Starseed Siblings

Dramatic Personae

Bleddynia Lacona

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An-Ina "Nina" Penwyth

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Blodaiweth

Starseed Siblings

Bleddynia's name meant "she who is born from the lykos". The Lykos, mythical extinct beings who were once the guides and hunters for all thousand-armed beings. Perhaps as revenge, stories told that they liked to take what mattered most to the Milenakos - their eyes and their limbs.

When her brother Lou lost Blodaiweth, Bleddynia was the sister who received the most punishment. Not for creating him, or feeding him, but for giving him her guile. Her eyes, and her limbs, the body parts that made her a person in her brothers' eyes - and as Bleddynia had been the favourite of his sisters, he allowed her to choose which one she could keep.

Though she had distant relations to the Lagona family who ran the orchards in Threatening Valley, they wouldn’t welcome an eyeless girl without a bribe.

“So that’s what you’re going to do with the dowry,” Nina had asked her the eve before Hithwenia’s arrival. Halfwings had obnoxiously good senses of smell when it came to dwelling thoughts. 

“What would you have done with it?” Bleddynia said.

“Find a chiruga who can get me a new eye,” She said, reeking of pragmatism and superiority. Bleddynia couldn’t help but snarl at it. “They say there’s lichen that can help reattach their roots.”

“Not in Kargast, surely.”

“Some of the Red Hoods import it.”

“I’d rather have a place to lay dormant for a while. You expect me to take such a risk?”

“Hmf,” Nina hummed. “Is your sister as much of a coward as you?””

“Hithwenia is no coward,” Bleddynia snarled. “Nor am I. I simply want security.”

“Yet you deprive her of the same."

“Hithwenia is not a coward,” Bleddynia repeated, though she couldn’t convincingly defend her own honor anymore.

“Well, in case you change your mind. The Red Hoods have a giant statue of their god Yan Kube Maur. They say he can hear the voices of prey. Maybe give it a try before signing your life to the orchards, princess.”

“I’m not a princess.”

“You could have fooled me.”

I’m just as brave as Hithwenia. I gave her what she asked for, what she wanted. She’ll be fine. She always gets what she wants. 

Bleddynia had been following the scent of a Lagona. It was weak, but it was all she had to go on to find her way along the upland roads which led to the Lagona Orchard, and the increasing smell of gall plums and smaller creatures who consumed them. It was so crowded in the encampments built around the trees, so overwhelming and unlike her former station. When the crowd did thin out and she was in the opening air, and could hear the rush of the river not so far away, and worried it sounded far South of where she would be. But the Lagona’s scent had not wavered.

The scent of the Lagona she had been following was growing closer, almost merging with her own. They were approaching her, but their pheromones weren’t threatening - in fact, aside from the smell of pollen, they didn’t smell like anything.

“You’ve been following me for some time, and I’ve got nothing for you to steal but a slow death,” it was a foreign, raspy voice. An accent Bleddynia didn’t recognise, but she hadn’t grown up around the Lagona people. She was the foreign one here.

Nina’s final criticisms were pushed out of her mind.

“I… I am the sister of King Lou Hen,” Bleddynia said, willing her voice to not waver. “Bleddynia, born of Catuvellani Lagona stock, within the royal walls of the Constellarium Court.” She shakily raised one her hands, the one where her engraved ring displayed her lineage. “I have come to take sanctuary at these orchards, with gifts–”

The stranger paused for a moment, and then recognition lit up their voice even as they butchered her name. “Princess Blaidinia! We know of thee.” They began walking, and by scent Bleddynia followed, even as the water grew closer and she felt uneasy. She had sworn the river was further South-

“You said you bring gifts, do you?” the stranger said. “We do not need gifts to accept sanctuary.”

“When you see my face clearly… you’ll see why.”

“I can see it perfectly well,” they said, and Bleddynia realised the sound of the water was coming from below. How high up were they? She smelled none of the familiar gall oaks, but rather, as the water cleared all the foreign scents inundating her senses, she was hit with the wave of fertile, wet soil. “The moon is out and we are in the open.”

Soil, with an afterthought of ash. From a lightning strike.

Bleddynia had not noticed the figure had moved behind her, and the smell of a Lagona mingled with hers again, balancing out the soil. They were placing something around her neck. “You are the one in need of a gift, poor eyeless girl, did the lykos eat them?”

Then as if the delicate chain snapped into place, it tightened around her like a choker, squeezing her neck like a tourniquet. Bleddynia coughed out the last of the air in her throat with a shriek as she clawed at it, but the chain was too tight to pull off.

My iron chain. The one I gave to him– but it’s too tight on me, it was meant for his neck–

“I always hated this,” he whispered then, panting in exertion as pulled her close one last time, as Bleddynia’s distracted, panicked body betrayed her common sense. She only smelled herself now, and every time she looked back, twisting painfully as Blodaiweth pushed her further toward the edge of the escarpment. 

“H—how–”

“You were Lou’s favourite,” Blodaiweth whispered. “So I have to punish you a little before I help you, okay?”

As Bleddynia’s last breath left her joints and began to atrophy, her consciousness fading, she felt the cleansing scent of water grow ever near, the dull pain of Blodaiweth’s kick over the escarpment. But instead of soil, she smelled something possibly worse - an unending, underground fire.