Kindred: The Man With No Name

Lysa

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The girl sat in the corner, painfully still, watching rolling green hills fizz by. They clustered together like they were cold, and beneath the heavy rain that had haunted them last night, they might have been.

Inside, she was a curious mixture of comfort and boredom, perched on the smooth red leather coach yet shut away from the rest of the world, with nothing to do but stare at the window as the train rattled along.

Keera hadn't said a single word since they left. That's how she knew she was in trouble. She snuck another peek at her. The flaring nostrils were a dead giveaway too. She always thought they looked alike. Keera's face was just as round as hers. They both had smooth porcelain-like skin too, and though constricted, her eyes were as wide and as blue as Keera's.

Both their hair had been a similar shade of brown once, a far cry away from her mother's blonde hair, or her father's golden brown mane until she had decided that purple locks would annoy the queen best. When that didn't work, she put in more effort, on one occasion liberating a baby boar from her father's grange and setting it loose on the kitchen staff. Eventually, she moved on to more heinous acts like absconding with her mother's silk gowns and jewelry.

Lenna, at this point, begged her husband to intervene but he brushed her antics off as mere trivial pursuits. She was spirited and willful, just like he was, and he loved her all the more for it.

Dragen and her tower were the queen's last resort and just as a precaution, her grandfather had promised to cart her off to Athtar to live with the Amazons if she got booted out of this tower. That had been enough to draw her into temporary subservience. She had never known Lord Oblak to make idle threats. The Amazons were famed for their ferocity. Two of them had visited the Golden City once. She was only three years old at the time but the memory had stuck with her well into her youth.

They came battle-ready, their stares piercing and penetrating, covered in bronzed armor fastened to their torsos, and hair pulled back in one single waist-length braid. They found her playing outside her grandmother's Sept. One of them lifted her up by the scruff of her collar and asked her where her father was.

She remembered kicking and flailing her arms wildly as they laughed...

"I didn't realize that I'd get into so much trouble_"

"Yes you did," Keera cut her off, her arms folding to match her lips.

Lysa pushed back her hair and pressed her eyes together so that they would tear up and slowly began to stifle a couple of sobs.

"Cut the crap," Keera said without turning, slightly amused and insulted at the same time by her attempt to con her.

"Fair enough," Lysa began, clearing her eyes and sitting up. There was no need for pretense anymore. "Am I going to lose my light?"

Keera shrugged, leaning back into her seat.

'Keera!!!'

"Yes?"

"Am I?"

Still nothing.

She remained stoically impassive. She couldn't punish her, so letting her wallow in anxiety for a while was the next best thing. They rattled past a by-pass that led to the exit rail into the next village and veered deeper into the Quarter. They had journeyed for nearly half a day now, but it would still take them another hour or so to get home.

The Quarter spanned endlessly, a collection of numerous great cities; from the glamour of the Golden City to Myrad and its towers, and the human villages that were lost somewhere in between.