There have never been secrets between Iano and his twin brother, Miano. But that changes when his brother marries an heir of the most powerful fief of the village. With such power comes the right to see the face of the Goddess. Only, Iano's twin mus...
2nd Week/ 4th Month/ 1794 - 30 years before the Gomeka researchers' travel to the Anuka Forest.
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Before Alika became the botanist's daughter she was simply Alika. Daughter of nobody. A child who spent the day hours dreaming about sailing adventures on a ship that navigated deserts with torrents of sand, and her night hours dreading the dark.
She was a child with known difficulty learning to read, born somewhere in Gomeh's suburbs between the last five and ten years. That was according to the sheet of paper that Alika had thought to be a proper birth certificate until she finally got a real one.
It had been said that it was the only thing her mother had left for her: a sheet of torn paper of poor quality, with her name and birth date scribbled on it. Only it had caught rainwater that washed some of the ink. And no one could tell for certain if the last number of the year was a four or a nine.
"I'd say it's a seven," someone always chimed in as the old debate of whether it's a four or a nine was held, sadistically making things more challenging.
Alika spent her first undetermined number of years in the orphanage, far away from the suburbs of Gomeh. The sisters of solidarity, who held the establishment, first introduced her to potential adopters as a nine-year-old child, but as the years went by, it seemed she became younger. Judging by the age the sisters gave her, the next year she was eight and when the botanist came to the orphanage, she was seven years old.
"Nobody seems to want a child who cannot read," the sisters told her after meeting with several potential parents who decided not to adopt her. At night, she invariably opened a book, but she was unable to extract any meaning from the letter soup before her eyes. In the back of her mind, her dreams, much easier to approach, would be calling for her. She could already see monsters and heroes in her mind. And once her eyes closed, she was transported to a world of comfort and magic.
The wait was long. For a child, it was almost eternal. But that faithful day came, to everyone's surprise. Alika, the daughter of nobody, best known in the orphanage for being quite diligent with her cleaning was finally adopted. By no one other than a rising scholar. A curse disguised as a blessing. Or vice versa.
The intention of adoption shocked everyone and caused quite a stir in the orphanage up to the point where the papers were finally signed. All of it was the devotee sisters' make. Because young handsome men who had their lives ahead of themselves didn't adopt a child that was thirteen years old-her age had suddenly almost doubled now.
Some of the sisters speculated that the young rising scholar wasn't Gomeka but a Menar-born, one of that barbarous kind who sold their daughters to marriage to much older men. The younger the better, and seeing as Alika was only six years old, the Menar-born man was practically bound to become rich by selling her along with some dust-covered fruits in a busy market.
