As reds arose and torched the trees and with the lighting of the darker rays, it become clear that the sun was settling. Gladius noting this lateness of the hour, returned to his father and Forlorn went back home to the elderly couple she stayed with and had to care for; both of whom were asleep. Neither were connected to the spirit-line, they were from the last generation not to be. Yet they seemed to take joy in their children and grandchildren being soldered to it, and that made Forlorn feel less badly for them and gave her a hopeful assurance that she might take delight in her own child’s connection to it. That she could revel in becoming a mother to the immortal.

  She looked out the window with its slight silver edge and past the bright, abundant roofs and the sun’s lightest creepers that left the world under a translucent, yellow bloom. As sun spread softly over foliage, she saw the greeter. He’d showed her about when she first set foot in the door of Vandalier. That day, she had been met by the greeter, a young slim man. He took her down the winding road and several white pavements that would lead her to her new home.

  She was shy, but his smile was causal and reassuring and he had a sweet, candid set to his face and stride that made feel her safe asking tough questions.

  She still burned and blushed at the remembrance of her decision to ask something she had long being curious about; “Vandalier in the past was often called restrictive and stifling. How did you approach and reconcile claims that you were always anti-liberty?”

  She had attempted to phrase it dispassionately but it came out condescending and she felt embarrassed.

  The greeter had frowned:

  “Well, the consensus here isn't identical; we’re not as homogenous as we sometimes get painted elsewhere but I guess you could say, we think that some liberties clash.”

  “Many here feel that value ought to be placed on the future and on the quality of life we all share. Pain comes after one has tried or burned out from living dangerously and caused others to have to care for them and waste valuable resources fixing their foreseeable and avoidable problems.”

  He’d rather glowered.

  “If they had any honour, or put others first, or even granted other people any due consideration, it wouldn't have happened.”

  Weaving through Hedera Helix and the flowering loom bells, a honey-feathered warbler bobbled about on fluted legs and Forlorn happily-squealed. They didn’t have any such birds back home.

  They did have a few frog-footed corellas alongside loveliest Siren-spun Sylphendae’s, with their eagle or raven bodies and little human faces. Tiny, maiden’s hands were straddled to their summery wings. Sometimes their lips had been forsook for great, golden beaks or their ivory hands forsook for talons.

  In Lyre Moors she’d heard, they were far fairer creatures. Bestowed with blue, duskiest eyes from which a noble, liquid light did sling and a crown of fairest roses upon heads white as the sanderlings.

  Their chimeric voices were the perfect mingle of man and beast.

  They often lived but a few years; they were not beings of a solid mergence. Their limp bodies that littered Guile’s cracked, leafless ground with beautiful, cold white cheeks, feathered talons and blackened fingers in an amass of old, cobwebbed finery and putrefying decay were a distressing sight.

  Yet with every living breath they engaged in cheerful chatter, babbling brooks of laugher and mating calls. As to their songful callings, they contained a pleasance indescribable.

  Daily and bittersweetly in Guile’s longest, prettiest, silver-leaved trees with dark branches, they whistled and sang Godly hymns. They piped old, forlorn folksongs, sung a symphony of orchestral and operatic melodies. Pumped out rock and wailed the blues.

  Though frail little beings they could nonetheless light any lingering shadow, sun the snow, pluck out the sharpest fangs from a beast or turn Dante’s gray shore gold.

  “We believe there’s joy in finding your way through the helping of others.” The greeter had at some point during their encounter said such, glancing pityingly over at the adolescent girl with her over-frilly clothes and her lightly-furred form.

  “After all humanity is a civilisation and each of us has their part, but if the parts all either harm each other or even themselves, eventually the whole will have to expend limited resources and energy curing them or die. Long-ago many debates reached the conclusion of the pure bodily-integrity approach. Whatever you wanted to ingest, do with or inflict upon your physical form was your right to do so. Of course, people could rarely perform their own medical or engineering procedures. Someone else had to be involved. Still, your society felt anything you wanted to do to yourself, your right lay.”

  He’d looked appraisingly into Forlorn’s doll eyes. “This conveniently ignored the increased risk of complication and diseases and the time and care and resources and already-crowded beds you took from a genuine sufferer struck by chance.”

  He’d walked a lot faster than Forlorn did: she had struggled to match his long, lithe stride. Wished she could have fluttered her fair wings for a little speed. Alas, they were bounded.

  “Full choice of what to do with and put into your body is considered by some, a fundamental liberty,” the man had continued.

  “Well, our founder, he disagreed. He pointed out that’s a right only gifted to those with money. People with ailments sickened, died and were denied treatments they wanted and needed; ones to remove tumours for example, if they lacked wealth. “

  That’s true I suppose, Forlorn had thought, surprised. In all honesty she had not ever thought of it in such terms.

  “Medical abortion was probably one of the more interesting examples of clashing liberties. The Greeter furthered. “Till controlled conception made it obsolete. When introduced to certain less-advanced civilisations, it caused much aid but also much strife in societies. For poorer countries valued males more due to their work, labour and marriage structures. Female children were a monetary burden to an often poor and ailing family and might also suffer; unable to find a place in their world. So female children were aborted.”

  Poor little infant girls, Forlorn had thought. Into her mind’s eye they appeared, half-formed and curling-limbed, little cherubs. Not yet rosy or ribbed. Their foetal forms all translucence and veiny blues and not even the lightest locks of hair.

  “Aborting girls didn’t break any technical rules of liberty: contrarily women may do with their bodies as they will and on an individual level it harmed none, as at early-stage the foetal is not a person considered.”

  A shadow had settled over Forlorn’s young face.

  “Yet in the end, the process made women a scarcity. The men were unable to marry and life was difficult for the next generation. Changing the structures of these civilisations to soften the sex divide was of course, the most viable solution, but it would take time and meanwhile the loss of so many females made this achievement only all the harder.” Or so the man had mused.

  “Of course, activists for choice are often concerned with some liberties more than others. They fought for the freedom to take drugs, more than to free those embroiled in child labour. They clearly thought some choices and free-wills were more important and valid and worth fighting for than others.”

  Gene therapy was our Achilles liberty. Forlorn had thought.

  “Allowing things such as excessive fossil fuel burning, nuclear power overuse and poor building structure in accordance with some, if the market accepts it then it must be right philosophy, was something we long-ago rejected.”

  The greeter had at some point gestured that it was time for them to change direction.

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  “Here you can build, study and create and do anything you want but we don't accept dangerousness or shoddiness in our food or products. They’re all mandatorily held to a high standing. We know some side effects show up decades later. We do welcome new technology.” He’d smiled brightly.

  “Spent our research on longevity, water-resistant and inflammable buildings and better wiring. We want to make people’s lives easier and increase their choices for leisure. We try to introduce things cautiously and not overuse resources if possible.”

  He’d looked at the ashen down on Forlorn’s little face.

  “We eat revitalised animals here. You’ll get used to it eventually. We feast on the open-grazers on the farmland but only those of age or who died of natural causes. This is done via one of two methods.”

  “The main one,” he’d informed the flower-footed girl, ‘”is a form of temporary reanimation.”

  “How does making dead things temporarily alive work?” Forlorn had asked, anxiously touching the dusk-pink crepe of her most expensive dress and hoping her flower garland which had seemed so pretty before, would not seem too garish to some with such an apprising eye.

  Vandaliens clearly thought their land was a paradise and she was a little tired of them telling her how much more wonderful and better and peaceable a people they were compared to her kind. They were not even trying to pretend they were not treating her like a lowly heathen. Possibly the reason she could not stop returning to memories of the greeter’s words, in particular, the matter-of-fact disdain in his certain voice.

  Forlorn awoke sometime well after the stroke of midnight, to find her body tangled to the plush bedding and her heart in a fearful beat. Until an exasperating freeing of the limbs.

  She reminisced for while about the last time this had happened and she been entwined in, and felt like she had been bolted to, a matted sheet. That one however was not blue, pretty and pristine but stained and torn and underneath a white-hanging post that rose over her shared room’s bed.

  She had been risen by the sound of Nam softly-shouting. She was head of Haven-Foley one of many modern learning and care centres of the Facilities-Misericordia and where Forlorn lived. The Educate-hospitaled households.

  Nam took the night shift on Thursdays and had the littlest Forlorn roused with a surprisingly-passionate shouting.

  “You beast.”

  Forlorn, by the particularly-virulent term of abuse started, as taught since earliest she could remember, how appalling its use could be. When used as a pejorative. Instilling fear, disgust, hatred and loss of esteem in people including the young; growing to hate themselves.

  Derided for things they couldn’t control and made to feel inferior due to their bodies: denied the rightful ability to get and ascend in their work: forgone the grant of an inherent dignity and within humanity and society, a place.

  Something everyone deserved equally. That none should be denied due to visual discrimination. Aware also of the consequences of using it, she thus raised her head curiously.

  As did the other little females each and every one of them mingled with all the various branches of the animalia tree. They rose assuredly: at least all of them who could physically lift their tampered necks and faces.

  “I have to spend my days caring for, and patiently tending to, screaming, frightened, sickly children. Cleaning their fever sweats and the blood from easily-broken, poorly-armoured skin and worse, and yet you want to make more of them.”

  She then continued and her rage turned tearful.

  “I loved you and all this time you were…” Her voice caught and got lost to dry-throated stumbles of indignation and into misery trailed.

  Forlorn was still very distant and thus she didn't hear much of what he said in reply, for he whispered. She missed any mention of a name or what Nam called him by, but it sounded via what were audible as if their conversation had something to do with masks. One of the few words she distinctly managed to catch.

  She’d moved closer and heard all spoken from that moment on.

  “Either a de-masquerade or an anti-Holoist, is what we prefer to be called. Not that horrible, derisive term, demasker, which a band of fearful Luddites devised and who, even before things went a little awry, were utterly unable to any kind of living comprehend or handle outside of their pathetic and myopic own. They such a name to us gave. They don't and could never understand.

  Neither they, the government oppressors or any of the wicked supporters of the masqueraders.”

  “Additionally, that appalling, disparaging term you called me is illegal Dally and were I to report it, why you might not feel the warmth of, or have the sun’s light cast upon, that, unique, fascinating, wonderful and utterly and only of you face, For quite some time.”

  Forlorn had then heard what did rather sound like someone running their hand across a body. She did not know what was happening but the dirtiness of touching another’s malformed-ness shocked her as did something else about the atmosphere between the two.

  She’d raced out in a decisiveness that seemed odd and alien when juxtaposed against her usual shying feyness, but that wilful fire had always been there; lain ready to imbue her with strength or character or mere rebellious disobedience. If she so needed it to. It was a part of her soul, but a piece locked and away hidden.

  She raced, despite this being most forbidden, out the door to find them.

  She being one of only a few of her time to be limber upon her feet, had used this form dearly-fortunate to find where the pair were.

  The man though not as tall as he most certainly seemed to the teeny Forlorn, was for certain imposing. Had turned the defiant little figure, him toward. His cracked yet vibrantly blue-black skinned arms had been hastily by his sides placed as he growled;

  “Move it brat.” That harsh voice, had a threat of violence towards her slid.

  Forlorn took palely a step backward. There was the rustle of a bare and flowered foot.

  “Yes. Return to the girls’ bedroom Forlorn,” her carer had said. Trying to disguise a frightened appearance and a soft and perhaps to her very soul, shivering. An unsteady quaking.

  The man remembered the incident too. He had listened to the girl’s hearty breath. Her voice contained a natural, songful giggle like she was born of the laughing birds of heaven. It reverberated. Irritatingly so. Her limbs were air, softened with snow. Her healthful mobility seemed lit by God’s sunshine and not mere nightly candles, like the rest of them.

  As he’d turned to view her, she’d danced a little. Seemingly-skipped over others black ash upon lily feet; ones white, quick, lively and sweet.

  She had irritating cherubic cheeks with a perfect curve and a quiet blush. Seemed fitting that her figure was one of bland angelism as he’d always found religion insipid and childish. Her dress was tattered, but those fringed plant-tresses reflected all shades. Considerable wile lay beneath that holo’d and in eyes of a cloudless fire. Their expressions warmly-animated. She looked like one whose plants never drooped.

  When she’d tilted her face, rich blue curls had tumbled. A strobe’s flicker lit the lighter ends. Spun in frost lavenders and green and silver creepers.

  It made him recall an old film which depicted all the fairy-light blazes once strung about Christmas streets in the otherwise cold, dark eve.

  Prettily, the strobe added a spry fair to locks the shade of a countryside harebell.

  For a split-second, the electronic veil had wavered ever-so-slightly as it was wont to do, and her true appearance had glittered even through the holo-beautifier. He’d saw unclearly as if through water, what seemed to be a symmetrical and rather human face.

  “I wonder,” he’d thought. Feeling disgust. For despite her face’s and hair’s shine, which might well be considered an attractive feature throughout much of the animal kingdom and was also found in the beauty of many a trinket, he personally found her one of such blank, humanly blandness that gazing upon her was like looking at plain cloth: someone like her did most unappealing to him appear. Her vibrant sea-curls were the only thing about her that he found truly pleasing or which seemingly contained any unique loveliness.

  His reaction had puzzled and hurt, even maddened Forlorn, who was used to people’s gaze being brightened and their tone enthused and welcoming and pleased by her somewhat hid and yet still somewhat visible, attractiveness.

  The man, who she’d suspected might be un-holo’d but one could not tell in the thralls of such dark-light, suddenly turned. Off he strode with a limp. Discarding from his person, his hair. Moulting and shedding enough to be noticeable, were the strands of his dull, tattered hair. Failing and falling. As if they lay fading, discoloured rags and so broken that they could no longer to him adhere.

  He was un-holo’d.

  He did however call after Nam, with a certain genuine curiosity and one that made him at least for the moment, seem rather softer and friendlier. Prettily did flit across his face, something open and kinder.

  “Why do the children here, why do they call you Nam, Dally? Do you even know my Dalliance?”

  “It's a combination of ma’am and nanny an old term for someone who watched other another’s children and possibly mother, I think. Gets used in a lot of the hospitaleds. I’ve always been most partial to it.”

  She smiled then and whatever the pair had had before was not quite rekindled but in that moment, and in a dear fleet, did return. Softly-lit and in a resurgent flare, that revealed how it had first come to be.

  It had taken a while for Forlorn to realise she knew the man. He taught at the private boy’s academy, relatively near to Haven-Foley and that she had passed on trips to the shops: something allowed for those healthy enough to travel. He’d always had a certain cold arrogance emanating from him though he hadn't seemed quite so odd when she had glimpsed him on prior occasions.

  Forlorn recalled one of the boys he was chaperoning, pointing to her and asking why she was in one of the Hospitaleds since she seemed so well. He asked why she was not either with her family or in a regular child-haven.

  The truth was she had been in one some time ago and that she could only through in-and-out specks of coloured threading (as she lay a most visual creature) remember. Her parents died within six months of one another: She herself being one-and-a-half.

  During a brief ailment she had been admitted for observation and due to the crowding in the other havens after a heavy influx, they left her in Foley-Hospitaled. One of the few places that were not struggling as demand for care centres rose.

  An elderly widow from Mallory Hills, (the richest congregation of people in the wealthiest city) donated to it as she had once there attended. She sent her granddaughter (or possibly niece) there too and kept the place in bloom.