Chaos Bound in Blood

Part I. The bastard - Chapter 1

Snowflakes were dancing in a frenzy, bathing the city in something that looked akin to powdered sugar, but it wasn't that—it just was that everything was frozen. The white horizons swallowed the Sun whole and one could barely make out the fading contour of the Moon. The triplet Peaks of Zaryn appeared to be drowning in Snow, more so than usual, but they still were gazing at the shores of Sea Asha, still were protecting the Summer Palace at their foothills—yet other things suffocated by the cold and the frost. The slopes of the mountains were pouring their forests onto the rest of the world and peak Tesryk, the highest of the Zaryn chain, seemed to be infinite not only because of its height, but also because of the river to which it gave life to: Teslya. The river was encompassed by the countless trees and one would think it had no end if it weren't for the fact that Teslya seemed to be evading into Cygallia, the capital city of the Kingdom of Sarmiss.

    The window kept fogging up, and she kept wiping it with the sleeve of her shirt. The fire was slowly dying and even if it kept burning, it was but a futile attempt to try keeping the cold at bay. But it was yet another impossibly cold winter and fire would be useful only if one kept adding logs onto it, something she hadn't done. Such was the month of Santion, the first month of winter. She knew where the mountains were, where Teslya was springing from, where the Sea was and where the Summer Palace stood and she imagined seeing all these things with her own eyes, when she was in fact staring into the dark and foggy night with her forehead glued to the window, with her lips pursed in wonder and almost even confusion and her eyes wide open... and that was all she could see—the dark, the fog and the scattered lights of the homes in Cygallia. She imagined everything as if the world was in miniature when it was, in fact, so large and full of things unknown, that she couldn't even begin to fathom it. She removed her forehead from the window, wiping the mark it had left there and then rubbing her face to warm it up again, lowering her gaze at the tiny map she had in her book. It was a book of fables, but she was sure some of it was true.

    "Beyond the mountains everything was ashen; there were no trees, there was no grass, little to no animals could live there...". She made a note to herself to ask her mother later whether this  actually existed and if they could travel to this weird land just like they travelled to Othellia to be in the Summer Palace at the end of each spring. Now was not the time, though, as everyone was busy and no one seemed to pay her any mind, not even her mother that had left her with endless piles of study materials and assignments that she had not yet finished as she was more interested in looking out the windows in her room. They were all getting ready to receive a diplomatic convoy from the neighboring kingdom of Porosha about which she knew close to nothing, save for its name and for the fact that they didn't speak their language, but another one. She had no book about it in her tiny library and she didn't have library privileges to just any book. She made another note to herself to beg someone for just one book about this other kingdom that existed out there. Did they have mountains? Did they have rivers and seas or summer palaces?

    Someone knocked on her door, and she knew exactly who it was, courtesy of the specific cadence of the knocks—lively and joyous, very much unlike the way she felt right now. She climbed off the windowsill, managing to also remove the fur her mother put there to try blocking the cold from entering her room.

    "Ouf! Yes, come in!"

    "Manon? What on earth are you doing there?"

    "Hi, Alec... this fell off the window", she said while pointing at the white fur.

    "What were you even doing there, child? I thought you were studying, did you finish?"

    Alec approached her messy desk, full of notes in awful handwriting. He picked a piece of paper and read the title out loud: "Notes on the human heart"; he frowned.