Nakali gave a start as her door was pounded on with a heavy fist. “Girl, get out here now!” She rose from her desk where she had been reading, quickly hiding the book in one of the drawers, hurrying to the door, opening it. A fierce looking man, tall and broad shouldered with neatly trimmed hair stood there, currently red in the face and clearly in a state of agitation. “What’s wrong with you?! The kitchen is a disaster and you’re huddled up here!” He thrust a rag into her hands, practically hissing in anger. “We have company tonight, and if you don’t have it done by the time they get here, you won’t have any meals for the next three days. Go!”
She quickly trotted down the stairs, eager to escape her father’s anger. Making sure her shoulders were covered by her shirt, she hurried into the kitchen and stopped short, staring around. What had happened in here? The whole place was a disaster, like someone had opened all of the cabinets and pulled things out at random, spilled flour, sugar, and oats all over, the eggs were left out of the ice box, one having rolled out and smashed on the floor. Several cutting boards were laid out haphazardly on the counter, and a thick indistinct doughy mixture is smudged all over the counter top.
Her hands started to shake. She could tell this was deliberate. There was no sign that the person who had left these things out had had any goal in mind, nor that they had the remotest idea on what they could make with the ingreidents. She hurried to the eggs, checking that they were still cold enough to put back in the ice box, and shoved them into the stone box used to store things that could spoil. As she closed the hatch she turned around and found her sister standing there, grinning from the doorway. “Oh, do you have to clean all of this up? That’s unfortunate. I was going to invite you to tag along with us while we go into town, but I guess you’re too busy,” she says, waving a very slightly white dusted hand at her with a very nasty grin.
Knowing better than to retaliate and with a slightly resigned sigh, she starts to dust the mixed powders into the trash bin, not looking forward to missing meals if she doesn’t finish this.
Once she got everything picked up and cannisters restored to their rightful places, she picked up the rag her father had thrust into her hand and wet it with soap and water and began to scrub all of the kitchen’s surfaces until everything was shining and glimmering again.
Sweaty, covered in flour that’s plastered itself to her, she dragged herself up the stairs to her attic bedroom just as she hears the toll of the doorbell that signified that she finished just in time. A bath would have to wait, as would a meal of stale bread and cheese. She wasn’t allowed downstairs when there was company, whether they knew of her existence or not.
So it had been for thirteen years. From the moment that Nakali had been born she had been an outcast in her own family, hated for the way she had been born, even though she couldn’t help it.
Nakali had been born with her mother’s long red hair and her family’s naturally pale skin. She would have been considered pretty by everyone in her family had she not had what they called her condition.
For Nakali was not a normal child. Her eyes were a strange vivid teal color, and the shape of the pupil was somewhere between that of a human and a dragon’s elongated one. The result was frightening to many humans, and it was the first sign of something strange. But that wasn’t the only thing that made her strange. Besides her eyes she also had bright scales on her shoulders and arms, as well as her legs. Her nails were also abnormally long and sharp, and naturally grew to a point that she had to file in order to keep in check.
Despite these obviously magical traits, Nakali had never shown the remotest sign of magical ability. Not even as a baby had she so much as accidentally changed the color of her blankets, as so many wizards did as babies.
All of these things made her a child of complete disgrace to her family, and they never failed to enumerate all of the things that made her such an unsatisfactory daughter.
Nakali was made to clean the house, do the laundry, and tend the yard and garden. She was never allowed to have friends, kept isolated from other people as she was, and her room since she had slept in a real bed had been the attic over the front door. This mean that while she could see people coming and going, she could never actually interact with them, could never meet them. The effect was to make her feel extremely alone.
The only times she was spoken to were when her father would demand that she clean something, or her mother to snap that she looked scruffy, or her brother and sister commanding her around the house, doing all manner of chores and tasks.
She wasn’t even allowed books or paper to write on, her parents claiming that such things were expensive and as such were only for people who were going to go on in life to accomplish great things and become outstanding examples of power. She, as a freak, a monster, and presumably powerless, was going to do neither of those things, according to her parents.
This did not, of course, stop her from having either of these things. Occasionally she would sneak a page or two up to her room, and sometimes she would come across a book on the rare occasions she was able to sneak out of the house. But mostly she kept the small collection of books she had under her bed and wrote her own stories on the pages she collected. They never missed these pages, as they were so few from each stackher father brought home from the marketplace.
These stories sustained her, kept her going. If not for them then she would have gone crazy, between her siblings and her parents hiding her from the world and preventing her from really living to any extent.
They often reminded her that they would have given her the name Adara had she not been born an abomonation and that had she been a normal child she might have ammounted to something.
Yet Nakali often thought of Adara, the girl she might have been had she not been born a monster, as a totally seperate entity.
Although she knew that in reality Adara was simply the name she would have been given if she had not been born with the scales and eyes of a dragon, she could not help, in her mind, imagining Adara as another girl, one that would have been loved and cherished by her parents. They certainly spoke that way, as if she had stolen their real daughter from them, and that she was some kind of imposter. Her name, in fact, they told her, meant “fake”.
The girl gave a sigh, and knowing her family would all be firmly busy with their company, she carefully pulled out her quill and a bottle of ink, which she had crafted herself from a large feather she’d found on her sill and had mixed her own ink from the ashes in the fireplace. Pulling out some paper, she continued to scribble her words on the paper, continuing a story she’d been writing for some time.
She’d written another three pages in her story and added them to the growing pile under her bed and had just stowed her ink bottle and quill in her desk when there was a knock on her door. This one was lighter than the one earlier that day, and she knew it must be her mother.
Getting up she nervously opened it. “Hello, Mama,” she said quietly, and the woman scowled at her. The look on her face may have suggested that something smelly was resting under her nose. It gave Nakali the distinct feeling that she’d forgotten to wash or something. But of course this was the way her mother had always looked at her, as if she were some sort of pet that had not had a bath in a long time.
“The Serans have left. Clean the kitchen and the dining room and get yourself some cheese and bread from the cupboard. And for heavens sake have a bath, would you? You’re filthy.” She turned then and headed down the stairs, muttering to herself about what an unsatisfactory child Nakali was.
With a small groan the girl headed down to the kitchen, figuring that at least she should get the house clean before washing herself up.
As she walked down the hall of the great manor house, though, she tripped over something and stumbled into the wall. Looking back, she found that her older brother was smirking and chuckling to himself as he walked away.
Not bothering to call after him, she went to the kitchen and began cleaning. This wasn’t nearly the arduous task it had been before, but it wasn’t fun, either.
Just as she was heading to dump the cleaning bucket outside and had opened the door to do so, she found herself face to face with a rather handsome looking man with tawny hair and dark eyes.
“Oh. Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry, my son left his book in the kitchen, and I came to retrieve it for him. You… weren’t at dinner.