Chatterbox: Inkwell

I'm starting a Round Robin to help bring the IW back to life! :D Read it and continue, please pretty please? Remember: NO POSTING until the post before you has shown up. Otherwise we end up with conflicting stories and...gah.

If you're not sure what a Round Robin is, I'm happy to explain. :) Basically, it's a story that one person starts, another continues where they left off, another person picks it up, etc., etc. It's different from a role play, because in a role play, we all make characters and only tell the story from our respective character's point of view. (Hope that makes sense.) 

Anyhoo...I'm thinkin' fantasy/mystery. Wait for a few minutes while I work out an idea...wait...waaait...got it. :)

Skydreamer. My name is Skydreamer. And until Endol, I was miserable. Until yesterday, I had no one. No one cared for me. No one looked after me. No one loved me and I loved no one.

Until Endol, I had no name. No one gave a name to me, and my mother was not there to tell me what it was. I have half-forgotten my mother. I just remember her soft hand that she laid on my head, her gentle voice, soothing me in some trouble. I remember her eyes, round and blue like my own, looking at me with affection and kindness. But I remember nothing else.

Until Endol, I had no freedom. For as long as I can remember, I have been a prisoner.Why? I don't know. How? I don't know. When? I don't know. Where? I'm still not sure. But my earliest memories are of my captor and of my cell. I know who did it. I know nothing else, but I know who did it.

Until Endol, I had nothing. But now I have something. Not everything - not answers, not a home, and perhaps not freedom, if HE catches up to me - but I have something. Two somethings. I have someone. I have Endol, and I have a name.

Skydreamer. My name is Skydreamer, and this is my story.

Skydreamer took a deep breath and ended. Endol looked up from his writing. "You done?"

"Yes," she said, decidedly.

"Very poetic," he smiled. It was that smile that had first endeared her to him. His smile and his promise of escape.

Endol was what he called a "semi-orphan" - an orphan with a place to sleep, food to eat, and a roof over his head, but little else. His aunt had not been cruel, in the usual sense of the word. She had fed him and clothed him and given him pocket money and taught him how to read, write, and do arithmetic, something Skydreamer had never learned. But she had been distant and unfeeling, and Endol knew she had only taken him in because she had dearly loved his father, her brother.

"What happened to your parents?" Skydreamer had asked him. Endol shook his head. "Don't know."

Aha. Here was a boy like herself - a boy without answers to his past, whose earliest memories were of dissatisfaction and unpleasantness.

One day last year, the day he turned thirteen, his aunt had called him to her. "Alright," she had said, "I have fed you, clothed you, taught you, and kept you for thirteen years, as your father asked me to. 'I know you don't like children, Maka,' he said to me, 'but if anything happens to me and Faila, take care of Endol until he's thirteen. Thirteen years, Maka, just thirteen. That's all I'm asking you.' And now I have done my duty and good riddance to you. You look too much like your mother, boy." "She never liked my mother," Endol remarked bitterly.

Skydreamer thought privately that Endol's mother must have been beautiful. Endol himself had long black hair pulled into a ponytail with a piece of leather, brown skin, and flashing tawny eyes. His smile was kind, endearing, and funny, all at the same time.

"So your aunt turned you out," Skydreamer had said, in those fleeting moments when they were getting to know each other after the thrilling escape. "And what then?"

"I was turned out and lived on the streets for a year," he replied. "And then...I ran into the woods to get away from the soldiers because I stole something - I forget what, exactly - and saw the castle. And I was curious, so I went to investigate. There was no moat in the back. And I saw you leaning against the window and thought, 'What in the world...' and you know the rest."

Yes, Skydreamer knew the rest. She suspected Endol had not forgotten what it was he had stolen; he just didn't want her to know about it. He didn't know her very well yet.

Skydreamer had stolen everything for as long as she could remember. Every morsel of food she snuck from the kitchen, every rag of clothing she wore, every torn-up shred of cloth that passed for a blanket, every drop of water she had drunk - all of it was stolen from HIM.

Every bone in her body froze to ice when her captor walked by her cell. No matter where he went, he always seemed to move in a perpetual shadow, so that she had no idea what he looked like. She had some vague idea that he was tall, and every now and then she caught a glimpse of a mirthless smile on a pale face, or the eyes. She shuddered. The eyes were awful. Pure black, not a trace of white, so that the only thing that would reveal them was a sudden glint of light from the filthy window of her cell.

She said cell, but it was more like a cage. No bed, no basin for washing, any food that her captor deigned to give her shoved in through the door as though she was an animal. Her blood boiled. Whatever she was - she wasn't at all sure she was human - HE obviously didn't think of her as an equal to him. Every now and then she managed to fool the guards, and when that happened, she was free in the castle, eating, drinking, stealing cast-off clothes and blankets, until she was captured again. She was unsure for what purpose she was caged - perhaps the castle's master just kept her for the sake of it. She saw nothing in the rest of the dungeon. The cage was made of solid sheets of metal; the only two openings to the outside world were the window at the back and a barred opening, small and square, at the front, that her food was shoved through. She did not look through this barred opening, but she looked out the window. All she could see through that lovely window was a mass of woods and plants and sky and a river twisting its windy way through the trees. It was so wonderful she would spend hours with her face pressed against the grimy glass. She didn't mind the dirt - she was covered in it anyway.

It was on a fall morning that Endol came, although she hadn't known it was fall - or autumn, as he explained it could be called - until he had told her. She had only thought of it as the bright time. She had no words for colors. No one had ever explained it to her. She hadn't known what anything in the outside world was called. She had known it was a dungeon, cage, food, water, blankets simply because she had heard those words repeated. Everything else she had learned from Endol in the week they had been together. But she remembered him.

He had come striding out of the red and golden woods, dotted with the occasional fir, breathing out mist. To her he had seemed a fearful prescense. Everything was fearful to Skydreamer in those days. Especially people.

He had seen her face and his tawny eyes had grown to twice their original size. Running over to the window, he had broken the glass with a hard fist, smiled at her, and said, "Come with me."

His hand had been bleeding, but he hadn't seemed to notice. He helped her out of the window - she cut her leg, but no matter, she had been in worse pain - and the two took off running. Where and why and who she was running with hadn't mattered. What had mattered was that she was out of the dungeon. Free.

When they had run so far they couldn't possibly run any more, Endol had sat down and motioned to her to sit down. His first words had been, "Can you talk?"

"Ye-es," she replied, in a hoarse and husky voice. "Who are you?"

"Endol. You?"

She shrugged.

"You're very small. What are you, seven? Nine?"

She had stiffened indignantly. "I'm at least thirteen. That's what they say. They don't know exactly how old I am."

"Well, no offense meant," Endol had said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. "Why don't you wash in the river, What's-your-name?"

"River?"

"The long strip of water, there. Don't you know what a river is?"

She had been too busy getting in, clothes and all, and getting clean, for the first time ever, to answer.

As she had stepped out, she had caught a glimpse of her reflection, not dirty and stained, as it usually was when she saw it in the window, but clean. Her skin was pale and smooth, her eyes large and blue, and her hair was silky soft, light brown, and long, reaching to her waist. Around her neck was the pendant. A circular black stone, ringed with emeralds, hung on a silver chain. She had no idea where it had come from. She had no memory of her captors giving it to her. Often a thought had stuck her - could it be a collar? But this thought was always banished. She had never been taken out of her cell, and even if she had been, this was too loose for a collar. Her only other explanation was that her mother had given it to her. Why it had not been taken from her when she had been captured, she did not know.

For no apparent reason, she thought of a net, and shivered.

Endol was watching her and she went to talk to him. She told him her story and he told her his. Then he helped her pick out a name - Skydreamer.

They had been journeying together for a week now. Endol had recently come up with the idea of keeping journals. After explaining what a journal was, he had written down his first entry, and then she had dictated hers to him. Now they sat by the campfire, Endol holding his paper, quill, and inkwell. She wasn't surprised that he had found them in his pockets. Endol had everything in his pockets.

"Read it to me," Skydreamer said out loud, the flames casting light on her face.

"Read what?" Endol asked, taken aback.

"Your entry. You heard mine. Now I can hear yours. That's fair."

He hesitated for a moment or two, then said, "Alright. I will. You need to learn how to write and read." Then he cleared his throat, flipped back a few pages, and began to read.

"It's been a week since we were at the castle," he read out loud. "I have a friend named Skydreamer, who was imprisoned in the castle. Why, we don't know, but we're going to find out. I want to find out what happened to my parents as much as she wants to know why she was captured. So we'll help each other. I'm not at all sure she's human, but with eyes like mine, I'm not sure I am either. Her ears are pointed - I wonder why she's never noticed."

Unconsciously, her hands flew to her ears and felt them. Yes, they were pointed, as Endol said. "Why didn't you ever tell me?" she demanded.

"I only just noticed," he said, with a sheepish half-grin. "Your hair was covering them before, but now you've pushed it back."

She had pushed it back. Without really knowing why, she pushed it forward again. "Read on."

"We just have to stay away from people. That's all we have to do. The forest is our home from now on." He stopped and looked at her.

"That's it?" she asked, mildly surprised.

"That's it."

"Oh."

Sometime after this exchange, they went to sleep back-to-back, sharing each other's warmth. Endol pulled the blankets up. He had everything in the pack on his back or in his pockets, Skydreamer thought sleepily. Then she dreamed.

Maybe it's not brilliant, but it's going to get better, I just had to get the idea out. Keep writing, somebuggy! The story's just beginning! And if it goes to the bottom I'm going to be miserable. XD

Andy P. C. says ccyx.

~Wolfgirl67 signing off.