from that camp. She sneered, and laughed, and red flashed across my vision as she so kindly reminded me that I would never be one of them. Many outsiders will mistake my family and I for the Vistani, but we are proud half bloods. Taking Gwenn into that camp was quite difficult, but I sucked in my pride. The same woman from earlier simply grinned as I pleaded with her to help this girl, and half way through my speech, a roaring explosion went off behind me.

It all happened so fast, the crowd of onlookers was so large I could barely see her figure through the smoke and flame that now covered our bigger tents. Kezia was caught in the fire. Kezia was in danger. I fled to her, leaving Gwenn with Tallulah to be cared for by the snooty Vistana- and as I screamed her name and searched the crowd, a woman on fire ran into me directly, screaming in agony. I lead her into the water, sobbing as I held my sister, gently leaning her under the cool surface to put the flames out. She clung to me, and I to her, her beautiful hair gone, her skin charred and blackened, splitting to reveal the soft pink flesh beneath it. We stayed there far into the night, as the others eventually left, cradling her in my arms and singing lullabies of times long past.

She is sleeping, now. And Simion has been such a wonderful distraction in all of this, he held me to his chest as I howled, and simply murmured the same thing I say to everyone that runs into trouble here.

"Tomorrow is a new day, we will rebuild, and move on."

-Nadya

[Boots]

I had my doubts about this place the moment we arrived. It is soul sucking, and terribly grey. Thoughts of ending the cirque and settling, if only for a while have crossed my mind, I've met such wonderful people here, amongst the sorrow that surrounds the land. Ghail came to us as lost and confused as a babe, his grasp of the common tongue poor, though now he thrives. He is strong, he is brave, and very passionate. This worries me, as trouble can arrive in all forms to the passionate souls.

Gwenn is doing well, free of her utterly hilarious disguise, a lovely girl who trails after Ghail like a little shadow. I cannot help but feel a sense of protection for this thin creature, among the wolves of house Gulthraeln and the prying eyes of the local men, she is but a child in this. Sweet, and innocent, and delightfully funny at times.

Such strange things happen here, Simion and I were sat playing on a winter's morning while I repaired one of my dresses, when a barely dressed man came screaming into our camp. He gripped the Borcan bard via his shoulders, howling for help. He said that he had been arrested for a crime he did not do, and I immediately pointed to the vacant tent and directed him to the makeup.

A guard came patrolling by our camp mere moments later, and Simion and I lied effortlessly to protect the prisoner hiding behind us in his tent. He seemed content, and went on his way. I directed the prisoner to the fire, and fed him as we sat beside him and listened to his story. He seemed more comfortable near me, than Simion- which is to be expected, the man is as hard as rocks around strangers.

As he told his tale, Ghail popped his head out from his tent, and made his way over to sit with us. We decided to help him, for his employer would surely provide him with an alibi, and come nightfall we snuck into the city. The sewer tunnels proved impressive to me, stretching and curling right through the entire city. Almost like an undercity of it's own, and thankfully a helpful twist showed us the way for a bottle of Simion's Tsuika. (Side note: Simion was not happy about losing his Tsuika.)

I made up some terrible story about being the prisoner's long lost relative and bawled my eyes out so loudly that his employer promised to give the information to the guards, just so he could shut me up. There was no time to lose, and we fled back to the prisoner's house in the slums of the Grey City.

Waiting for us inside was a rather morbid sight, the body of his beloved wife laying on the floor, cold and lifeless- as three immortij freaks took large bites from her flesh. We managed to take down the first two, but the third, their leader- he proved too much. Thankfully the sun was rising, and the creature fled back into the undercity.

Alone in the house, the prisoner crawled out from under his bed and informed us that the guards would turn up soon. I leapt on the closest set of drawers, pulling them apart to find a letter, one that matched the one Simion found beneath the mattress I ordered him to search. A love letter! Two of them! It appeared this poor man's wife had been having a passionate romance with this other man, but she had written her final letter of goodbye, not wanting to hurt her loving husband.

We tracked him down, and Simion scared him into giving away his secrets, not with words, but his body language was fairly easy to read. A rich man, in my opinion used to getting his way, and so he butchered his lover when she rejected him. Quite sad, really. We watched him get dragged away with smirks on our faces, the prisoner turned up and thanked us profusely, though his sorrow was clear.

This land is full of sadness. This land is full of heart break, and pain. I feel at a loss trying to fix so many things at once, and I must ask myself, is it a waste of my time to be here?

-Nadya.