NaraK — Roleplayer Guild

The house that sheltered the snake from unseen dangers always remained clean. It was kept clean by the child who lived in it.

She had no name. She had family, but she only knew because of the pictures left behind in the house. Her family had left behind many things- almost everything but themselves. And for that, she lived alone in the wild.

She had no name. Perhaps her family knew her name. So she waited.

Her red hair grew longer as time passed. The clothes she wore got smaller, so she replaced them with bigger ones stored in a closet. Time made her grow, she learned on her own. Whether it be physically or mentally, she grew alone. The child with no name lived without any thought aside from continuing to live.

Life was simple.

She ate the herbs in the small garden the size of a table next to her home. When she needed more food, she would leave the home with nothing in her hands, only to return with an armful of plants. She did this when the skies were bright.

She would clean her home when the skies went dark. It was harder to see in the dark, but she still finished before the world went completely dark.

When she woke up again, she would wander around her home before repeating the activities for the new day.

The child did not know how to read. The pictures, however, she could understand to some extent. Some people outside of her home apparently used contraptions that could protect themselves. Others held long and thin pieces of metal, and sometimes, said pieces of metal were combined with contraptions.

She found the information on others like herself fascinating. Some lived in big, blocky places that had no trees and animals roaming around. They painted the ground with a hard layer of materials she did not recognize for people to walk on. Sometimes, she wondered if wandering far enough could let her see something like it.

But her family left behind a message. A message without words, telling her not to approach people.

She stayed home.

She continued to grow.

The snake began marking a paper with red ink every time the skies brightened. Ever since then, she counted hundreds of those moments.

Sometimes, the day would be humid and rain would fall on the ground, bringing life to her surroundings. Sometimes, the day would be dry and snow would make the ground cold. She always found these occurrences to leave her in awe. Why? She did not know, but she could not help it either.

The child grew up enough to reach places she could not. And she continued to grow. She learned that every hundred sunrises or so, she grew up at least a little.

One day, a time when she could use a small broom at the very edge of its handle without much trouble, she met a person.

It was the first person she met, but he appeared to be unmoving somewhere close to her home. The child remembered not to actively seek out people, but in this case, the person was too close to just ignore.

She approached the large person. And she poked at him with her finger.

It took her a while to conclude that he was not alive.

There were a bunch of holes in the person’s body and an odd tear that reached from the head to the chest. A strange smell came from the red area.

In the person’s clothes was a small piece of metal that looked like the ones she saw in her home’s drawings. She touched the blade, only to wince and drop it when she pressed it too hard. A red fluid trickled out of her body.

The child did not know what the red fluid was, but she soon felt dizzy. Her hunger, however, was still present, so she still ate a few mushrooms before sleeping early.

She got better the next day as if nothing happened.

When she approached the person who remained still the next day, she reached out for his cheek. She pinched it lightly, only to be taken aback by how hard his skin had become.

The dead felt different from the living.

She remembered from her drawings that putting those who passed away under the ground was respectful and good for the deceased. With her hands, she dug up the ground next to where she found the person. It took her two sunrises to make a large enough hole for the big person. When she finished, she softly pulled the person in and started covering the ground again.

By the third sunrise, she had put the person deep under the ground.

She washed herself with the waterfall nearby, for she did not clean herself for the past few sunrises. As the water trickled against her pale body, an odd thought came to her.

How would she die?

She continued to grow.

Life remained the same, and as a result, she lived without any changes to her daily routine. Sometimes her body hurt from its own growth, but she was quick to feel better.

She was able to clean the ceiling of the house’s interior, and with trial and error, she was able to clean the roof. Reaching the roof was harder than cleaning the interior, so she only did it whenever the white powdery crystals fell from the skies and weighed down on the roof.

Things remained quiet. For the snake, there was no need to feel negativity, so she never encountered anything out of the ordinary.

On a snowy day, the child met a person.

He stood with red painting his body, the white of his eyes contrasting with red fluids that had splashed against his face. He smelled similarly to the person she buried long ago, but he did not look like he needed to be buried.

A person who was alive.

The child remembered to bow politely, but she did not know what else to do. The man stared at her with his bright blue eyes.

The man opened his mouth and let out a strange sound. It was a complex sound, his tone changing and his mouth’s movements shifting, as if to make a chain of noises. His voice was deep.

There wasn’t anything the child could do to properly respond, so she stared at the man. He held a hatchet that had red fluids dripping from it, and his wide eyes peered straight into her.

As he tilted his head, the child unknowingly tilted her head with him. When he moved forward, the child moved as well.

He towered over her.

It was strange. The person she met long ago had his body disfigured, but the person in front of her had a normal body shape like her own. Although he looked different from her, she could tell that he was of her kind.

Raising her hands, which were covered by the long sleeves of her clothes, she reached out as much as she could.

She softly put one of her hands on the person’s cheek, her other hand remaining in the air without anything to touch.

The cheek was warm and soft.

It felt comforting.

Pulling away from the person who simply watched her actions, the child went to her home before returning with a mushroom and an herb. She raised them up to the person as an offering.

The man plucked the mushroom out of her hand, looking at it carefully before roughly returning it to her. He did take the herb and eat it, however.

The child stared at him. He stared at her.

Without a word, the red man left, and he did not return for a while.

She continued to grow.

The man began to visit her place occasionally. Every time he did, she would prepare the food she had and share them with him. Sometimes he rejected the food, and sometimes he ate them silently.

It became apparent that he was a nice person. He never hurt her, and she never hurt him.

One day, she met a different man. A man who towered over her less, but somehow surrounded himself with a dangerously hostile aura. She, like she always did, approached him with mushrooms and herbs. She did so with doubt, knowing that he could attack her.

And he did.

She fled, but she stuck close to her home. She never left it as he chased after her. She ran, crawling through every corner as he swung a sharp tool around at her direction.

It was sharp enough to cut her arm off.

The scent of the living red put her in a trance of confusion and pain as she looked up at the skies. The red in her poured out like a bucket tipped over at a lousy angle.

She would later know of this scent as “blood.”

She lay still outside of her home, and the man approached her. He tore at her clothes, revealing her bare body to the heavens as he took off some of his own garments. But the snake knew nothing of the desires of men, and as such, believed it to be connected to her inevitable death.

Death scared her. She knew nothing of what would happen if she died like the man she buried.

But it still approached her rampantly. As the man kept her incapacitated, however, a streak of red suddenly splattered against the girl’s face.

The man, like her, had lost his arm.

A figure loomed over him as it picked the man up with one hand.

It was the red-haired person.

Chunks of red painted the leaves and trees of nature. The space between her attacker’s legs had been torn off, and things flew out of his face rapidly. The red-haired person relentlessly attacked the man, but the girl had lost the strength to breathe properly. Pain- it was familiar when it came in small pulses, and foreign when it rushed across her whole body instantly.

The pain subsided steadily, and for the next few sunrises, the red-haired man who slayed the man who attacked her stayed next to her. And he continued to do so, unlike the days when he returned to wherever he came from.

He helped her.

The hurtful memory did not comfort her at the slightest bit, but she found no proper way to express her sadness. She tasted the pain of her trust being taken advantage of, yet she could not immediately learn how to protect herself.

There was still room for her to grow.

So, despite the loss of an arm, she still grew up the same.

She continued to grow.

She chose to.

Just like how a person would.

End

~The Wordless Childhood~
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