A Court of Distrust and Darkness

Distracted

Nyx's point of view:
I was walking throughout the halls of our family home. My siblings were running outside with my cousins as Elain and Lucien visited from the Day Court. My mother was currently taking with Elain about what she saw about the rebellion.

I prefer to leave the gossiping to my mother and Neith. My aunt always gave me a ominous feeling. She was cheerful but at the same time quite, almost sullen. She was like that even with her mate and children. Her visions seemed to burden her more than she let on and it always put me on edge with her. One day she would break and never repair because of her visions. I worried about what she would do when that day came.

It wasn't going to be today though. My aunts where all together today and while very different people, they enjoyed being together. I left them alone, to not be an overprotective shadow as my mother called it. However I was still keeping an ear out just in case and frequently tested the defenses around the area as a precaution. I didn't want my family to endure something like the attack that happened a few days ago.

While walking through the house I heard my father and Lucien talking below about varying issues. But they weren't where I was heading. The library was the one location in this house where I could get some peace.

As I walked into the room I was immediately flooded with the sense of calm. It was the one place, that even while I was a child, I chose to hide away. Not surrounded by people's pestering and incessant questions. The library was just comfortably silent. It gave me a place of peace to just relax away from everything.

     However my calm was disrupted by a scent that drifted around the room. I knew the foreign smell even from the remnants left in the room. I couldn't go into the ballroom bellow without detecting the very same scent. The strong scent of grapefruit and what smelled faintly like the ocean breeze.

The scent calmed the tension I had along with the peace of the library. I knew who the scent belonged to. It made sense that Keres's scent would be here, seeing as she dropped down from the railing to save my siblings. But it was curious that as I walked around the area, how spread out the scent is. I assumed she was present for a while unnoticed but I didn't posit that she would wander.

I followed the scent and I figured out where she had went back and forth from. The section I enjoyed most. Fiction novels written by authors with centuries of ideas. Some where more normal than the next, others completely different. It was one of my favorite things as a child. Besides fighting with my cousins and flying. Books became a love of mine. Just as my mother had paintings I had novels, though I preferred the more unrealistic ones.

I followed her scent to a particularly favored section of mine. I could tell by the faint but present scent that she had wandered through the titles for a while. I figured that she walked about while she waited. However I wondered which of the novels she skimmed over actually interested her. I smiled as I skimmed my fingers over the new and worn spines of different novels. Each books topic varied from war, to lost loves, to undying trust, or even betrays. They were all vastly different stories, some told differently but each with a similar principle, that the protagonist wins.

I paused as I looked towards the window. I figured at first that my sister had left it, but the title and scent swayed me from that thought. It was one of my favorites. A novel of simple love and life. It was something that I dreamt of but never could achieve. It was fiction, but it seemed to reside with Keres as well. Something about the novels normality and love drew her in.

I picked it up lightly, going to move it back into its place on the bookshelf, but I paused. I wanted to know why she pulled this novel. Out of the thousand questions I wanted to ask her this became another, and I couldn't put the novel back. Instead I kept it in my grasp, holding the spine gently as it was worn from my repetitive use.