After hearing the seer’s message, Iirin finds himself struggling to come to terms with the fact that he’ll soon be leaving the only place that he’s ever called home. Despite how he’s been mistreated in the temple-orphanage because he isn’t a typical demon, the idea of leaving still stings.

Despite owning only a few worn items of clothes and several toys and books from his youth, Iirin was determined to make packing for his new future drag on as long as possible. He lingered over every single step of the process, drifting around his tiny room in the temple-orphanage’s rickety attic and packing at a snail’s paces.

As one of the left behind children in Akkadia’s capitol city, Iirin had precious few possessions to start with and as an older former-foundling, he has had to hide most of them in various places around his room lest Matron take the opportunity to requisition even more of his things.

After opening his wardrobe to pull a faded green tunic out of its dark depths, he let his fingers brush over a tiny ceremonial robe with purple and silver stitching creating wondrous patterns across the soft white fabric. It was the only thing that Iirin had left to remind him of his parents.

Not that there was very much to remember.

“Why I kept that silly thing, I don’t know,” Iirin mused aloud, gaze lingering on the robe he had been dressed in when his parents had left him in a basket at the temple steps twenty years before. He had only been a few hours old, but his parents had at least done that much for him.

From what Iirin had gleaned over the years, they never seemed to regret their choice. They never registered him at the midwife halls or even left an offering under the name they gave him at Dorna’s temple to make penance.

“Maybe I should get rid of it.” Iirin muttered, eyeing the tiny robe with a frown on his face. “It isn’t like I need another reminder of how little I’m wanted.”

Iirin frowned even harder a moment later when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the dented silver shard mirror propped up next to his wardrobe.

Most of the time, Iirin didn’t mind looking at himself.

He liked looking at the way that his white hair brought out the shimmering silver-green sheen of his eyes and made his skin appear to be an even darker shade of brown. He liked his gangly tallness, the way that he always stood out in a crowd. He even, occasionally, didn’t even mind the fact that much of his body was covered in intricate markings that mystified all of the many healers that Matron had taken him to as a child.

Unfortunately, few people that Iirin had met over the years felt the same.

Iirin was hornless, fangless. A veritable sheep amongst the predators that trickled in and out of the god quarter. Sometimes, he wondered if that was why his parents had chosen to give him up instead of raising him themselves.Read More »