Little Star

Chapter Ten

Roses! (For the image, geniuses, not the song. Also, all the nobles here might be a bit OOC, so just bare with that for now)

Karias's POV (surprise!)

I had never thought I loved Rowena. I had never even known that I liked her, so love was a long shot. I mean, I considered her older sister as my own older sister so there had never been a reason for me to wonder if I had romantic feelings for Rowena. Sure, she was beautiful. In fact, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in the whole of Lukedonia. Tall and slender body; fair and flawless skin; long and wavy brown hair that sparkled under the sun; blood red eyes that sparkled under any circumstances. That girl truly had it all. But I never thought I had romantic feelings for her. I had literally grown up playing with her; Raskreia and Kei, being the oldest in our generation, regularly remained busy with their official duties so it had always been Rajak, Rosaria, her and me who would be hanging out together. Well, there had been Ignes and Claudia too but Ignes was a rude bitch who would never even make polite eye contact with us when we tried to talk to her while Claudia was still a baby compared to us. That still left plenty of other girls my age, besides Rowena and Rosaria, who I thought were pretty enough to flirt and play around with which had probably been why I took Rowena for granted. It had also probably been why I took the all the loving smiles she would throw at me for granted. I was so used to those exquisite loving smiles of hers that I never once stopped to think about what it would be like to not see those smiles.

Until I did.

We had been around twelve years old when Rowena had started to show a keen interest in science due to which her father, the Lord, decided to send her to the mansion that was just around the palace. We all had been stunned, because our own parents always warned us to stay away from that mansion so as to not disturb the mysterious inhabitants. But the Lord's decision was supreme and according to him, Rowena would apparently receive the best science teacher she could ever get at that mansion. And so she started going there. At first, it would only be a monthly visit. She would go there for one day in a month, come back and show us a bunch of charts and papers that we understood nothing about but smiled anyway to please her, and then we would go back to playing our own games. But soon, her obsession with science proceeded to grow more profound. The monthly visit turned into a weekly visit, and during the time of the week when she would be with us, she would barely play with us and just remain absorbed in her charts and papers, and then, the weekly visit turned into a daily visit. We hardly saw her anymore, and I realized just how much I was beginning to miss her exquisite loving smiles. Her laugh that sounded like the tunes of a melodious harp to my ears. Her eyes that never appeared dull or dismayed.

But she was gone.

Not actually gone, but the only times we ever saw her anymore were at official gatherings and meetings now. Rosaria was the only one of us who gathered the courage to tell Rowena how badly she was ignoring us, since Rajak always preferred to remain silent anyway and I was too ashamed to have taken that angel for granted. Being the angel she was, Rowena even felt guilty and reduced the number of her daily visits to spend more time with us. However, even that didn't last long. Around eight-hundred and twenty years ago, Rowena suddenly announced that the mansion no longer had anybody living in it which was why she had decided to reside there in order to take care of it and to continue all her research at its lab. We tried to protest, and this time even I mustered some guts to say no, but the Lord said yes and that was that. We were two hundred years old at the time, thus after our coming-of-age ceremonies, we stopped seeing Rowena altogether. Out of desperation, I once visited her at the mansion and she had looked as beautiful as ever.

So beautiful that I wasn't able to stop myself from kissing her.

But she rejected me. She said she knew that it would be difficult for me to commit to a single relationship, owing to my playboy nature which was proving so awful to me at this point, and so she didn't want to burden me. She had said all this calmly, but I had eventually begun to yell at her. Then I'd left the mansion in a huff, and continued with my stupid playboy antics to distract myself from that untouchable angel who remained unreachable within the confines of that dreadful mansion.