A Tender Hand from a Violent Crest

Scars run Deep

Daniela had run away, giggling from the shouting Bela. A wide grin upon her face as she made quick back home. She had no intention to speak a word, but the frantic way it would rile up Bela was far too sweet a Berry to leave unplucked.

Instead, she was quick to head towards the neighboring village, long cleared of the old folks and replaced by their housing quarters for the maids. Better built and free moving, it was the perfect place to hide from Bela until she realized Daniela hadn't spoken, but also, there may have been other reasons for her decision on such a hiding place.

Wandering through the soft earth streets with a sway to her steps and a big grin, the youngest of the sisters quickly took in a bit of the view, scanning around the well constructed wooden homes and soft gardens of the village quarters for someone new to tease, or fluster while she sat in hiding. A task she would never get to indulge in, as a hand quickly rested on her shoulder with a grip that made her body shiver and freeze.

Behind her stood the head of the maids, a rather tall and scarred woman with brown skin and rather long, thick, and curly black hair that was always maintained in a set of twisting braids, kept in a big bun behind her head. She had round glasses that always seemed to catch the light, obscuring her dark brown eyes and lethal stare. Her uniform was always properly maintained, but today, on her day off, she was wearing a rather mundane off white dress layered over with a rather warm looking kind of scarf that had green, red, black and white colors layered in a fishnet pattern. She had once called the item something, but Daniela could never remember how it was pronounced.

The head maid was a wise woman that many knew held the ear of the Lady Mother. She had experienced a dark massacre years before that she had survived only through her own stubborn resolve and had escaped northward, eventually finding her way to the lady mother's employment. While her clothes did much to hide it, the woman was powerfully built with strong arms and legs and a toned, even muscular torso. Yet she rarely showed it. Daniela suspected that those scars were in places other than just her arms or face, but she hadn't had the courage to ask.

Daniela, you see, had a weakness for this particular maid. She couldn't place why, but the way she spoke and moved had a unique effect on the otherwise bratty and childish woman. She would get rather quiet and even obedient when she was around. So, surely, the lady mother had started scheduling the head maid's shifts around Daniela's more rambunctious hours of the day, and the number of broken walls and random deaths of couriers had substantially dropped as a result.

"Causing trouble as usual?" She inquired, tapping her fingers along Daniela's shoulder in a slow sequenced motion. Her voice was soft but full of warning. She had a hoarse way of talking, as if she had suffered smoke inhalation damage to her throat, yet maintained a degree of clarity in her voice that few others might have without sounding cartoonist.

"Whaaaa- me??? You must be mistaking me for some troublemaker, Miss Nour!" Daniela lied with a cheeky smile, turning to face the substantially larger woman. Daniela was small. In her reborn state, she was a mid to late age teenager physically, so the nearly 7 foot tall Middle Eastern woman in front of her, combined with a nearly 50 kilogram difference in weight, made it more than a little intimidating to maintain said cheeky grin.

The woman did not seem persuaded, to say the least. A cocked eyebrow and a hand on her hips told Daniela just as much. "Oh, do forgive me, Lady Daniela. I must be looking for the other woman in black that sticks eggs in all the toilets," she retorted with a hint of humor mingled in with a scolding tone. Last Saturday had been quite the mess thanks to this bratty heiress, and Nour was going to try her best to avoid any more incidents if she could.

Now, Nour did have a soft spot in her heart for Daniela. The girl was pure trouble, but despite the often sadistic nature of the establishment she worked for, with Daniela being a contributor more often than not to said violence, the woman had a habit of seemingly only unleashing truly malicious acts upon those that Nour may consider deserving of such actions. Nours hands were by no means clean, though the blood that soaked her own hands held no guilt. Self-defense against a genocidal regime did much to remove the shame in taking a life, especially when those you killed were treating civilians and even their own people, held as hostages, as expendable target practice.

Whenever Daniela was at her worst, it was usually because someone had whipped her into a frenzy. Well, it was almost always Cassandra's doing, and thankfully, Nour had only ever seen it then put to work, turning rather foul men into smears against brick. That did a lot to make Nour see Daniela not as some monster on a warpath who treated wonton violence as a game, but rather a young woman with a lot of unresolved, and complex emotions that were stoked by a sadistic sister, and thankfully directed by a thoughtful mother.

Nour had reservations at first, when she had arrived at Castle Dimitrescu. The lady mother had still been recovering and needed help rebuilding everything. A painful process Nour had been pivotal in. It had done a lot to show that this towering monster of a woman was not the same horrific figure as local stories had led her to believe, or at least, she wasn't anymore.

Nour's gaze remained fixed on the cheerily grinning girl, even as that grin slid into a pout at Nour's response. "Okay, it was one time, and besiiiiiidess, it got cleaned up!" The woman responded with a mixture of pleading and jovial humor in her voice. Nour simply adjusted her glasses.

"Mm. And who was the one who cleaned it, Lady Daniela?" She inquired with a harrowing stare. The vampiric girl would be sweating if she had the capacity, but she certainly was aglow with blood in her cheeks. Her eyes instantly hit the dirt as she shuffled about in place. "Yes, that is what I thought. So. What brings you to our quarters?"

Daniela smiled sheepishly, slowly returning her gaze back up to the larger woman with a subtle gulp. She couldn't admit the full reason, but maybe a half truth would suffice. "Hiding from Bela?" She said, trying to hide that it was closer to a question of trust than an actual answer. Nour sighed in resignation. She knew Daniela was only telling her part of it, but if it meant the girl wasn't here to specifically mess with them, she could play the part of a sitter for the day.