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...
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As soon as the village leader uttered his words, the strange creature before them frowned. With the face of a child severely dissolved into the rough layer of bark, she turned to Kairou and Malin. A grunt that sounded like a stifled roar echoed from her throat, and then thick vines broke the ground beneath Kairou's feet, cutting through the floor's blocks. By Kairou's side, Malin and the other two men brought there to be punished met the same fate.
The vines compressed their limbs, scratching their skins as they snaked around them.
"She's going to choke us," Malin shouted. "Put your arms against your chest, Kairou." Like Malin, Kairou executed before the vines enveloped their torsos. The other two weren't fast enough. None of it phased the angry creature and she continued her work. She was intent on killing them.
The hold of the vines was so strong that there was no room to move, no matter how much Malin tried. His arm bones ached against his ribcage, and he began breathing laboriously. Kairou, too, was struggling, while the Indigenous Anuka already started wheezing from the lack of air, trying to scream without anything coming out.
Malin feared this could be the end. He looked straight at her. Alika. His sister. So, she was real after all. He hadn't been crazy. What he had read in his father's diary when he had first found it had been true. Suddenly, the stories, rumors, and speculations that had been common lore within the Satouka family came rushing back to him. Gossip and words meant not to be said, that surfaced around drunken dinners. All the accounts came together to form a somewhat coherent tale. The tale of Alika, his sister, who had never been named until now.
She had been the product of his father's teen love with the daughter of the family servants. The family had been relieved to give her up for adoption in an orphanage in the suburbs. But for the family's disgruntlement, his father had gone to adopt her as his daughter when she was ten years old.
Malin wasn't born then yet, but it was said that part of the adversity the family held toward his father was because he had pursued his daughter again and the maid he had loved as a teen. His mother had told him his father had spent two years traveling, without speaking to his family. And when anyone asked where he had been traveling the answer was invariably the same: no one knows.
