Completed Mother of Pearl

[Amolina]

Beatrice was already sitting up when Amolina came back in. Still feeling sick, Amolina offered Beatrice to help her wash, but the young woman politely declined. She didn’t ask after the would-have-been child, but just wanted to put on her dress and cloak, so they got the garments from the chest and Beatrice dressed. She moved somewhat slowly and seemed to struggle to be reasonably steady. When she was fully dressed and ready she reached into the inner side of the cloak. Her hand came out holding a dagger.

“I’m sorry nurse Moletta” she said. “ Her voice was low and strained. ”You have been a great support today and I will remember it with gratitude. But I can’t let you live and know this about me. You too must die.”

While Beatrice spoke she lunged forward, the dagger coming at Amolina in what looked like a pretty skilled way. The cloak moved the way thick cloak cloth of high quality moves, and the green dress flared and fluttered around her, feminine, beautiful and expensive.

Beatrice was armed, but she was slow, and her movements were clumsy and unsteady. Amolina dodged and avoided the first attack. She dodged again, and again and again. She would have ran to the door and rush out and fled, no matter she was still in her underwear and barefoot, but Beatrice made sure to stay between Amolina and the door all the time.

It seemed to only be a question of time now, before one of Beatrices attacks would finally hit her. Beatrice was quickly losing the unexpected stamina desperation had given her though. She stumbled, her body giving in to the state it was in. She wasn’t really able…she had made herself try despite it… she must hit Amolina soon, or else the risk was she wouldn’t make it. She gathered her last energy for a last wild attempt and would soon stumble forward, her face still hidden behind the mask …

She or me. Live or die.

Amolina had been cornered at the table with the fishing gear and looked at the things there in panic. A there she saw it, the box, and in the box … without thinking much she got the things there out. It was Nolan Parnell’s sock, the sock she had taken from him that night when he had been knocked out and she was searching his body for evidence … it was his sock, and inside it the dart she had found and saved.

The dart. The poison dart.

She had it in her hand when Beatrice stumbled forward in her last desperate attack. The dagger hit Amolina in her left shoulder - Beatrice had aimed for the heart and Amolina had let her come nearer this time before she tried to dodge. Hardly knowing what she did, just set on staying alive at all cost she drove the dart into Beatrices flesh. She didn’t see where it hit, and she didn’t care. All she cared about now was that it had hit.

Beatrice’s body had been very weakend already. She died nearly instantly, after a few high screams of agony. Amolina stared at the corpse, stunned, breathing fast. She wondered hysterically how she could have ended up in this situation. It was beyond belief. She was shivering, and she felt like just screaming, but forced herself stay silent. It was all like a nightmare, yes, a nightmare, a pure nightmare.

After a while she managed to think: she must get rid of the corpse.

[Amolina]

Beatrice hadn’t been a heavy woman really, but it was like all strength had left Amolina. It was perhaps the stab in her shoulder … she suddenly realized the dagger was still there, left in her flesh. Memories of things she’d heard about knife wounds flashed up in her mind. She recalled tales about how pulling the dagger out was what really had killed people, as the weapon had blocked a damaged vein and when they took it away the bleeding started.

She was in pain and her shoulder was throbbing. She felt numb and her left arm wasn’t working well. But she decided to not try to do anything about the dagger. Not yet. It was a small weapon…she would leave it where it was, for now. As it was she could still move and do something, and she didn’t want to take the risk to lose what little stamina she had left.

Mostly using her right hand, she started dragging the remains of Beatrice to the door. For once she was grateful that the room wasn’t too big. Feeling empty inside she did what had to be done. She got the corpse to the door, opened it and peered out. Seeing how it was after dusk she realized much longer time had passed than she had been aware of. During the long abortion process in the boathouse, in practice a birth actually, she had been … she didn’t know what she had been. Absorbed in it ? Overwhelmed?

Now it already seemed unreal, like a dream.

Amolina was still in her underwear. It was silk, but cheap, thus scant. But this wasn’t the time to worry about what people would think. She could see that the other boats had returned and been moored. Nobody was around and the other boathouses were silent, the small windows dark, if they had a window.

She thought about how the owners had went home to their apartments and were having dinner now, with their families, laughing and speaking in the light of lanterns, happy and safe. Soon they would put the smaller children to bed and perhaps tell them some fish stories to deter them from going to near the canals and fall in the water. The kind of laughably gruesome fish story Amolina had told the vantha Vanari that evening in The Spot, about the evil deepwater fish.

Oh the warm, safe and cozy life of the others...the kind of life Jeb had wanted her to go for...why, oh why, hadn't she listened to him ...

She hurried up…not that this was quick, not with a wounded shoulder. But she got the corpse out on the small pier right outside the boathouse. She looked at it. This wasn’t Beatrice anymore. The body was empty, the soul gone. And the beautiful green dress was stained with Amolina’s blood, the delicate green silk torn and dirty after the short transportation.

No, no more of this … she stopped watching, pushed the corpse down into the water and expected the undercurrents of the lake to slowly carry it away to a destiny nobody would ever know. Well, likely the fish would come again, simply.

And so it did ...

A monster swam up in the water! It was huge and pale, monstrous, unbelievable, it’s jaws open, lined with giant teeth, and … what followed in the water, right in front of her, nearly made Amolina faint of terror, but instead she rushed back into the boathouse, slammed the door shut and bolted it. She felt cold. She was shaking. Only the pain from the dagger in her shoulder made her feel real.

The fish HAD come. The giant fish. The really big one.

[Amolina]

The image if the monster fish remained with her, turning up again and once again in her inner vision. The more she tried to dismiss it,the more it seemed to come back, until if felt like it was eating on her mind, tearing it to pieces just like … she was breathing fast, very fast and the feeling of far to speedy heartbeats blended with the throbbing pain from the knife wound in her left shoulder.

Her thoughts where whirling, swirling, writhing, curling, flickering like candle-flames in wind.

All to fish-fodder, all to fish … we don’t know where we are coming from, but now I know where we’re headed. At the end of the day the big fish takes it all. The fish takes it all.

There’s a monster at the bottom of our beautiful lake. Beneath the glittering surface death is always waiting, biding it’s time.

And so my only body will be counted to the huge and unknown numbers of those who went before me to the lake. Down to the lake, yes down to the lake we go … like my mother Ana did…all of us, down to the lake.

She knew she must do something. But this was all she knew. The something she must do was concealed for her and all she did was sit there, pain and terror mixing in her mind to the strong and heady drug named agony of death. It made memories of reality and dreams alike break through and blend into her thoughts absurdly.

The memory of Clyde Sullins was telling her to not swim with the big fish. How right that man had been !

She found herself laughing at the thought. A stab of pain went through her as the laugh made her injured shoulder move and the laughter turned into a moan. The fire she had made in order to keep the boathouse warm was on it's way to burning out and the cold of night was slowly seeping in through thin cracks between the planks of the walls.

She ought to dress and get out of here. Not sit on the floor dressed in violet underwear and laugh at things that weren’t fun at all. Vaguely, it occurred to her that though she wasn’t bleeding much she had been bleeding a bit, and she ought to make sure she wasn’t slowly bleeding to death. But looking at the shaft of the small dagger that was embedded in her shoulder, she had no idea what to do about it.

[Amolina]

Dreams. Dreams about translucency. Lucent dreams that haunted her, althought she normally suppressed them. But she remembered. She remembered the feeling of thirst. She remembered how she had danced with a translucent being and how she had been given a heart to carry, a heart like a pearl, invisible and precious.

And another dream. There had for some reason been a feeling of fish there … big fish. Amolina had wanted a soul, but her face had gone to water and her name had been erased. The better to recognize her, the translucency had said. She had taken the clear water in her arms and swimmed up throught the air with it, flying away, while the world far beneath them started burning, the fire consuming everything..

A heart, a soul, a pearl and a narrow escape. Enigmatic nonsense.

Humankind are doomed to think of enigmatic nonsense more or less nonstop. It was there in her mind, all the time, annoying rubbish going nowhere, purpose-less and without any clear reason to be there in the first place. She thought about beautiful things, art and fashion, lines she liked in the plays she starred in, the rose colored flower patterns she had decorated the Nitrozian-Moletta Sanitary Station with, though nobody bar herself noticed, cared or could be bothered.

She knew the other’s thought her silly. They suspected she was squeamish and though they didn’t comment on it much she knew they didn’t think her the right stuff. She didn’t count as "strong". Valerius had said he thought her frail, Parnell had called her delicate. The only thing that stopped them from just throwing out the worthless fake nurse was that she owned one third of the research project.

Right now she could understand them. She wasn’t doing well. This job wasn’t a mess, it was a pure disaster. All had went to petch.

She could stumble up, get dressed, leave and seek help. Or she could sit where she sat, pull the dagger out of her flesh and let the blood flow, if flow it would. That way she could stay forever in her mother Ana’s boathouse, and she wouldn’t need to ever open that door again, go out and face the fish. It would be the easy way out. The way that Amolina Moletta almost always was guaranteed to choose. It would be the way that avoided immediately dealing with troubles and threats , in favor of postponing an increasing heap of tricky messes to the future, where somebody else might get to solve it instead.

Out there it was night in Ravok and the lights of the lantern made the water in the canals shimmer with a soft and enigmatic beauty like the alluring, alluring gleam of mother of pearl.

The easy way would be to stay.

[Amolina]

A wail reached through her confused thoughts.

Amolina came out of her bad state of mind and looked around, but not for long. The wail was coming from the basket under the table. She didn’t think. The wail fueled her somehow and she moved by sheer instinct, crawled the short distance there and pulled the basket out on the floor.

The baby was alive. There was no way to tell why it had been so still and silent at first. There was no way to tell why she had quickly assumed it was dead but put it away in the basket on a whim instead of just getting rid of it. Amolina stared down at the small, pale, screaming being. She had kicked the boat blanket away. It definitely looked just like any human baby as far as she could see.

The pain in Amolina's left shoulder was an impediment but it didn’t seem like the wound was serious enough to kill her. With her functional right arm she pushed the basket nearer to the fireplace and put more wood on the fading fire. The screams fuelled her like there was some kind of mysterious power in them, that made her able to do this despite how hard it was. She did it anyway, and it was like the pain in her shoulder didn’t count as much as it had done just chimes ago.

The still lukewarm water in the through… another blanket dipped in it, cleaning the child a little bit … there were more things to do, but Amolina was one-armed and not able. She would need to take it to somebody else, give it to somebody who could … It wasn’t totally clear to her what she was planning. Or maybe it was clear but she wasn’t acknowledging it. But she knew she was going to leave the boathouse and bring the baby with her.

Still using just one arm she managed to open the chest, take out her white linen dress and wriggle into it. She crinkled it hopelessly in the process and had to leave the bodice unbuttoned , wrapped down so it looked like she was dressed in a white skirt and a violet top …she hoped the cloak would conceal most of it. She didn’t dare to just pull out the small dagger. The important thing now was that it looked like she had clothes.

Stumbling a bit, she put a new boat blanket around the baby’s small pale body. This was when she noticed it : the baby’s right arm looked a bit weird … there was a kind of shimmer in the skin, a shimmer that reminded her of the inside of a shell - mother of pearl. When she touched it, it felt just like normal skin.

But it shimmered dimly, alluringly, just like mother of pearl.

At this thought the memories of her dreams slammed into her with a force that made her feel a revelation descended on her. In that moment all the odd fragments she had been speculating about over and over again seemed to move together, fall in place and finally make a meaningful picture.

The dreams ! A heart, a soul, a pearl and a narrow escape. Enigma.

Not all children were meant to be born, but this one was. This was what it all had meant, she thought. The dreams and the fortune. Everything was finally explained and making sense.

Thus do our minds fill in the blank spaces of reality, driven by the need of meaning, because humankind was made to think there must be a meaning, a purpose, a plan. And so we make sense. And so she did.

Amolina Moletta pulled the blanket over the furiously screaming baby. She picked up the basket with the odd extra endurance that kind of screams can somehow create in people, and walked out. A glance at the lake told her it’s surface looked as harmless as always.

She left the boathouse in a mess, locked the door and hid the key.Then she took the basket and walked. A ravonsala wasn’t an option, not after the horror she had seen in the water.

[Amolina]

…and she walked, but where could she go in this city where she had been born and raised and been living all the twentyfive years of her life, who could she turn to in the hour of need, who could she count on to help her now …

It was out of question to go to the healing hand, ask them to remove a small dagger from her shoulder and show them a baby with one slightly shimmering arm. It would be like asking for an interrogation and whatever that would entail. The woman who had called herself Beatrice had been wealthy, and chances were the members of the family she had belonged to would mourn a daughter, a sister, perhaps a wife even, and want revenge. Amolina couldn’t afford to let anybody know there had been a connection between her and Beatrice. She would give the job back to Bohir Adam’s at The Spot and tell him she had thought twice and changed her mind.

… so where could she go, where could she turn …

She was certainly not turning to her business partners at the Nitrozian-Moletta Sanitary Station. Both of them would be capable of helping her with the wound, but both of them would also be able to wrench the truth out of her in a less than considerate way. It was easy to predict the Nitrozian’s reaction : Amolina guessed Valerius wouldn’t like anything whatsoever of the whole mess and might find it bad for his family’s reputation. Nolan Parnell, if she knew him right, based on experience, would likely not be bothered by what she had done, but make business of it, take advantage of the situation and profit on it somehow, ask for money, or worse, demand information about the monster in the lake.

… so where to go, who to turn to, who…

Birine. She would turn to Birine Telemnar.

Birine was fisher folk, just like Ana Moletta had been, and mother of many children, though they had grown up and found their own lives and homes. What was her name again, the youngest one, little … Ireth? Perhaps not so small anymore, time had passed. Amolina hadn’t seen the girl around for a long time. But she had seen Birine once in a while, as she too lived in an NHC apartment in a complex not far from the Nitrozian Plaza. Well, in The Docks, to be honest, though Amolina used to embellish the address a bit, for the sake of more glamour.

Anyways, Birine would know what to do with the baby.

The beautiful, beautiful, lovely and alluring night of Ravok was around her, but she didn’t pay attention. The baby was screaming furiously and the screams made Amolina find strength she hadn’t known she had inside her, and despite the pain, despite her extremely tired and half-blurred state of mind she forced herself to walk on. It wasn’t a long walk, but to her it felt long. She was injured and spent, scared and desperate.

Amolina reached the NHC block, went in, headed for Birine Telemnar’s apartment and found the middle-aged woman at home. Birine looked old and worn for her age, her eyes sad and wise. She looked once at Amolina Moletta as the actress stood there silently and the baby screamed angrily in the basket. Then she pulled them, in shut the door, took the basket and picked the child up. A few questions, a short talk … “We help our own, Amolina. We help our own” Birine said silently.

Warmth, care, the rare treasure of loyalty.

… a bit later Amonlina sat on a chair at the table, drinking herb tea, her wound cleaned with hot water and put a bandage on. Birine had went out and dropped the small dagger into the canal nearby, without asking where it came from or what had happened. She too was ravokian, she too knew the art of not asking, not knowing too much.

Now she sat on the other chair, with her own cup of tea still untouched, as she was slowly feeding the baby with drips of lukewarm goat milk from a small spoon, and the child had finally stopped screaming. Birine had dressed her in small clothes, saved for the sake of memories and affection. They had once been Ireth’s baby clothes. She looked at Amolina, calmly. The actress would keep her secrets and Birine wouldn’t pry. This went without saying. “Are you going to take her somewhere else, to somebody else” she asked though.

And Amolina shook her head slowly. There was nowhere to leave the child. Nowhere. “She’s mine” she said . “Her name is Pearl.”

Her own words made her feel like she shattered the boundaries of the world she had known and put it together again, new and changed, never to be the same again. Yes, she actually, said those words of power, the words that changed her, words that transformed her, words that went into the core of her soul and made her be somebody else than she had been.

They made her the mother of Pearl.

Pearl :

[Abstract]

Grade Awarded!

Amolina

Skills

~ Observation - 5
~ Rhetoric - 1
~ Medicine - 4
~ Persuasion - 1
~ Investigation - 1
~ Leadership - 1
~ Brawling - 1

Lores

~ Beatrice Leander: Rich Mother
~ Identifying a Strong Baby
~ Beatrice: Mother of a Half-Statue
~ The Giant Fish In Ravok
~ Medicine: Don't Remove Blades
~ Midwifery: First Birth!
~ Pearl: A New Baby

Other

N/A

Notes

A lovely thread, and a strange turn of events! Quite well written... good job ^-^