Difference between revisions of "Rilka"

Revision as of 08:12, 10 April 2011

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Prologue

It's not often that the opportunity to clean house presents itself so perfectly. When it does happen, you'd have to be mad to ignore it. In Turn 192 of the 9th Interval, such an opportunity presented itself.

Beradin's youngest daughter, Rianya, was no plotter. She had no interest in politics, and no power to make her useful. Once upon a time, she might have been a marriage prospect for an outsider, but at twenty-six, she had long since been relegated to the status of 'old maid'. Rianya was strange. She was... mad? The implication had always been there. Rianya was kept out of the public eye. Rianya was sickly. Rianya preferred not to attend gathers.

Rianya was exiled.

It was convenient. Expedient. No one even seemed to notice. If she'd had any concept of the plot at hand, she never seemed to show it - but then, Rianya rarely seemed to show much of anything. She didn't even seem to protest her own exile.

The islanders thought Rianya was strange, too. Weird. Unusual. No quite all there. But she was still young enough to bear children, and with more men than women, it made her useful - for, perhaps, the first time in her life. Whether or not she was crazy - or simple - is hard to know, now, but she produced two perfectly healthy, normal children in quick succession before her untimely and probably accidental death in an early threadfall.

Description

Rilka is all legs and long brown hair, a waif-like girl whose often faraway expression does little to alter the impression of extreme youth encouraged by her narrow figure. She wears her hair loose, wind and weather rendering it almost constantly unruly, though nothing has succeeded in making it anything but perfectly straight. Her face is long and pale, with a narrowly pointed chin and feminine, even pretty features, and solemn, grey-blue eyes. The elements have left their marks upon her skin, but her natural pallor remains.

Background

Rilka is Rianya's great-granddaughter: the daughter of her son's son.

Rilka is the only surviving child of her parents. She was born a few turns after they paired off: a much wanted child, after several miscarriages. Even from birth, she seemed an unusual child, but her parents adored her nonetheless. It was Interval - finally! - and things were getting easier. She may not really remember it in detail, but her first couple of turns were very happy ones, mostly spent out of doors, and, for the first time, in properly private quarters: the family's very own hut.

But when she was seven, Thread returned. There was no warning - there was nothing. And everything changed. Her mother was pregnant, and far enough along that it really did seem like it might be sticking-- but she went into labor too early, and in the end, both she and her son died.

It was a very bad Turn.

Without her mother, Rilka grew increasingly detached. She'd always been a loner, but now, she spent more and more of her time away from others. She was old enough to be of use, and she certainly was: she had a real affinity with the sea, to the point of considering it something akin to a friend. Or, occasionally, a very angry parent.

The comet pass (not that she knew to call it that) ended when she was in her early teens; it relaxed life again, though the islanders were slow to trust the peace. Again, Rilka lived in a hut - though this time, it was with the other young girls. Life was... back to normal. And so it remained, until the turn Rilka turned twenty-one.