The Huntress of Silvermore

They say girls mature and begin to understand the world faster than boys. I guess that was the case for me.

I didn have any friends of my age in the neighborhood but there was one older girl whose views and beliefs resonated with my own, and so we used to hang out together. She was Hinisha or sister Hin as I called her.

As for the views and beliefs that I mentioned, I was referring to being open to have fun, as that was all that mattered to my younger self.

Most days, we would visit the towns marketplace and keep looking for cheap treasures there like random old earrings and necklaces.

Sister Hin had quite a passion for those accessories, which influenced me a little as well.

I didn like wearing those things but it was indeed a blossoming joy for me to collect them and fondly gaze at them. It gave my childhood self a sense of fulfillment that was irreplaceable at the time.

Perhaps, I was trying to peer through the veils of history surrounding those objects, perhaps I was just trying to hypnotize myself, or perhaps I was daydreaming of becoming a famous royal lady wearing those jewels. I don remember why I loved collecting and looking at them so much, but it was indeed my favorite pastime.

Naturally, the old and withering pawn shops in the dark alleyways and isolated corners of the market were our favorite places to visit.

Of course, my sister Chloe always tagged along with me in those adventures, bringing with her an atmosphere of contentment that would ravish those gloomy and miserable places.

Sister Hin also loved playing with her and so I could only helplessly let her tag along with me whenever I went out of the house.

Perhaps, sister Hin was an oddball like us as well. She was just like her mother, who was also my mothers gossiping companion, a conversation addict.

It was just that the topics that she talked about interested me as well, unlike my mother. That made our friendship perfect.

She was two years older than me, but I was always the one to advise her against the dangerous places she kept wanting to visit.

Perhaps, even then, I had an inkling of things that might go wrong if I let sister Hin follow her heart and let her spirit of adventure go unchecked, but I simply didn have the words strong enough in my mouth to refute anyone confidently, whether it be my mother who was nagging, my sister who was pestering me to tag along with me, or sister Hin who wanted to lead me increasingly more ambiguous and mysterious places.

Perhaps only my brother was worse than me in that regard, and I absolutely adored him for that, too bad he didn like going out or even… talking.

So in the case of Sister Hin, most of the time, I didn respond to her enthusiastic invites to places out of the town. It did put her down every time but since I didn refuse outright, her suggestions and invites kept getting more and more daring.

Sometimes, I just had to agree because the places she wanted to visit were within the Silvermore city, like one time we tried to jump the wall of the mayors courtyard to see the mythical creature inside, but we were caught and scolded by the guards.

Thankfully, they didn tell our parents, otherwise with how our mothers were, we would have had to spend days hearing emotional lectures.

”Oh, how troublesome it is, to have this little girl of mine acting all grown up. I feel like it was just yesterday that she used to piss herself and wake me with her cries in the morning. ”, My mother would say with a sigh, leaning loosely on the door frame, to which aunty would respond, ”These two already don want to come back home, sister, do you think theyll ever want to come back after marriage? ”

While little Chloe would laugh at our misfortune at first, when we would have been grounded for days, she would beginning pestering my mother to let me out.

Well, even though the news never reached my home, it remained to be a very happening place, with Chloe or my mother always finding something wrong.

Frequently, a pale-faced Rowan would get caught in the middle of our antics and act still like a stone sculpture, while we played around him. We would only leave him alone when his lips or eyebrows began to twitch from annoyance.