Chapter Text
Xulena
The stars were sparkling in the night as the Astorians of the Kingdom looked down at their tilled and seeded ground, finished with the planting, just in time for the Season of Planting to end. In just a few minutes, the twinkling lights in the sky would smudge and change, making the climate perfect for growing and harvesting to happen quickly.
The kids dancing around their parents’ feet, noses twitching and hooves clopping stopped their play to see the swirling of art and beauty that was proceeding above them. The adults were used to the sight of their sky changing and payed no attention, rubbing their shoulders and backs, groaning from the pain of staying in one place for so long. All adults, save one.
Xulena, Daughter of Kreen and Lehigh was staring up at the sky, eyes wide and hand pulling her hair away from her face. Her other hand was holding a paintbrush ever so slightly above a stretched, homemade canvas, loaded with dark colors. Then, just as the sky shifted, her hand moved without her looking down. The paint curled up and down, running out of one color then going to the next. After the sky stopped spinning, Xulena looked down and started to detail the painting.
The webbing between her fingers flexed as she stretched her fingers far to draw the shooting stars and moving planets. Kids gathered around Xulena’s legs after they had finished gawking at the sky, watching her paint it. A few tried to poke their fingers into her paints, but that earned a light poke on the head, with which they also received a round dot of white that dried quickly. The fins on her elbows flexed as one kid with ram horns tugged on it and she pulled her arm away, trying not to smudge the paint.
“Let me work, Ian,” Xulena said quietly at the boy, pinching his cheek, “then we can go home.”
Xulena’s littler brother nodded, small hands clutched in her skirts. He took after their mother in the Traits department, unlike Xulena. They both had their father’s dark black hair, though. Ian buried his face in his big sister’s hip, a scared little boy.
After she was done with her painting, Xulena flicked her hands in the air, drying the quick-dry paint and crouching to her brother’s level. A tear was snaking down his dark complexion, which was another opposite to Xulena’s own. She flicked it way with a colorfully scaled finger and kissed the little boy’s forehead.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she asked, shooing the other little kids away, then turning back to Ian and picking the small boy up. Setting him on her hip, Xulena started to break down her art equipment while her brother thought.
“Some of the kids made fun of my horns,” Ian said, just as quietly. Xulena’s head whipped around to face her brother, eyes full of rage.
“Who?” she said, voice scary and rough. Ian shook his head and threw his hands around her neck, crying. Xulena took a couple of deep breaths to tamp down her anger and proceeded to pack her things into her cylindrical deer-hide bag. Looping the strap over her free shoulder, Xulena hiked Ian up and reached down to grab the still-wet painting.
“Let’s go home, honey,” she said, turning and leaving the fields without a word. Their home wasn’t remotely near the forest, since their parents had never worked in the fields. Instead, Xulena and Ian’s parents were a teacher and a bookkeeper, dealing with the jobs that many other Astorians passed to the lower class. She swung the painting back and forth, whistling a light tune for her brother, but still seething on the inside from the kids that made fun of her brother. Since he had inherited his mother’s Traits, many thought Ian was weaker than everyone else, and even their father’s Trait was “wussy”.
They got to the house just as Xulena started tripping over roots and snapping twigs. Generally bumbling around and almost dropping Ian, she kicked the door in leu of a knock. The door was swung open by a girl around ten years old. The little girl’s face broke out in a smile and she caught the wood framing of the canvas, bringing it inside for her sister.
“Lili, can you put that in the hallway?” Xulena asked the girl, grabbing one of her thin horns and shaking it slightly as greeting. Lili, the girl nodded and dashed off, leaving her older sister alone with Ian. Xulena dropped the little boy to the ground and kneeled next to him.
“You know that you can tell me anything at any time, right Ian?” The little boy nodded and threw his arms around Xulena’s shoulders for a quick hug, then ran away to play with his brothers and sisters. She rocked back on her heels for a second, breathing in and out deeply to brace herself for the verbal beating that would come when her parents called her in to talk.
“XULENA!” and there it was. She bounced up onto her feet, dropping her art bag. Walking farther into the house, Xulena tried to avoid the rest of her siblings. They would attack her and ask what she did today, and, being their older sister, she couldn’t brush them off. Walking up the stairs to the office on the second floor, Xulena wondered what they would punish her for this time. The instance before, her parents had set her in the tank for a week and a half because she skipped farming classes to take care of Enzi—the youngest of the family—when she was sick. Before that, she was tanked for a month because she had talked back to Lady Bromming after the old woman had cornered Lili and poked at the young girl to lose weight.
The door at the end of the hall was coming up quickly, and Xulena just wanted to get everything over with. Just as she stepped up to the door, it swung open, her mother yelling.
“XULENA YOU COME UP HERE THIS MINUTE!” Lehigh clamped her mouth shut when she saw Xulena right outside the door. Her mother’s thick horns were so glossy that Xulena could see her face in them, and she hated it. Lehigh grabbed her daughter’s arm, grip so hard that her newly manicured claws dug into Xulena’s pale skin.
“What have you done?” the bookkeeper hissed, “You were painting in the fields?”
How did they know already?
Her father—Kreen—was facing the wide window that opened to the forest. He sighed and turned around, “What were you thinking? You’ll never get a job if you slack off like that in public!”
Xulena opened her mouth to protest that the painting was her job, but her mother, who was a lot taller than her daughter clamped down hard on her arm, “Think about your future! You’re going to have to help out Xavi soon with the estate and we really want him to succeed. If you keep painting instead of doing your work then no one is going to want to hire you, and you’ll disgrace the family!”
For some reason, everything that Xulena did would eventually disgrace the family. Disgrace Xavi, the first male sibling. Disgrace her future husband—if she ever got one. Xulena was accepting of her fate—which would be a very, very long time in the tank—but she wanted to know one thing before her father ushered her out the back door and to the back forest.
“How did you know I was painting this time?”
“A little old lady came by the house seeking to buy your painting,” Her mother said, smoothing her long blonde hair around her horns. Xulena smiled but Lehigh’s face made her drop it immediately.
“We threw it in the fire,” her father said, voice like iron, then tugged his daughter out the back door before any of the other kids could see her. They walked in silence for a while until Xulena caught the light glint of water in the moonlight. The tank.
The tank was a fishbowl sunk all the way into the ground with water around five feet below the top. It was specially made for Kreen when he married Lehigh so he could swim without anyone seeing him, but Kreen barely ever got in a pool of water anymore. He told his kids that had inherited his Trait that getting in the water was a show of weakness on their part since it was where they were weakest. This was a lie.
“You know we do this for your own good,” he said, leading Xulena to the edge of the tank, where the grass was overgrown and hanging down, not nearly long enough to touch the water. She snorted, standing as far away from the edge as her father would allow. “You need to think about what you’re doing. Don’t ruin your future.”
Xulena sighed and inched closer to the edge, looking down into the dark water. It wasn’t very deep, only about six feet, and she could breath underwater, but you couldn’t get out of the tank without help. You were at the mercy of the people walking by.
Her father’s hand pressed to her back and propelled her into the water, a cold splash echoing in the night. When Xulena bobbed back up, her father was staring down into the water, a look of slight disgust on his face.
The feathery filaments of her fin billowed in the water as she sunk down to the bottom of the tank, cold dirt surrounding her. The shadow of Xulena’s father shifted and left. She pulled off her tunic to show a wrap that she always wore just in case her parents threw her in the tank. It always happened, so why not be prepared for it?