𝙈𝘼𝙍𝙏𝙔𝙍 || Feyd-Rautha

02 | The Promised One

CHAPTER TWO
T H E   P R O M I S E D O N E

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Allya remembers her father being a proud man. A stern and tainted individual, bound to legacy and duty and her. He was indecently fascinating. His approval, when given, felt like a soft balm. Like a sailing bay after a raging storm.

Throughout his weary life, he continuously kept himself secure and stately. But Allya could not help but think there existed something coarse about him, something not entirely finished. His hands were not all that fine. They were rough and beringed, and had aged long before their time. For all the fortune and promise they beheld, they always seemed to grasp for more.

Her mother was separate, in her own way; a creature moulded by her indifference towards those around her. A bird held back in its flight, whose wings broke off long before she took notice of the sky. In her life, she existed only within the shadows of her husband. A constant companion. A shadow. A ghost without a name.

She tended to her children, like one might tend to a part of themselves. With tender and brute hard-hold.

'You will bring forth greatness, my sweet. You will reclaim honour to our name and blood.'

Her voice had sounded sweet, like a melodic wedding-chant.

Even when she did not need to, her words would remain fluent and tide-like. She was a woman, trained in solitude. A woman who had done nothing but serve throughout the entirety of her life. Who did not know of anything else.

'Your brother will take on your father's duties. He will seal the parting, and honour what is rightfully his.'

'And I?' Allya had asked.

'You will venture into your calling. You will serve and toil in the name of a cause, far greater than anything you yet know of. A hymn will befall us– a hymn that has been whispered a thousand times and will be whispered a thousand more. It will be sung in honour of the one that is promised, the one who has yet to come. When he dawns upon the world– all the past voices will sing as one.'

Allya had not answered her mother. She had only observed the shrouded figure, in whose lap her small body laid, and attempted to find the eyes resting beneath the black veil.

She had not found them. Part of her wonders if she ever did.

In truth, her parents would live through her. A young, sickened girl, who had little aspects to her at court, and only bore legitimacy in the char of her blood. They moulded her into something. A deity of her own.

Even now, whilst parted from them, she still senses some underlying presence. A sense of knowledge that feels removed, feels foreign.

Allya sits close to the wall with her knees drawn to her chest. Her head still aches with remnants of stimulants in her bloodstream, an endless abyss of tire– but she manages to persist through her confinement despite it.

She wears a beige dress, made of matted, plain fabric. It rests against her bare, sweat-stained skin– almost like a second layer of flesh. She has vague memories of servants clothing her. Young, eager women who would pull and nimble at her skin with their slight, pale fingers. They observed her as though she were a different creature. A foreign species.

She has been left alone for what seems like days. Not even guards or servants have entered her new quarters since she was brought here. Her room is neat. Plain and vacant. A dark rug covers the ground, leading all the way to a small window, nearing high upon the stone wall. Through it, slivers of pale white cast patterns on the floor. The outside world seems distant, a tantalising glimpse of liberty just out of reach. She longs to feel the warmth of her home planet once more, to breathe in the fresh air that beckons to her from beyond these suffocating walls.