Elva Rackthorn and the Tears of Azrael

Entrusted, Part 1

The Rackthorns' second day at Greenpeak dawned bright and clear— not that Elva was awake to see it. While Silas and Henri woke, dressed, and headed down to breakfast, Elva just buried her head deeper into her pillow, gathered her duvet tighter around her like a warded cloak, and fended off their prodding with an indiscriminately flailing arm.

When she actually woke up, the sunlight sticky in her eyelashes from cruelly opened window shutters, she had a vague memory of a promise to meet at the butterfly atrium. There was a note by her bed, but it was in Henri's atrocious six-year-old penmanship, and his predilection for ornate sentence structure did not help Elva decipher the message.

When she finally left, softly closing the door to their sleeping quarters behind her and not entirely convinced her pigtails were evenly placed behind her ears, she encountered a nurse resting against the windowsill and reading a clothbound journal.

She smiled at Elva with a practiced softness that matched the lavender of her robes, if not the rest of her bearing. "May I escort you to the atrium?"

Elva nodded, and caught a glimpse of the title and stamp on the journal. "Pardon, but what are you reading?"

"Oh." The nurse tilted the cover to Elva as she started walking, revealing Psychophysical Stressors of Familiars, 2nd Edition."Latest reading for staff on your mother's rotation. It's funny to think we were so concerned at first about having a familiar on location— 'specially one so sized. Them being such an old-fashioned thing and all, we didn't have any protocol prepped. It's all figured out now, of course, and Reggie is such a dear— and very popular with the other residents! Can't imagine the place without him these days."

"Old-fashioned?" The southerlands had queer beliefs, and here in the mountains, basically in Takir, Elva supposed things might be seen differently.

"Well, it's a bit of a courtly tradition, isn't it? From knights in storybooks and legends and such, and nowadays it's really just the gentry that keep them for show."

"Mother wasn't— I mean, my mother, Amelia, wasn't landed before. When she got Reggie, I mean."

"Well, yes." The nurse looked at Elva sideways. "Aristocrats and academicians, I suppose. University folk." She shook her head with a shudder. "Not many others would want to go into that demon world for a lark. Or have the means to even try if they did. "

"I— that's true, I guess. Though I think..." Elva wondered if this was appropriate or markedly inappropriate to say to a nurse at Greenpeak, then found herself stumbling through it anyway, "that this world might be matched for horrors with the Night."

The nurse stopped walking, and Elva wondered if she had gone and drawn a rune left-handed. But they had reached the atrium, and the nurse was just looking at her steadily. "It is. We've demons enough of our own without any more from over there breaking through."

When Elva reached her family in one of the glass-walled nooks that jutted out from the main atrium, her heart was unsettled in her chest and her stomach had the nausea-ache of hunger-maybe-not-hunger to it. She settled on one of the plush cushions, nibbling at a piece of toast scavenged from the breakfast platter on their table and watched Henri and Mother play Sevenses.

It was a game of adroitness as much as short-term memory and strategy, and at around Henri's age children ended up being a match for adults. Even on bad days, unless she was near-catatonic, Mother seemed to be able to play it by muscle memory alone. And that fascinated Elva. Watching her in moments like this gave her the information she wasn't able to get through more scientific exams.

Elva shifted her legs beneath her, tucked her toes into the crevice at the back of the couch. There wasn't an official diagnosis for Amelia Marshvelle-Rackthorn's illness. Elva still couldn't really decide whether to call it an injury or illness— had it been the swipe of that monstrous claw that tore her mother's mind away, or had that simply been the catalyst for a more complicated condition she was still fighting every day? It was hard to parse, but Elva had her theories. The idea she kept coming back to was of her mother's soul being untethered. As if that night some vital cord had been cut loose that linked her body and essence. She imagined all of Mother's memories and personality being a kite too unreeled into the sky on a windy day, and only by chance did they sometimes align with her body on the ground far below.

Elva couldn't run the tests she wanted on her mother, could only observe and analyze — but she did have her memories of that night, seared into her soul. Waking to her mother's scream, stumbling down the stairs, peering into her mother's study to see the heavy mist of a summoning gone wrong. At the time, the only way Elva had managed to break into the pentacle and disrupt the summoning was by ignoring on one side the sight of her mother crumpled and bleeding, and on the other the roiling shape of the monster who had painted the bloody scene.

So she didn't have much to go off of when she had scoured her books for references to the creature that had ripped right through reality that night. The closest description she had found was speculation about "unsavory beings which live in the Betwixt, in that void between worlds. Vixal creatures, beyond mortal or demon ken, their existence is limited to folklore, conjecture, and unexplainable quirks of data." Amelia's library was impressive, of course, even the bits Elva could access, but it was limited to her interests. Now if Elva could just get access to the Royal Library, where there'd be books and monographs like Psychophysical Stressors of Familiars...

"It's like she's still sleeping." Henri poked Elva again in her side. "Are you still sleeping?"

"No I— good morning, everyone. Father, Mother." She glared a bit. "Henri. Sorry to have kept you all waiting."

"No matter." Silas said, passing her a glass of orange juice, which she dutifully sipped, despite the disgusting pulp. "You're at that age where you need more sleep and sustenance to grow. We're heading for a walk about the grounds. Have you had enough to eat?"

Elva looked at the rubbery piles of eggs and glistening strips of bacon on the table and couldn't imagine either staying in her stomach for long. "I'm fine for now, thanks. Let's seize the day while it's so lovely, eh?"