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~;*Caingel's Crux*;~
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Humans had been shunning Caingels for centuries. It was nothing new. They’d forced them as far away as they could go; up to the frigid white lands of the Arctic Circle. To the Humans, they were abominations, freaks, demons against God. They called them ‘Blunks’ or ‘Deecees’; derogative forms of ‘blanc’ and ‘D.C.’ - short for ‘demonic cats’.
The Humans’ nicknames fit them disgustingly well. Caingels did look reminiscently feline, with their long slender tails covered in soft fur that twitched of their own volition, and their ivory clawlike fingernails that retracted and lengthened when they gripped an object in their hands. And the Caingels’ eyes made them look even less human than they already were. Where a Human’s eyes were white, a Caingel’s were black, and their irises could range from a dark grey to pitch. They also have feathered ears, which are their pride. Caingel girls fuss a great deal about the state of their ears, just like human girls fuss over their hair. In many ways, Humans and Caingels are just alike.
In a handful more ways, Caingels are just as unique. Every one of them is as pale as a candleflame, with individual hair colors varying from snow white to light gold to salty grey, and all of them are fine of feature and as lithe and frail as flowerstems. A darkly-colored Caingel has never been born, and something in their very genetic fabric allows them to be born instinctively knowing all the knowledge that a Human mind must learn over years of time. It is supposed that when Caingels evolved from Humans, they retained it all as a species, and gradually inherited a full memory of facts as they evolved even further from their Human roots.
But somehow, between then and now, Caingels developed a fatal flaw: they are unable to tolerate darkness. Any kind of deep shadow will affect them like frostbite, leaving a painful dead spot on their bodies. If the shadow is dark enough, whatever it touches will be severed and disappear. Even today, Human scientists have not been able to explain why darkness has such an effect upon Caingels.
Before they were considered a separate race, they were discriminated and persecuted along with so-called ‘witches’. Accused of being servants of the Devil, Caingels were pulled from their homes in large numbers and thrown outside at night to vanish. Similar events have occurred all throughout recorded history: the Black Plague was blamed on the Caingels, the Crusades targeted cities with large numbers of Caingels, they also made up a significant percentage of the slave trade for some time, but they were too fragile for most hard work. Centuries of Caingel-genocide slipped past the quill of Time because there was rarely any evidence left, and they gradually slipped out of Human civilizations. In this modern day, there is only a small organization that represents them in Human countries, while the general public has almost forgotten them, and Caingels have all sought refuge in the frigid North, where the sun shines for six months out of the year.
Having developed their own humanoid culture, they founded small cities of their own in the snow. With their intelligence they constructed buildings that suited their new environment, and made it so they could survive in their homes during the months of darkness out on the tundra.
But, in spite of everything their past generations had endured, no one was sure what would happen to the Caingels. They could survive in their own small, remote version of civilization, but there was little hope of forming any kind of separate nation that could stand with the Human Empire, even as divided as it was. In essence, they were a race of handsome beings that are as easily broken as a flute of glass.
Perhaps the Caingels were destined to sputter and burn out like a dying stub of candle. Afterall, no matter how large the container is, anything kept in a box will eventually smother itself and perish. Even animals in a huge cage with more than enough food will, given enough time, multiply and crush their chances of survival with weighty numbers and inbreed until they become malformed. An animal in a box will always be in a box, and any creature caught in a trap must either escape or die.
But do you know what an animal does when it’s trapped?
It will do whatever it has to do to get free. Then would the poor creature seek refuge with the very hunter who laid the trap, especially after it finished gnawing it’s own leg off to escape?
Even now it seemed like a sick revelation, but Cayst was no animal. Forget what the Humans said. She knew just how the poor creature would have felt; she was gnawing her own limb off to escape at this very moment.
She finished painting her new thumbnail with deep violet polish, and dropped the sticky little brush back into the mouth of its bottle for the moment. Picking up the nailclippers again, she flexed her fingers until her rounded, curving claws extended all the way, and snipped the index finger claw.
She sucked in air through her teeth at the sharp twinge that jolted up her arm. Then she calmly moved the nailpolish bottle from atop her folded knee and got up to find a tissue. Her bare feet padded across the carpet of the nearly empty room towards the hall.
The house, in its entirety, was painted and decorated a pale buttery yellow from wall to wall to ceiling to floor. Big 101-watt lightbulbs protruded from every corner of every room, leaving no place for shadows to form, except in a faint star on the rug around Cayst’s bare feet. There was virtually no furniture in the house to avoid casting shadows, or risking a fire if any of it came into contact with one of the corner-bulbs. Their frosted-glass shades tended to heat up and one could burn one’s ankle if they got close enough to brush against one of them.
All of the houses in Old Mossuwayett were very empty and very bright; most of them were almost windowless in order to save energy during the Dark Months. From a few miles away across the sweeping sheet of white snow, the hum of each house’s generator sounded like a swarm of sleepy electric bees. If Cayst had stood still she could have felt the tiny vibrations of her own house through the floor.
The tissue rustled from its box as she plucked it and dabbed gingerly at the red dot that had welled up where she had trimmed her claw too close to the quick. She walked back down the hallway and back across the living room to where the violet nailpolish and a kit of plastic nails lay out on the pale-yellow carpet.
Settling herself back onto the rug, Cayst touched a dab of clear glue to the sore quick of her claw, and pressed another false nail in place. They were perfect. They made her hands look just like a Human’s, and as long as she was careful and always kept the little tube of glue with her, they would never know otherwise.
It was almost the start of the Light Months outside, and she knew without having to look out the one window in the house that the sky would be bright enough to go out in less than a few days. Just a little more waiting, and then she could be free of this trap that her kind had been forced into.
Cayst screwed the lid back onto the bottle of polish and blew on the fake nails as she held them out. She could barely restrain a grin; she had Human hands! And they looked so real, there was no way she couldn’t pass for one now. Of course there were other things that needed to be taken care of before she could get excited. Her claws were only one part of her.
She got to her feet, carefully holding the little bottle with the pads of her fingers so as not to smudge the polished nails, and put it away in a drawer of the clear plastic hall dresser.
All furniture with drawers was now made of transparent plastic, due to the hazard of losing fingers and hands to the dark inside of cabinets and desks and nightstands. A generation ago, having all ten fingers was like having God’s own luck. But times change. And not always for the better, in Cayst’s opinion.
She had paused in front of the oval mirror that hung above the hall dresser, and was scrutinizing her reflection. White-blond, almost silver hair, looped in thick curls all over her head. It was much too short to cover the back of her neck, but it twined irritatingly around her ears and got tangled in her carefully-groomed feathers. Her black eyes and grey irises blinked back at her in the glass from her smooth, nearly-white face and the wisps of pale hair.
Her eyes would have to be hidden behind sunglasses at all times, which was simple enough, but her pretty ears would have to go. The thought of ruining her feathered ears pained her. She had put so much diligence into keeping them neat and white and trimming them back when they started to get uneven. It seemed a bit egotistic to say it, but she’d always liked the way her ears looked, and now they had to be gotten rid of. It felt like such a waste of all her effort.
Even so, Cayst rummaged through the dresser drawer until she found the scissors she needed; sharp ones, for cutting thick things like cardboard and special plastic-repair tape. She brushed her hair out of her face, and tucked the stray curls out of the way as she leaned in close to the mirror with the scissors poised beside her ear. She let out a long heavy breath when the blades razed through the tiny little feathers that fringed her ears, but Cayst continued to snip until her beautiful Caingel ears sat as bald as rat-tails on either side of her head. She looked hideous, but at least her ears looked Human.
Putting the scissors back into the transparent drawer, Cayst gathered the little bits of feather up and continued down the hall to the clean white bathroom to dump them into the wastebasket. Here she stopped, after the last fluffs of feather had been dusted from her hands. Only one thing was left that had to be taken care of…
…her tail.
Cayst had been putting it off for last because she didn’t want to think about what she would have to do to get rid of her long white tail, but now that it was the only thing left to do, she couldn’t avoid it anymore. What had she been thinking before? How had she expected to turn herself as human as she could get, and still avoid the ghastly consequences that would bring?
She quailed as she leaned over the porcelain bathroom sink, acutely aware of her tail’s nervous swishing behind her. Cayst bit her lip and breathed slowly through her nose to calm her nerves.
Was it worth it?
She didn’t know. There was no way she could know, because no one had ever left Old Mossuwayett that she knew of. She wouldn’t have been the first to have such a reckless and foolhardy idea, but before, she had wanted to be the first to actually leave the Reserve. However, now she wasn’t so sure about it.
She would be risking her life in a dozen different ways: she would be outside the city, she would be the only Caingel for miles in any direction, and eventually, if she made it to the Humans’ city as she had originally planned, she would have to contend with shadows lurking everywhere around her, and the absolute darkness of Night at the end of every single day. There would be no going back once she had left. Once she was outside the Caingels’ Reserve, she was outside it for the rest of her life.
All this fell onto Cayst’s shoulders at once as she leaned over the bathroom sink. It was all so frightening she couldn’t stand it, and she felt like she couldn’t move from where she stood. Maybe this was what it meant to fear for one’s own life? To be paralyzed in every sense of the word, and just want to move freely again.
She hated that feeling.
She hated feeling trapped.
Cayst glanced up at herself in the bathroom mirror, and abruptly walked out of the white tiled room with fast strides. She went swiftly down the hall, past the clear plastic dresser and the oval mirror, and crossed the living room into the kitchen. From under the metal sink-pipes inside the clear plastic counter, Cayst pulled a wad of sterilized rags and some wire. Wrapping one of the rags around the base of her tail, and binding it as tightly as she could with the wire, she knotted it and ran the water in the sink. She put one of the rags between her teeth, bit firmly down on it, and turned to face the counter. On top of the plastic countertop was a knifeblock made of clear sterile-glass.
Cayst reached over the counter and chose the biggest knife from the block.
...............................................~;*end*;~...............................................
 Mitsukeru Furidomu · Thu Dec 06, 2007 @ 08:12pm · 4 Comments |
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