The Dark Heir (SHORTLIST - Open Novella Contest 2019)

Rose

Rose was a conundrum.  She'd often wondered whether she had been named after a flower as a joke since it seemed both her looks and personality had taken one glance at her name and run as fast as they could in the opposite direction.  Her hair and eyes were black. Her lips were red but thin. She had her birth-mother's buttery skin tone and oval face, but where her mother was tall and stately, with an expansive bosom, Rose was slightly above-average height, with lean, willowy muscles, and her breast band was merely adherence to social norms and performed no actual function.

She was pretty in a feral sort of way, but her mouth was stuck in a perpetually pouty sneer, and she almost always looked angry about something. She couldn't help it, she was born with resting-bitchy-face. It made it hard for her to make friends, and she was constantly told by men to "smile more." Occasionally she would smile at those men, at which point they would spit out whatever was in their mouths, exclaim they'd made a huge mistake, and quickly exit the premises. This didn't make her feel any better about herself, and she couldn't "work" on her smile because the commune had no mirrors.

Like the rest of the people in her commune, she wore a simple, un-dyed, woolen dress which looked like a sheet of cloth with a hole cut in the top for a head, which is exactly what it was. The dress was tied with an equally un-dyed cord. It blended almost exactly with the color of her skin, and Rose liked to imagine that it made her invisible.*

Everyone wore the same thing regardless of their sex, and everyone had just two dresses. It was all that was needed when you dedicated your life to D'Lorde. It supposedly removed jealousy, because everyone looked just as bland and frumpy as everyone else, but it was actually a coverup for the fact that none of the followers were tailors.

The itchiness of the wool also made everyone slightly unhappy in such a way that made them constantly contemplate the glory of their promised afterlife. This was exactly what Oren wanted, and without telling anyone, he had a cotton liner made in town and sewn into his dresses so he didn't have to feel itchy all the time.

D'Lorde's commune was located about a half a mile outside of the town and nestled at the foot of a large cliff. A tower, the only part of the old castle still standing, was embedded in the side of the cliff in a manner which stumped the architects of the age. One of the many business ventures of the commune was taking traveling architects to see the tower, since the commune claimed it was on their land, and required payment.

Rose was often assigned to do this job because no one else was at all interested in listening to the architects conjecture. The last group had been a lively bunch.

"Ah, you see here, where the granite of the tower plinth has fused to the hillside?" One architect who was on his third visit was telling another newbie he'd brought along. "This is indisputable proof that there was some supernatural or magical force at work here,"

"Well, couldn't it just have been that the plinth was carved from the cliffside itself? Really, Yan, I don't see why you keep bringing up magic, you know it's not real."

"Some of us like to imagine other possibilities, Frank.  What exactly do you think could have caused the top of that tower to be cut so cleanly and preserved so well for centuries?"

This argument went on for a while, with one or two of the other architects interrupting occasionally with exclamations about this or that, asking if they could climb the tower, or get inside. Rose liked their discussions if only because it had nothing do to with D'Lorde, or the commune, or any of the other boring day-to-day things which she usually had to hear about.

Sometimes they would tell her about the capital of the country in Fare Town (Which had once been Fartheton), and other places they'd traveled to, and Rose would imagine escaping the commune and exploring the rest of the country away from Oren and Auntie Janette, and Auntie Margaret, and Auntie Elsie, and Auntie Laura.