Aadya

This is the story of Aadya, her strange birth, her well spent life, and her invaluable death.

If you have ever even been in the vicinity of someone in childbirth then you know that, typically, there is no end to the shouting, crying, cursing, and swearing that goes on; whether it's coming from the baby, the mother, the father, or the doctor. I imagine the experience of being ripped from the soft, comfortable, and warm safety of your mother's belly and thrust into a cold, jagged, and largely hazardous world is a quite unpleasant experience.

However, Aadya's birth involved no crying or screaming at all. Her mother went through labor without making a sound for fear of attracting more bandits or wild animals. She was alone on a bridge far from any other civilization so there was no one else who could have screamed and cursed. Not even Aadya uttered a single cry as she shuffled onto this mortal coil.

Now normally a baby not crying would be quite alarming. A baby's cry means that they are alive enough to take air into their lungs and feel the harsh environment around them, but Aadya's mother was not alarmed because Aadya was making sound, however it was not the sound you might expect. When Aadya emerged from her mother, rather than cry and scream; she sang. No one knows for certain what caused this strange trait, but most attribute it to the odd circumstances of Aadya's birth.

There were many reasons to call Aadya's nativity odd. To start, Aadya's mother, a strongly built, fair woman named Annabelle, had lived in a small village that was often raided by bandits, barbarians, and the odd bored noble. On the day Aadya's mother went into labor there also happened to be a band of bandits, barbarians, or nobles (depending on who you ask) raiding and pillaging the village. No one is precisely certain why, but Aadya's mother, a woman in the throws of labor, was snatched up as a prize of that days raid, and before she knew what was happening Aadya was crowning as her mother was dragged into a wagon and taken away from her village.

When her captors realized what was happening they dumped her off of the side of the wagon. Aadya's mother found herself giving birth halfway across a bridge in the middle of a river, to a singing baby. Perhaps the unique circumstances of her birth are what caused this third bizarre trait, or maybe things would have turned out the same regardless of where and when she was born. No one can say for certain.

And if a singing baby isn't strange enough for you, according to her mother, it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It was a sound like the first spring breeze that brings with it the warmth of the sun, and the bright colors of marigolds and tulips. It was a melody of new life, life with nothing but potential.

This song gave Aadya's mother the strength she needed to move from her place on that bridge, with her infant in her arms, and make her way down the river. After several miles she came to a small inn where she stayed the night and told everyone of how her baby was born, and they all heard the strange singing that Aadya made when she ought to be crying.

For those who may not know, pregnancy is a very taxing event, especially for the mother, and with the addition of being briefly kidnapped on top of childbirth; Aadya's mother should have been knocked out cold from exhaustion, but she wasn't, because she knew that she only had a little bit of time to spend with the tiny human she had just brought into this world.

You see Aadya's mother was cursed, and she knew it full well. A nine month countdown started ticking the moment she had gotten pregnant. How did she know this? A simple observation, her whole family was cursed. When Annabelle's mother had given birth to her, her father had dropped dead twelve hours later, but that wasn't all the evidence she had. According to her mother, his father had dropped dead the day he was born, and his mother before that. They didn't keep any official records in those days so Aadya's mother couldn't know how many generations back this pattern went, but she was willing to bet it continued far past the limits of her family's memory.