Gaffriel-5

Have you ever met anyone that you knew would be there forever? I had concrete certainty in my mind—no, diamond certainty. I remember the day I met Niala. The team had arrived through the ‘rough light.’ I liked to watch the flash of their magic go off. They were staggering and reeling from the leech of energy used. When Kiromir turned to reveal the little girl, we understood why. They had transported another person.

Her delicate features couldn’t have been more than four years old, a year younger than me. Of course, a year’s difference means less and less over time. But, then, the difference between four and five was this immense chasm. Her dark hair hung limp and strange over her body. She wore strange restrictive clothes, and she smelled like humans. Despite Kiromir’s raging aura of fear, she clutched onto his side, legs resting on his hip as he gripped her tight with one arm.

“Kiromir, you can’t have that thing here!” Lowak told him. I don’t remember much of Kiromir’s father, save for that his broad stature was immense in the way some of our hunters could be.

“This thing is a child!” Kiromir told him, and she turned strange bright eyes to peer out cautiously. I had never seen eyes so blue before, like steel and oceans. People were backed up and fearful. We were secretive and never allowed humans on the base.

“Get rid of it before it costs us our cover!” Lowak’s voice sang out in a roar, but Kiromir had long learned how to manage his father’s temper.

Niala turned to face Lowak and his shouting. She stiffened the moment the volume rose, a defiant expression crossed her face.

“Nal skern!” She pouted to him. She had literally looked Lowak straight into his eyes, the tallest and strongest of our flock, and told him that he wasn’t scary.

Lowak’s eyes widened. Every tense muscle in his body somehow dropped then tightened at the same time. It went totally silent, broken only by a gasp. Letti, somewhere in the background, died laughing. She had been debating on staying with Dimal for so long, but that laugh just cemented her place. Even if she didn’t bind to Dimal, we had to keep her. Lowak shot her a glare.

“What… Is she Cuervos?” Lowak’s tone changed.

Kiromir stepped closer to Lowak amid the whispers. “No. Her ikris are different.”

As the only kid close to my age in the flock, I raced up to see this new girl. I wondered if the migration had come to us this year. I caught her attention with a wave, and she moved her focus from Lowak to me.

She stared for a long moment. Gears turned behind those beautiful blue eyes.“Gaffina!”

Kiromir and Lowak pursed their lips and fought back laughter, failing as they fell into titters.

Lowak scooped me up and sat me atop his shoulder before gesturing for Kiromir to go back to his home with her. Kiromir still lived in the barracks in those days, and Lowak had the information center. I was pouting as he led me away. Everyone always made fun of my name back then.

“Sorry for laughing at you, little one,” Lowak had told me as he carried me off to my father. Yarrick took me from his shoulder with ease and scolded me for interfering with their return. Lowak ruffled my hair a bit and lowered himself to my eye level. “She’s just about your age. Be nice to her. The girls that tease you often turn out to like your fire the best.”

I shyly waited outside around Kiromir’s barracks and Lowak’s house for days, trying to catch glimpses of the strange new girl. Elders from all over traveled in to see her. We had Cuervos come in from Mexico and the tall, dark-skinned men of the Nyota, our Tanzanian brothers. The songbirds, who never left their protected lands, showed up as well. Everyone had seen Niala, it seemed, but me.

I had been a persistent and wiry child at the best of times, still was, and I waited for that door to open for just a fraction of a second too long. Then, before they could stop me, I darted through someone’s legs and found her just inside Lowak’s second bedroom. They made a few grabs for me on the way in, but Kiromir let me slide by without much fuss. She sat up in a cot covered in blankets, eyes bright and wide.

“GAFFINA!” She announced, and I pouted as Kiromir pushed me forward.

“Gaffriel,” I corrected her.

“Gaff… Riel?” Her head tilted, and eyes squinted. She pointed to herself. “NIALA!”

“Nil ipsilan tsus.” Kiromir scolded her, and she wilted a little.

He told her not to show something. I didn’t know what it meant, but before I could ask, Lowak was prodding me.

“She had never seen someone with red hair,” Lowak laughed. I pouted and hung my head.

“kriitz utok dir ikrian,” Kiromir said to her, and she glared dubiously but obliged as she rolled her shoulders and let her wings slide free of her ikris. He told her to show her wings!

I had never seen anything so pretty in my entire life. All of our wings were so dull and drab compared to the vibrant contrast to her silver and black.

“She doesn’t speak any English?” My own Anil at that time came in broken spatters. The adults used it to talk so we couldn’t understand. Usually, I just assumed it was something dirty until I got older.

“Nope,” Lowak’s voice came stern from behind me, but I approached all the same. I feared Lowak, but my curiosity outweighed my fear.

“Uhh.. iller… tal…ikri,” I managed to choke out. I told her that her wings were pretty. ‘Iller’ had lots of meanings—pretty, beautiful, cute. I meant all of them as my cheeks burned. Kiromir smiled as proud as could be to hear me muddle out the words. I loved making Kiromir proud.

She bunched her wings up to her back tight, and her cheeks went pink.

She asked me a question, and Kiromir had to answer for me, and it took a few minutes to muddle out her meanings. Their hands gesticulated for a while, and that communicated more to me than her new words.

“Tam yar?” She pantomimed with Kiromir.

He laughed until his eyes watered, “Tal yeer!” She nodded, and her eyes sparkled. I liked watching her smile.

“She asks if you’re a boy.” Lowak laughed as she chattered on, having to stop, repeat, rephrase and gesticulate.

“Apparently, their men wear their hair long.” Kiromir ruffled his own hair, right at his shoulders and messy. He was never so full of smiles and laughter. He burst with happiness whenever he could care for someone. Sometimes, he got that excited and happy for me.

“Wait until she sees Thanus, then.” I had laughed.

“That was a discussion and a half, already.” Kiromir couldn’t stop laughing. Niala entertained him so much. Kiromir was never that happy.

I counted it as our first moment when I hopped up over her cot.

They let me stay the night that night and the next. Being so close in age to her, we could mold one another. I could teach her English. She did her best to teach me the foreign language she spoke. It was almost like an accent of our Anil, but a lot of words were shifted. The grammar always switched around. We didn’t know all of what she said for a while still. I spoke her tongue better than she spoke English after a few months.

Within that week, my mom got sicker. It was also when my dad started acting funny—shouting at me. After that, they were never together anymore, not that they got along great, to begin with.

The way my dad explained the wasting disease to me was that it was because my mom hated him and me so bad that she would rather waste away and die than be with us anymore. When I tried to ask Ester, my mother, about it, she refused to speak and just pushed me away. She started getting mean, a little violent.

Letti had joined the flock officially shortly after we declared the search for Niala’s family and flock at a dead end. By that time, I learned to fear the adults, withdrew from them as I suffered under Yarrick and Ester. I never called them mom or dad. They didn’t earn that from me, and Kiromir seemed to agree.

They suggested, at one point, since Dimal and Letti had bonded, that they should adopt Niala. Their only argument was that they were newly bound and needed their time together. They were pretty touchy, feely, and kissy. Kiromir agreed that maybe they could take her after the new wore off, but after Niala’s first English sentence involved the F-word, they lost that privilege.

Kiromir had taken over the grousing hut, then. Lowak said he didn’t need to have that whole house to himself. I slept there several nights a week, it seemed. Usually, it coincided with when dad started acting funny, drunk, getting violent. He had been a hunter in Kiromir’s crew in those days, and they sheltered me from him in his strongest. We were all waiting for Lowak to just do us all a favor and enter himself back into the cycle. I would be an orphan, but the flock cared for me already.

Niala and I shared a bed until we were closing in on eight years old, almost. She had nightmares, and I would hold her. I would cry, and she would hold me. We were kindred spirits of abandonment. Some nights Kiromir would have to come in and hold both of us. My crying set her nightmares off.

She had almost completely tuned out my aura, one of mourning sadness. Kiromir wasn’t too bothered by it, not until Lowak died at least. Niala had been a constant in my life.

We’d been best buddies until a little before I got my fires last year. I think we’d gotten a little too close and comfortable with one another. I started blushing a lot when we were near, and while I liked it, she didn’t. Ever since she’d started drawing away and Kiromir had been keeping an eye on me.

I held out hope that she’d hit the age soon, and as luck would have it, a few weeks prior, she’d asked me to braid her hair for the first time in a while, and as the backs of my fingers brushed her cheeks, her skin blushed, and she felt fever hot. Her breath wavered, and her eyes went dark. I wouldn’t call it a glow, but something did the opposite of a shine back at me. Stars lit deep in her eyes, and I wanted nothing more than to reach for them.

The lingering moment ended with her shoving me away so hard that I couldn’t breathe right for a few hours. Her face beamed scarlet! Feathers! My face was scarlet.