Hello.

That seems an appropriate beginning, methinks. That is, after all, how most relationships begin, right? And I do believe that we are now in a relationship with each other, since you have stumbled across my story by some snide trick of fate.

I’ll introduce myself before I begin. I’ve held several names throughout my lifetime, but my first name is a constant: Rocielle. My last name was original Black, after my mother. My father, being an asinine drunk, never made my acquaintance, but fled the scene as soon as he realized that my mother was with child, rendering me a bastard. I never met him, as I’m sure you can surmise, and I never felt any inkling to seek him out. I felt anger and sadness that he did not love me, his son, but no malice, none of the hatred that my mother bore for him.

That hatred passed on to me once I was born, and thus the sad story of Rocielle Black began.

I was the middle child of seven, all from different fathers; two girls and another boy were above me, and a triplet of boys were below me. The two eldest (girls my mother named Rose and Loran) rarely had time for me once I was able to fend for myself. Mother was a violent woman filled with fury about the injustices done to her throughout her lifetime, and she vented that fury out onto us, her children. She favored her eldest son as if he were a god-send, however. I suppose that, in a sense, Michael was good for her. He calmed the fires of her raging temper when she rampaged, often saving me from her cruel hand.

When I was six, the older kids were about to become, or were already, teenagers. Rose, the oldest, was fourteen and tenderhearted. Loran was thirteen and had become very shy; I suppose she was also a little slow, but that didn’t keep the rest of us from loving her any less than we did. Michael was twelve, and had not become sullen, as most pre-teenage boys tend to do before they come into their "natural inheritance."

The triplets were four; Tim, Tom and Todd. (Mother was not an imaginative woman. How she came up with the name Rocielle for me I will never know.) As soon as I was capable of caring for them, I too was left staggering with chores. Rose became interested in weaving and left our house to live with Mother’s sister. That left an open slot, which I conveniently filled.

Our house was a slum, to say the least, in the poorest section of Kalaven City. We lived in the Trinity Quarter, where all of the impoverished ended up one way or another. The streets in this section of the city were revolting, filled with muddy, tepid water, and the scent of illness floated heavily on the air. Our next-door neighbor’s child had died one night, and they had not removed the body for nearly half a month. The stench was fouler than I have words for, and when rats began scurrying into their house, we could only imagine the state of the corpse.

Eventually the Trinity Quarter constable had come by to see why the body had not been properly embalmed and removed from the vicinity. What he found bypassed disgusting right into the grotesque.

The mother could not relinquish her child. She lay with the festering corpse on her bed, smoothing its hair, sobbing.

Both she and the corpse were removed from the house, and were "properly" dealt with. The stench went away, which is what mattered most to my family.

I played in the streets with the other quarter children, regardless of the threat of kidnapping and disease. Our games took us past some of the more degenerated sections of the quarter, where the dead were literally cast out of sick houses and into the streets. We rushed past their bodies, blissfully unaware of the epidemic of death around us.

Of course, the disease took something from everyone, and my family was no exception. Returning home from my games one night, I found the family gathered beside the stove; the somber atmosphere caused me to come down from my giddy elation brought on by play, and I stood in the doorway, frowning.

I remember confusion at what I saw. Mother was sitting in her old rocking chair, holding the triplets close against her breast, all three of them. I came in and closed the door, wondering if perhaps they were sick.

As I bolted the door, she looked up at me with tears streaking down her gaunt cheeks. Standing behind her chair with his hand on her shoulder, Michael met my gaze sadly. I could hear Loran’s sobs, muffled by a wooden wall, from the bedroom. Still confused, I looked from face to broken face, and then to the triplets in Mother’s arms.

Words left me.

They were ash gray, all three of them, with horrendous bruises covering their flesh as if a spiked club had been taken to them; black scabs covered their discolored flesh. Their little faces were twisted in agony from their death, and Tim clutched Tom’s hand tightly in their rigid, deathly embrace. Todd’s eyes were still open, the whites of which were a sickly yellow.

Mother spoke softly. "We ought to call a doctor," she said with a tremulous quality to her words, "to have these little ones looked after properly."

Michael gently smoothed her hair back from her face and leaned down to kiss her cheek. "Mum," he said softly, gently, as if afraid his words could only do harm, "You can’t help them anymore. They’re gone, just like Lynn’s baby, don’t you see?"

"They’re sick!" Mother shouted at him in a sudden fit of rage. She whirled around and slapped him across the face with the back of her hand, sending him sprawling backwards. Michael clutched at his cheek; I saw tears in his eyes and three scratch marks made by her nearly feline claws. Mother turned back to the triplets and clutched at them; there was madness in her eyes, madness induced by sorrow over her loss. "They’re just sick, that’s all!" She looked to me again, that heated anger making her appear feral. "Rocielle," she said sharply, "I want you to go into the Twilight Quarter and fetch a doctor. If you can’t find one there, then go to the Bendolyn Hill Monastery and see if you can’t get one of the monks—"

"Mum, you can’t!" Michael shouted, recovering himself. He looked at Mother in disbelief, horror etched across his young face. I remember shying from both of them. Michael pointed outside one of our glassless windows. "It’s too late for him to be going anywhere. You know what sort of bastards hang around the Twilight Quarter at this time of night; Rocielle would never make it to the doctor’s house, let alone Bendolyn Hill—"

"They’re dying, Michael!" Mother screamed, and I sank to my knees covering my ears. I had never been one to speak much as a child; every time I spoke, I was punished for being rude, or for being "smart." I’d learned to respect silence greatly.

"They’re already dead," Michael stated again, and he stood resolutely between Mother and me. "There’s nothing more we can do for them, nothing at all. In the morning, maybe Rocielle can go to the constable and tell him that the coroner is needed, but not now. He’ll never come back if you send him out now."

Mother was beyond help, hysterical in her grief. She clutched at the three corpses in blind despair, sobbing, and I soon joined her sobs as mine grew in volume. I wanted to go back outside, quite suddenly, away from the faint odor of decay and the palpable grief that my family emitted. I wanted to return to the joyous play I had participated in only moments before, chasing down my rugged little companions to play-fight in the mud. I wanted to be free of this sudden burden, of the knowledge that half of my family was gone, the little boys were gone.

Michael knelt beside me and hugged me tightly; he had always protected me, even during our petty sibling arguments. I don’t know why we fought, now, because after that night we never spoke an ill word to each other again. He picked me up (I was very small for my age) and carried me into the bedroom where Loran continued to sob. He sat down on the side of the bed with me, holding me in his arms.

"Loran?" he asked of our sister gently. With one hand he reached out to stroke a curl of her blonde hair out of her eyes. Her sobs lessened some. "Loran?" he repeated. "Rocielle is here. He’s all right."

"Oh thank Heaven," she choked and sat up. She opened her arms to me. "Rocielle, darling, come here."

The next morning, I didn’t go to the coroner—Michael did. I knew he would, which is why I didn’t think to rise when Loran gently shook me and reminded me of my task. I did rouse, however, when the house grew cold; Mother had not stoked the stove and I couldn’t smell breakfast.

I slipped out of bed and peeked into the small space that was the living room. Mother had not gone to sleep; she was still in that rocking chair holding the triplets. They were stiff in her arms now, shells without souls. I shied away from the sight and fled back to bed, where Loran waited to hold me again.

So there I was at six, Rocielle Black, with three dead brothers, a mother who would soon be carted off to the Ward where she would die, and no feasible way to survive at all. Kalaven City had no social services to take in children, Loran and Michael were not old enough to work, and I was more of a hindrance to them than any real help. So while they sifted through Mother’s meager belongings in search of any connections that we might have to family outside of Kalaven City, I roamed the streets once more, a wild thing, and I soon forgot that I’d ever had three little brothers. Mother became a faded memory of a screaming, ranting witch; I was not sorry to see her go.

Eventually, contact was made with Rose and my stringent aunt, Jillian. As I returned from my romp one afternoon, Michael caught me before I could run outside again and showed me the letter. It was creased in several places from where it had been folded and unfolded, then folded again.

"It’s a letter," he said with a smile. "From Aunt Jill and Rose in Crystal City."

"Really?" I exclaimed in delight and reached for the letter. "What do they want?"

He let me take it, though I could not make sense of Aunt Jill’s neatly scribed writing. I had never been afforded the luxury of schooling, and letters meant nothing to me. However, I could almost feel Jill’s rigid affection for me in the thoughtful care she took in spelling my name correctly (that was a word I could understand).

"Aunt Jill just found out about the triplets and Mother," he told me. "She’s working with officials in Crystal City to try and formally adopt us. If she succeeds, then we will move to Crystal City to live with her."

"And Rose?" I asked hopefully. "Rosie will be there too, right?"

He smiled. "Yes. She will." A vague, distant glimmer came into his eyes, one I had never seen before. As soon as he was aware of it, he shook his head to clear his thoughts and ushered me into the back of our shack. "Go clean up," he told me. "Loran will be home any minute with our lunch."

Our "lunch" consisted of a tray of rolls and dirty water that the public food court dished out to the impoverished on a regular basis. We ate in silence on the floor beside our stove. We never complained about the rotten food or the dirty water; we were too thankful to have it at all to be bothered by a little speck of dirt here and a slightly moldy roll there.

Then I was off on my romp again, out into the streets like a little hooligan, while Michael and Loran stayed behind to get our affairs in order.

Rocielle Black’s tale ends here. There is nothing more to tell of the little naïve boy who roamed the back streets of Kalaven City, but plenty to tell of the young adolescent I was about to become once Jillian du Monte became a primary figure in my life.

Three days after receiving Aunt Jill’s first letter, another arrived. This one was scribed by her husband, a man I had never met but had heard horror stories about from Mother. His handwriting was a little more severe than Aunt Jill’s had been, which frightened me. We sat by the window in the fading evening light while Michael read it to Loran and me.

The gist of the letter was this: Aunt Jill was going to arrive in two days to escort us to the du Monte estate in Crystal City.

Michael was elated, and to celebrate he burned what was left of Mother’s clothing in the stove, along with the belt she had used to beat me when angry with him. Loran and I stood far back from him as he deposited these objects in the furnace, and a slight tinge of worry made my brows furrow. Michael’s eccentric behavior was consistent with Mother’s madness on many levels. I tried not to ponder over it too much.

Herein begins the tale of Rocielle du Monte, nephew of Jillian and Mortimer du Monte.

Loran, Michael and I left the Trinity Quarter behind us when Aunt Jill arrived in her extravagantly polished black carriage. Inside one of the violet-curtained windows I could see my sister Rose, her blue eyes scouring over her old home in visible shame. I found it difficult to meet her gaze suddenly; I was a grotesque sight, as I had not bathed in over a week. When we were given the opportunity to bathe, it was merely in a river that ran thick with salt out into the Kelp Sea, and more often than not we came out of the water filthier than we had been going in. Michael stood in the doorway, attempting a gracious smile while trying in vain to hide his own shame. I could see the line of tears converging at his lashes.

Loran was gathering our few precious belongings together, her musty brown skirts brushing our dirt floor. I padded over to her and attempted to help, but she haphazardly pushed my hands away. "Go greet your aunt, Rocielle," she told me brusquely.

"…such abominable conditions! You, boy, who has had you living like this for the past month? Certainly someone has attempted to do something to better your situation, eh?"

"No, Aunt Jill," I heard Michael say humbly. "We’ve been on our own—"

"Despicable," Aunt Jill spat viciously, but I knew that she did not speak to my brother. Coarsely, she took his arm and gave him a hearty push in the direction of the carriage. "Climb in, boy, and try not to get your dirty shoes on the velvet." She turned back to me, her relatively slender frame almost an unseemly shell for such a powerful voice and personality. Her coal black eyes landed on me. "Rocielle?" she asked tersely.

I hurried forward, not wanting to anger her, and bowed politely. I felt a painful strap connect with my shoulder, hard enough to sting but not hard enough to leave any lasting damage.

"Don’t bow like that," she said tartly. "You look like you’re curtseying. Have you transformed into a woman since I last saw you? Were you cleaned up a bit, you’d resemble one remarkably."

I was not sure what to say to this, and so I gazed at her, stupefied by the immensity of her entire being. She was small, as Mother had been, with luxurious black hair falling across her shoulders in beautiful veils, her elegant blue gown clinging to her shapely figure alluringly. For a woman who had birthed two sons and a daughter, she looked younger than she truly was. Not a line marred her severe features, nor were there any streaks of silver at her temples. I was almost envious of the cousins I’d never met for having such a beautiful mother as Aunt Jill. I was also envious of her good fortune for stumbling across the renowned nobleman of Crystal City, Lord Mortimer du Monte.

She ushered me out of the crude shack as quickly as she had Michael, and I did not hesitate to launch myself into the carriage. Rose waited for me with open arms, all but sobbing my name as I flung my arms around her.

"Rocielle!" she cried in delight and kissed my grubby forehead, ruffled my oily hair. I am certain that I ruined her dress, but she did not seem to mind it much. She held me to her tightly. "Oh Rocielle, you and Michael both look terrible! What has that witch been doing to you?"

"Rose, don’t say such things," Michael cautioned her with a careful glance into my eyes. I returned the stare, oblivious of what he implied.

Loran joined us a few moments later, and then Aunt Jill. She remained behind long enough to lock the door to our little shack and then order one of the men who had accompanied her to nail a notice to the wooden planking. On all sides of our narrow artery, grim-faced individuals were lingering by their windows, curiously observing the polished black carriage and wondering to themselves, ‘What on earth could be so important?’

A violet-clad man offered out his hand to Aunt Jill to assist her into the carriage, a hand that she brusquely refused. She sat beside Rose, who held me protectively in her lap. The man closed the door, them clamored up into his seat at front of the carriage. Moments later, the apparatus gave a sudden lurch beneath me, and I clutched at Rose’s arms in fright, my eyes wide.

Aunt Jill chuckled with a derisive snort. "Never been in a carriage before, have you?" she asked tersely of me, but I knew that the fondness in her eyes was not an illusion. She was delighted, in her own unique way, to have her nieces and nephews under her own protective control.

As we left the Trinity Quarter together, Michael attempted to instigate a conversation. "Thank you very much for taking care of us, Aunt Jill," he said, with the meekest smile I’ve ever seen on his face. "I’m sure that no one appreciates this more than we do."

"And so it should be," Aunt Jill responded with a dutiful nod of her head. "It’s one’s duty to look out for her family, I always say. And you lot are my kin. It’s my duty to make sure that there’s proper food in your bellies and an adequate roof over your head. Evelyn, ostensibly, was not providing that for you."

"Evelyn?" I repeated in confusion. "Who’s Evelyn?"

Aunt Jill looked at me quizzically, even as Rose, Michael, and Loran quietly giggled. However, a sharp glance from Aunt Jill silenced them, and she looked back at my face. To this day, I’ve not seen a set of sharper, more penetrating eyes. "Evelyn is your mother’s name, Rocielle. The woman who you have been living with up until this point."

It seemed blatantly obvious after that moment, and so with a quiet "oh" of understanding, I fell silent and picked at my dirty fingernails. Rose set me down on the velvet cushion at her side and draped a gentle arm around my shoulders. I cuddled close to her side, even while my other hand moved to take Loran’s, who sat at my other side. Both of my sisters regarded me fondly.

Across from all of us sat Michael, his gaze vacant. He did that often, letting his mind slip away from him temporarily. I never knew where he "went" during these lapses, but I’ve always experienced a slight pining deep in my heart to want to join him. To be with him during his moments of introspection, and revel in his discoveries, perhaps. But on the few occasions that I asked him what was on his mind, I received fragments of half-thought in answer. "Moon," he said at times, or, "Birds in trees, sky…" He never made sense, always incoherent.

I simply came to the conclusion that this was simply another part of the enigmatic shroud that concealed my brother’s inner being from me. I didn’t try to pry any secrets out of him.

Aunt Jill pushed aside one of the thick, violet curtains and peered outside at the city. I leaned a little ways forward in my seat to look as well. Through the little slit that I could see through, paved streets and bright yellow kerosene lamps were visible, the lamps illuminating the otherwise dark and forbidding night. The wreckage of the Trinity Quarter was far behind us now, along with our dilapidated little house. This exquisite street was the main thoroughfare of the Twilight Quarter, where the noblemen of the king’s court in Kalaven dwelled. I recognized a few of the statuesque mansions as they loomed behind shop buildings.

"Hmph," Aunt Jill snorted. She leaned back in her seat, allowing the curtain to glide closed and obscure my view of the city proper. "Crystal City is much more impressive."

"Than Kalaven City?" Rose asked, her voice as pretty and clear as a lark’s, and then she laughed, an equally pretty and clear sound. "I agree; Kalaven seems so Juuran-esque to me now."

"Quite," Aunt Jill said with a rich chuckle.

Loran exchanged befuddled glances, then shrugged our shoulders in resignation and resumed our separate thoughts. I had no clue what "Juuran-esque" meant, but during my escapades with my playmates back in the Trinity Quarter, I often overheard the elders speaking fondly of a place across the sea, and a word frequently mentioned was "Juuran." There was clearly a connection, but I was as flighty as a butterfly, and my mind quickly fluttered from that topic to another.

At some point during the ride, I nodded off to sleep. The rock of the carriage, the gentle humdrum of conversation between Rose and Aunt Jill, and Loran’s quiet singing, gave me a moment’s peace I had not experienced before in my young years. My heart clenched suddenly in my chest at a memory of Mother and the triplets. They were curled in her arms, sleeping pleasantly, while Mother sang to them. My eyelids drifted closed slowly, and I drowsed against Rose’s side.

Hours passed me by without my realizing it. I awoke to find all the occupants of the carriage as sound asleep as I had been. Loran leaned against me, I against Rose, and Rose nestled against Aunt Jill’s side. Across from me, Michael’s arms were crossed tightly over his chest, his chin resting on his chest. He looked cold.

I leaned very carefully across Aunt Jill and Rose and pushed aside the violet curtain. Outside, the twilight of dawn was beginning to chase away the night. The sky was a bluish gray against the flat horizon; all I could see for miles was grass. Fields of the stuff, rolling and littered with sparse winter flowers. Above the carriage, the sky was still a deep blue-black, scattered with vibrant, glowing white stars.

"Pretty, aren’t they?"

I startled and sat back quickly. Aunt Jill watched me with a speculative smile turning up the corners of her thin lips. I opened my mouth to speak but found that my voice had, conveniently enough, fled me. Aunt Jill chuckled quietly.

"They lose a little more of their splendor each time you gaze at them," she said thoughtfully with a gesture at the sky. "The stars, I mean."

I said nothing, but listened.

She sighed out a weary breath of air and looked outside herself. "I try to look at them as infrequently as possible for that very reason."

"So they will still be pretty when you do look at them?" I asked tentatively.

"Yes." The answer was quiet, but firm. The subject was closed.