A hope reversed

Content Warnings: grief, abuse, bad things happening to children.
 
 
(Soundtrack in my head d as I write this one: "Fix You" by Coldplay)
 
 
 
After the fire...after the factory went up in flames and too many machines blocked too many doors...after a pair of hands carried her out of the stifling darkness…after she had looked helplessly for her parents, for whom there had been no strong hands to carry into the cold, clear, night air…
 
…The world had been a jumble of disjointed noise, grief, and terror. Words in languages she did not understand. There had been shouting. People were upset. A sad man held her paw – she’d been so small then – and walked with her to a large building – the buildings in this city called Senovgorad were all so large, even bigger than the meeting house in the island.
 
She’d later know the building as the orphanage the Sisters of the Blessed Dawn ran. An elvish woman had stared hard at her when the man first dropped her off, as if she was both disgusted and hungry. Nel – about eight years old at that time –had tried to hide behind the sad man.
 
The elvish woman seemed angry about that. She barked more sounds and words at her that Nel didn’t understand. The sad man said other things, tone softer. The woman seemed angrier about whatever it was he said. He took a long time to let go of her paw and looked ashamed as well as sad when he turned to go.
 
A new chapter in life began in this place that people just called The House. It was a painful, lonely, confusing chapter. She seemed able to do no right to the angry elvish woman and the others who worked there, whom she could not understand. There were many other children there too. Many seemed as frightened as she was. She couldn’t understand or talk with them either, until a tiny changeling girl taught her Common and Orcish.
 
Life became slightly easier then. She learned to understand the orders the clerics gave them, the things the other children said, the prayers they had to memorize and recite each morning and night. The new languages were lifelines to survive this place.
 
But at night, no matter how tired she was after working wherever they had been sent to work that day, she would turn her thoughts back to her mother, father, aunties, uncles, cousins, and elders. She did not know where they were, but she felt certain that they would learn about what had happened to her parents and that they would come for her and take her and Khemma out of this dreadful place and to their homes – even if there homes were nothing more than a single rented bed in an overcrowded tenement that she’d slept in with her parents during the day and the day shift workers slept in at night. It would be more of a home than The House.
 
She wanted to show them, when they came for her, that she had not forgotten them. So she told herself their stories, over and over, practicing for when she was back with them again. She sang their songs, voice barely a whisper, once everyone else was asleep. And she made sure to do it all in their language – that beautiful language that made sense to her– the one where the words seemed to sound like the things they described – as one always feels about one’s native tongue. She would need to be able to speak it when they came for her.
 
Weeks, then months, then years, passed. She grew bigger – though still small for an ursan. Never eating enough saw to that. She grew harder too –became accustomed to the harsh conditions, to violence – both receiving and dealing it–especially when it came to protecting the tiny changeling girl from the bullies in the group. She learned to be strong – at least what it meant to her in this context – that she could draw the ire of the clerics away from Khemma and the others when she wanted to – it hurt, but it was also a sort of power.
 
After a few years she realized her aunties, uncles, cousins, and elders were not coming for her. She did not know where they were or what was happening to them, and they did not know where she was or what was happening to her. But she did not stop practicing the stories, the songs, the language. They were all she had left of the gentle life before the fire, before The House. If she lost them, she would lose her parents and the rest of her kin for good.
 
Eventually she gave up hope of ever finding them and ran with Khemma, the little changeling girl, and by some miracle, they made it to Eisen. They thought they would be free. But they found more cold, more hunger, and another woman who looked at them disgust and hunger that Sister Galina had–but Marlene, at first, had mostly tried to do it when she thought they didn’t see her.
 
There was more violence. More work that she didn’t have a say in. But at least now, first in their hovel, then in their crowded tenement room, then in their flat, 15 year old Nel could share the songs and stories and language with Khemma above a whisper without fearing punishment. Their gentleness, wonder, and humor kept her going.
 
The first time she’d seen that familiar mix of grief and terror on an orphan in the streets it had been when a petty crook had been berating a child and was about to strike them for not bringing in enough coppers from begging in the lower Central Ward. Nel used the violence she had learned on that man, then offered the terrified child her paw and her home. That night as the child slept soundly in her bed, she sat nearby and whispered the words she had been desperate to hear from her kin: “You are safe now. You are loved now. And I will always come for you.”
 
Nel had never stopped wondering what had happened to her kin, even though she had long given up hope of finding out.
 
Then Aaboli sent a message on a femur through a portal and she realized that their fate may have been a nightmare. They had not been able to come for her because they had been trapped in a hell of their own.
 
She was not small anymore. The magic of the runes had made her bigger than even most male ursans. Nor was she helpless. She had survived even death. Her claws and teeth and axe were strong and she had a group of friends with her who could fight and cast and heal.
 
That first night in the Wastelands, as she took first watch with their guides while her beloved insane friends who had come with her slept, she pictured the faces of her aunties, uncles, cousins, and elders, and whispered into the darkness. “Kay lee ha motonay” – “We are coming for you.”