A Failure of a High Elf (Book One)

7.1

Written: 4/24/24
Word Count: 1,081

It wasn't every day that Mother fled into the unconscionable gratification that ended with her passing out, the tell-tale signs of Elfsbane spidering beneath her skin in phosphorescent purple trills. Once upon a time, such a sight had actually been a rarity.

Until Aunt Rosetta left the Capital for good, she'd had a permanent residence near Elmhurst Grand, right on the edge of the market center. The back side of her zesty, suave little cottage rested in the permanently gray, desiccated streets of the Beggar District. When I trudged up the uneven, winding stairs to reach the little attic and stared through its blurry, triangle-shaped window, I could see the soaking red palace spread out like an everlasting sunset while tents and trellises connected broken windows in tilted, crumbling buildings right next to the immaculate lawn and golden fence.

Aunt Rosetta had often taken trips. Training missions, she'd called them. It wasn't odd for her to be gone three to four months at a time, but it was equally normal for her to stay in the Capital she hated for up to six months. She'd left for good once her parents had died, the fires from their Burning hardly settled before the cottage had been sold to developers from the 3rd Ring of Housing and Architecture.

I think I was...three? Four?

It wasn't odd for Niall and I to be shuttled off to the cottage for days at a time. Niall quickly befriended the street rats living in the Beggar District, while I leafed through pop-up books of dragons, wyverns, and wyrms. Birds, reptiles, and fish.

Secluded in a pillow fort of my own creation, Mother and Aunt Rosetta could always be heard laughing in an adjoined room. They left me to my own devices, paying diligent attention when I crawled out of the fort's only entrance to ask a question about something I saw. Of course, I couldn't read. I was a slow child, hardly capable of learning anything. Hence all the ire I later faced with my two elvancy teachers and Cauline.

The days were spent in solitude and laughter. The 11th Ring's mansion was still under construction, while Grandfather's old mansion was under deconstruction. Father was far too important to come visit his family, but whenever he deigned to show up, somehow prim and polished despite living out of his office in the Royal Palace, a quiet, unsettled hush would fall over the little house.

I couldn't really remember much more than that. Mother at Aunt Rosetta's side was a stranger compared to the elva who spent most of my later childhood years passed out from Elfsbane trips. I was used to seeing Cauline more than any other grown-up. And when Mother had been scuttled off to the Western Sector for "rehabilitation," I was just as quickly shuttled away to Elmhurst. It was a two-in-one deal for Father, leaving him with only his out-of-control heir to handle at one time.

Well. It's not like being cold to your family was a crime. It wasn't even that morally twisted. As the heir to the 11th Ring, Father had had no choice but to have a family. Really, it was rather unfortunate for him that he'd ended up with two addicts and one elvaniac shackling his ankles together.

One could call him the victim in this family.

A burning, bubbling, broiling cauldron of memories weighed me down where I lay plastered against the fluffy purple rug in my aunt's office. My senses had returned to overdrive-mode sometime during the night, painting each memory as the most vivid of nightmares. Nighttime in the oasis acted as a cacophony of bugs and critters, the sounds inking a backdrop of horror as I watched Mother's smiling face tweak and fade away each time one of Aunt Rosetta's conquests sauntered out of her room.

As I watched Niall get beaten to within an inch of his life by a food vendor he'd stolen from, some dirty High Elf who looked as if he'd never had a single good thing happen to him in his entire grizzled life. The look of shock that turned to malice shining in Niall's uneven eyes. Even back then, those green smudges had made him look less intelligent than he might have been.

Mother hadn't cared much for Niall's wounds, but she'd happily fretted by Aunt Rosetta's side as the veterinarian-in-training reset my brother's bones and wrapped his bloodied ears in leaf filaments soaked in healing tonics. Never once had Mother's eyes veered away from Aunt Rosetta—her efficient hands, her burgundy hair, her steady shoulders.

"Why would you steal from Trony?" Aunt Rosetta had tsked, her voice neither kind nor angry. "Couldn't you tell just from looking at him that he needs all the money he can get?"

Niall's bruised and battered face had been so swollen, I wasn't sure he could even answer. "Whatever," he'd huffed, voice so thick it could pass for a doughy, glutinous loaf of bread, "I didn't think it was that big of a deal."

"Did someone tell you to do it?" Aunt Rosetta's hand stilled on Niall's knees, tweezers in hand as she picked at gravel embedded deep into his skin.

"I didn't think it was a big deal," he mumbled again instead of answering.

At the time, I'd been barely more than a toddler, so most of the exchanges were hazy, made of suggested facial expressions and tones of voice. Most memories were like that. One deep impression on one of the six senses, then sparse details filling in the rest.

This memory was defined by three impressions, though I couldn't say why. It wasn't a particularly important memory that I looked back on as some irrefutable evidence to how my life had gone wrong. Yet, each degree of familiarity with this scene brought me a surging feeling that felt almost like puke but also like tears. Vines burrowed through the incessant surging like worms trying to eat away at all the mess.

Rosetta's hands stilling on Niall's shredded knee.

Mother's eyes pinned to the side of Aunt Rosetta's profile.

But the most horrible, most disgusting of the three was the smell. It was a scent that would later become more familiar than the smiling stranger at Aunt Rosetta's side. But at that time, it had never been so strong as to overpower one's nose.

Half powdery-makeup and half wisteria flower, the scent overpowering this little bathroom scene was none other than Elfsbane.