Although three years had passed, the girl still didn’t know if fleeing Palaedia had been a good idea. 

But she hadn’t had time to think. She had just bundled her brother up in her arms and ran — ran far away from the bodies of her parents, from the little shop she’d grown up in, from the land she'd once called home. The distance didn't matter, though. The memories of that day had followed her like a shadow. As if they were imprinted into the backs of her eyelids and she was cursed to relive those moments every time she dared to blink. 

“Did you sell anything?” 

Abhipadma’s sullen tone made it clear he already knew the answer. The girl wrangled a smile onto her face as she closed the front door to their hut behind her.

“Do not worry,” she said, carefully lacing her voice with an encouraging chipperness as she put down the garments she was carrying on the small cot they shared. “Tomorrow promises to be a better day.” 

“That is what you say everyday.” 

The girl’s smile waned. Her brother flopped onto the ground, tracing idle patterns in the dust. The wheeze in his breath seemed louder in the silence. The girl had thought that the clean ocean breeze of Orion's peninsula would help him but the dirt carpeting the floor of their hovel dispelled any possible assistance. It settled in his lungs, filling his insides with a perpetual haze.

“It is killing him,” she thought, running her gaze over Abhipadma’s sunken cheeks and his dull, lifeless eyes. “His home is killing him.” 

It wasn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when. She had to get him out of here. 

“No,” she said firmly. “I mean it this time. Tomorrow will be different. I will make it different. I promise.” 

Abhipadma laughed, but it was a hollow, horrible sound. “We will see.” 

The girl watched her brother, despair gnawing away at her heart. The boy who had stubbornly declared he would never grow up, who had dragged her into games with pudgy and persistent fingers, had been replaced by someone she did not recognise. 

And she was afraid she would never get him back.

“Do you want to hang out with us, Piyumi?”

Piyumi, age thirteen, tucked her worn but well-loved issue of The Misadventures of Miss Adventures under her armpit. She shut the door to her locker to see the face of a girl from her grade, the bright yellow hijab wrapped around her head as sunny as her smile.

What was her name again? It was on the tip of Piyumi's tongue. They had been friends once, back in their early years of primary school. Wasn’t she part of the school representative council or something? 

Piyumi's eyes flitted towards the gaggle of girls waiting for their friend a few metres away. They talked amongst themselves, giggling at something or other with their lunch in their hands. 

“I’m okay,” she said politely. “But thanks.” 

The girl looked unsure. “Are you sure? It’s really no issue! There is plenty of room for you to-” 

“Hey, Waliyha! Are you coming?” 

Ah. 

“Your friends are waiting for you.” Piyumi offered Waliyha a small quirk of the lips. “I’ll see you around.” 

She quickly spun on her heel and walked down the hallway before Waliyha could say anything else. While her racing heart slowed when she pushed the doors to the courtyard open and the warm summer breeze hit her face, it did nothing to dispel the loneliness welling in her chest. Would it have been so bad of her to accept Waliyha’s invitation? To eat lunch with company beyond just herself? 

Piyumi looked down to her lunchless hands and then remembered. 

It was better this way. 

“Thatha.” 

A sigh broke through Piyumi’s lips as she threw her school bag to the side and gave her father’s shoulder another nudge. The man just continued to snore, his body draped over the couch like a limp noodle and mouth slightly agape. The fingers around the bottle of scotch miraculously hadn’t slackened in his inebriation, the liquid inside tilted but otherwise still contained. Figures. Out of all of the things her father decided to keep safe, it would be his precious booze. It wasn’t as if Piyumi had had to wade through a sea of dirty clothes, month-old takeout boxes and shards of glass to even reach the couch he was passed out on. 

A spark of irritation flared through her gut. She punched her father on the arm. 

“Ah!” Miyuru started awake amidst a particularly nasally snore. “What’s going on?! Who’s- oh, it’s only you, Duwa. Did you just get back from school? What’s the time?” 

“It’s ten at night.” Piyumi had to grind her teeth to stop herself from screaming when her father took a swig of the scotch bottle. “Thatha, did you- no, please tell me you went to work today.” 

“Of course I did,” Miyuru said after his lips had finally dislodged from the bottle’s mouth with a rather loud pop. “I mean, I did go, but…” 

“Thatha.” 

“It wasn’t my fault, I swear!” Miyuru receded into the ratty cushions of the sofa as Piyumi stared him down with a lethal glower. He waved the now empty bottle in his hands as if that would somehow get his point across better. “My manager just happened to catch a whiff of my thermos and-” 

“You were drinking at work? Again?”

“Don’t worry, Duwa, I’ll find another job.”  Miyuru snatched up Piyumi’s hands, letting the scotch bottle drop to the floor. Her eyes trailed after it as it rolled away. “But you won’t believe the most wonderful dream I just had! My love suddenly showed up at the door, and she took us to Palaedia, and it was just so beautiful, and oh, Duwa, don’t you think it’s a sign?!” 

Piyumi couldn’t bring herself to meet her father’s eyes. She just knew they were full of that frenzied, frantic and manic brand of hope he insisted on holding tight to, so she kept her gaze planted on the rolling scotch bottle as it hit the cabinet a few feet away, the glass reflecting the bright images playing on the small box television above. Her father always had dreams about the Queen when he drank himself to sleep. Piyumi half suspected that that was why he kept doing it. The man always took them as some sort of premonition that her mother was going to turn up soon, conveniently ignoring the fact that he’d been having these kinds of dreams for years. 

Piyumi knew she wasn’t coming — she’d be stupid to believe otherwise — but she knew it would crush her father if she told him that. So instead, she braced herself long enough to look into those eyes full of frenzied, frantic and manic hope and said, “of course, Thatha. What else could it be?” 

It hadn’t always been like this. Piyumi could remember a time when their little family of two was actually happy. Granted, she would sometimes catch her father wistfully looking at the photo of the Queen that stood upright on their mantle, but those moments were far and in-between and her father would blink himself back to reality only a few seconds later. 

He just missed her, which was understandable. That didn’t stop the nagging feeling in Piyumi’s chest whenever he did get lost in that photo though, because it was a very real reminder that she just didn’t. The Queen had left the Other Realm when she was barely a week old, and as much as her father had tried to make up for her absence, Piyumi didn’t know her mother, not really. So how could she possibly miss someone who was practically a stranger?  A stranger who somehow shared her name?

Piyumi saw how much her father craved the Queen’s presence however, and the fact that she didn’t made her feel horribly, horribly guilty. Like it was somehow her fault, like there was something wrong with her for feeling that way. Weren’t daughters supposed to want their mothers? Weren’t children supposed to want their parents? 

Of course they were supposed to, but that wasn’t the issue, Piyumi realised. She didn’t even see the Queen as her mother. To her, she was nothing more than a character in a fairy-tale — a distant, unrelated, almost fictional figure. And that epiphany had just made her feel even more guilty. 

Piyumi knew now, however, that she should not have beaten herself up. Because slowly and gradually, despite the fact she was nowhere to be seen, the Queen had somehow managed to poison the only life Piyumi knew. As the years trickled by, her father had gotten lost in that photo more and more often, had gotten lost in countless bottles of booze, which had made him lose job after job, like clockwork, rinse and repeat. 

Miyuru loved Piyumi, she knew that. But sometimes she couldn’t tell which Piyumi he loved.