Silver Blood, Broken Wings, Shattered Heart

Chapter 2: Dollhouse

 There's yelling again, but of course, that's normal. Eris is used to it by now. Just as she's used to the pain on the two points on her back where the scars of being a halfborn still haven't healed.

The ten year old looks at her dolls. She has enough for a whole village of happy families, and enough houses for them all to live like they are wealthy and comfortable. If only things in real life were so easy.

She holds up one, with wispy, long, dark hair with streaks of silky white, a pretty but forgettable face, and brown eyes. It looks just like her, so much that it's almost scary. She has close enough matches to her brother, with short, brown, choppy hair, a mischievous grin, and smiling green eyes, her stepfather, with the same brown hair but stone cold gray eyes and frowning expression, and her mother, with a face similar to Eris's own and hair so blond it is nearly white.

The real life version of this family is broken, but maybe this one isn't. Maybe she can make her own little world of perfection that can never be possible in real life.

Perfection. . .an awful word, one that her haughty aunt Treesa, the leader of House Bloodstone, is trying so hard to force onto the family. Everyone looks at Eris's family and sees perfection, happiness, a successful rich husband, beautiful, agreeable wife, and two obedient, human children.

Alas, only the rich part is true. And possibly the beautiful part, the opinion was subjective.

The bloodstone lamp in the corner casts a red-bronze filter over the room. All those years ago their founder, Lord Bumbo, had discovered the power hidden inside of the blood of all creatures, including the not so obviously magical humans. His method of harvesting the blood to use in beneficial inventions had been paying those willing to donate blood to be converted to bloodstone and power the district, but House Bloodstone's new leader, Eris's Aunt Treesa. . .has slightly more aggressive strategies. Including sacrifices, from outside the district and in.

Eris shudders, but comforts herself that at least House Bloodstone's sacrifices have purpose: Giving technology and assistance to the rest of the Bloodstone District. Most unlike the brutal, meaningless sacrifices House Boatem made to their "Boatem Hole and Boatem Pole" and House Jellie's feeding their prisoners to their bloodthirsty "pets".

Bloodstone isn't like the others.

Bloodstone is brilliant.

Bloodstone is perfect.

This family is perfect.

Everything is perfect.

Another shout from the kitchen, step-father's voice this time, containing more profanity than most girls Eris's age have heard in their lives.

But Eris isn't most girls.

On so many levels, she isn't.

And she never will be.

Lightning crackles through the sky as a whip would, and thunder booms in the distance, like an angry dragon's roar. It is a cold dark night outside, but not inside this house. Not inside this massive manor with an air of pristine perfection that housed a family of shattered pieces.

A small boy, two years younger than Eris, runs into the room in fear, probably of the storm. He toddles over to her and cries into her shoulder.

Eris's little brother, Eron. Though the two do look very similar, it's obvious that they aren't full siblings. He looks so. . .normal, with plain choppy brown hair and the barely visible beginnings of a moustache (All but a requirement in House Bloodstone, for boys at least) on his young innocent face. And there's Eris, with strange silver streaks in her dark hair, and then the other things her family had gone through drastic measures to hide. She isn't normal. She isn't most girls. Why can't the world care, but at the same time leave her alone?

"What's wrong?" Eris asks.

Eron sniffles, "The thunder and lightning, it's scary. Do you think the dragons will come after us in vengeance of Aunt Treesa destroying one of their hives? Or one of the other houses? Will they blame kids like us who did nothing wrong?"

"No, of course not," Eris replies, but doesn't believe her own lie, "Why don't you talk to mommy instead?" Their mother is much better at calming kids down than she is.

"No, she's arguing with daddy again," Eron says sadly, and it's just then that the shouting Eris had been tuning out before is loud as ever again.

"They'll be happy one day," Eris says, but it's another lie. Her very existence was the original reason the two had started fighting so much, and the other reasons just piled ontop of that giant one. It was all because of Eris's blood father, who Eris didn't know who he was.

Only what he was.

"Maybe," Eron says, "I hope so."

The two children both look out the window and silence, as the rain continues to pour down, the dragons roar their thunder in the sky, and the bloodstone lamp flickers in the corner.