[Vignette] And One Day...
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Tiriana. And one day, her mommy died.
She was dozing when it finally happened; the keening of the dragons for Taminyth woke her back up from her nap curled up in her father's lap. He was awake, as still as she'd ever seen him. Like hunting, like when he'd shown her how he did that a few months back. It'd been boring, too much sitting and not enough blood. These were strange thoughts to think then, still sitting in the infirmary beside a body; but that thought didn't occur to Tiriana until years later, when she tried to remember exactly what happened.
She remembered Cyrra, vaguely--on the bed, Tiriana thought, but she wasn't sure. Memories of Cyrra were often like that: conscious she was there, but not sure exactly where or why or what she was doing. Clearly, though, Tiriana remembered lots of bandages, her father's slouch in the chair, the way the world seemed so strangely the same outside as it had always been. She was conscious of healers hovering at the edges of the room. Her family's waiting was done, but not theirs, not yet.
It felt like turns before someone tried to pull her loose and she started crying then, clutching at her father. Her grandmother always said she was too old for tantrums, at seven, but she didn't this time. Instead, she let Sh'drian pry Tiriana's fingers loose from his shirt and pass her over, and then Ria shifted her whining, snotty grandchild over to one hip while she went to rouse up Cyrra too. Tiriana was really too big to be carried by then, especially by Ria, but she clung so that her grandmother couldn't put her down: both arms around her neck, feet around her waist, chin propped on her shoulder while the woman got the girls away from there.
On the way out, over her grandmother's shoulder, Tiriana watched the healer, one fidgety journeyman she remembered seeing a lot in the day and a half since the accident, finally broach Sh'drian. Some sort of conversation, she didn't know what. About the body, maybe, she eventually decided. Sh'drian didn't seem real interested, and he went out the bowl entrance while her grandmother carried her down in the lower caverns, to her rooms.
Aunt Nuria was there already, bustling around--Tiriana never remembered her still. She was getting a spare bed ready and making tea, thick with cream to give the girls after Ria got them situated. Cyrra was crying, no pretenses about it as she curled up on the makeshift bed; Tiriana sat up there with her, defensively. She kept scrubbing at her face as fast as the tears leaked out, not that it did much good, while Nuria awkwardly tried to talk her into drinking something, anything.
The rest of the time there was blurry. Tiriana felt like she dozed off at some point, but she was still exhausted the next day, just as hoarse and stuffy and teary as before. There was lots of petting from her grandmother, constant feeding and cleaning by her aunt. A subdued stream of cousins creeping in and out, avoiding Tiriana. When Sh'drian turned back up in a couple of days to claim his girls, he picked a fight with Nuria over... Tiriana wondered if either one of them knew; she didn't recall. She hadn't focused on that, had instead kept drifting back to his side again, making him pick her up and put her down again, over and over, like she was two and not seven.