Rose was a conundrum.  She'd often wondered whether she had been named after a flower as a joke since it seemed both her looks and personality had taken one glance at her name and run as fast as they could in the opposite direction.  Her hair and eyes were black. Her lips were red but thin. She had her birth-mother's buttery skin tone and oval face, but where her mother was tall and stately, with an expansive bosom, Rose was slightly above-average height, with lean, willowy muscles, and her breast band was merely adherence to social norms and performed no actual function.

She was pretty in a feral sort of way, but her mouth was stuck in a perpetually pouty sneer, and she almost always looked angry about something. She couldn't help it, she was born with resting-bitchy-face. It made it hard for her to make friends, and she was constantly told by men to "smile more." Occasionally she would smile at those men, at which point they would spit out whatever was in their mouths, exclaim they'd made a huge mistake, and quickly exit the premises. This didn't make her feel any better about herself, and she couldn't "work" on her smile because the commune had no mirrors.

Like the rest of the people in her commune, she wore a simple, un-dyed, woolen dress which looked like a sheet of cloth with a hole cut in the top for a head, which is exactly what it was. The dress was tied with an equally un-dyed cord. It blended almost exactly with the color of her skin, and Rose liked to imagine that it made her invisible.*

Everyone wore the same thing regardless of their sex, and everyone had just two dresses. It was all that was needed when you dedicated your life to D'Lorde. It supposedly removed jealousy, because everyone looked just as bland and frumpy as everyone else, but it was actually a coverup for the fact that none of the followers were tailors.

The itchiness of the wool also made everyone slightly unhappy in such a way that made them constantly contemplate the glory of their promised afterlife. This was exactly what Oren wanted, and without telling anyone, he had a cotton liner made in town and sewn into his dresses so he didn't have to feel itchy all the time.

D'Lorde's commune was located about a half a mile outside of the town and nestled at the foot of a large cliff. A tower, the only part of the old castle still standing, was embedded in the side of the cliff in a manner which stumped the architects of the age. One of the many business ventures of the commune was taking traveling architects to see the tower, since the commune claimed it was on their land, and required payment.

Rose was often assigned to do this job because no one else was at all interested in listening to the architects conjecture. The last group had been a lively bunch.

"Ah, you see here, where the granite of the tower plinth has fused to the hillside?" One architect who was on his third visit was telling another newbie he'd brought along. "This is indisputable proof that there was some supernatural or magical force at work here,"

"Well, couldn't it just have been that the plinth was carved from the cliffside itself? Really, Yan, I don't see why you keep bringing up magic, you know it's not real."

"Some of us like to imagine other possibilities, Frank.  What exactly do you think could have caused the top of that tower to be cut so cleanly and preserved so well for centuries?"

This argument went on for a while, with one or two of the other architects interrupting occasionally with exclamations about this or that, asking if they could climb the tower, or get inside. Rose liked their discussions if only because it had nothing do to with D'Lorde, or the commune, or any of the other boring day-to-day things which she usually had to hear about.

Sometimes they would tell her about the capital of the country in Fare Town (Which had once been Fartheton), and other places they'd traveled to, and Rose would imagine escaping the commune and exploring the rest of the country away from Oren and Auntie Janette, and Auntie Margaret, and Auntie Elsie, and Auntie Laura.

All of the women were Aunties, and as is usual with cults, most of the followers were women. Oren preferred it this way and only made exceptions for men who weren't threatening to his power structure. Rose didn't have a "Mother," only a lot of Aunties, and three "cousins." She didn't know this was odd at all until she was eight and took her first trip out of the commune into town.

She had gone with Auntie Laura, who was a very large and powerful woman, and who was in charge of all the bartering because she was good at strong-arming merchants. Rose had been told to stay in the cart, but she thought she wanted to behave, she always found herself doing exactly the opposite of what she'd been told. It caused her a lot of trouble, but she couldn't seem to stop herself.

She was really trying hard to stay put when she heard some yelling down a side street and decided it would be ok to just go and look. When she peeked around the corner of the butcher, she saw a boy just a bit older than her grappling with the owner of a shop down the alley.

"Ger-off-me!" The boy yelled, but the shop owner had a tight grip on his arm.

"You Aries scum! What have you stolen from my shop? Every time you people come into my shop something else goes missing. Give me back what you've stolen or I'm going to drag you to the magistrate. Serve you people right to be run out of town, trying to convert honest gods-fearing folk with your nonsense."

"I didn't steal nothin'!" Protested the boy, trying to pry the man's hand off his arm. His statement was not true at all, for he had stolen some cookies.

"Turn out your pockets," said the shopkeeper.

"What are pockets?" Asked the boy, since he, like Rose, was dressed in a glorified sheet wrapped with a cord, and had never seen a "pocket." His dress was dyed red, in the practice of one of the other local cults who worshiped Aries, the god of war, the rising and setting sun, fall, and red apples. The boy was understandably hungry because his cult only ate during the rising or the setting of the sun, and their diet consisted mostly of apples.

As she watched this exchange, Rose was inexplicably compelled to bite the arm of the shop keeper. Whether it was because she wanted to help the boy, or purely because she wanted to bite someone, she didn't, particularly because she often had the urge to bite and it had gotten her sent to the doghouse multiple times. And so she found herself running at top speed down the alley to sink her rather sharp teeth into the shopkeeper's arm. It tasted of flour because he was a baker.

This action had the desired effect of the baker screaming in pain and letting go of the boy's arm. Rose let go of the arm, grabbed the boy's hand, and ran with him down the alley, around the corner, down another street, and out into a field. Finally, they stopped breathless at the edge of a small wooded area and dropped, laughing, into the shady grass.

"That was magnificent! Did you see his face? Pure genius," said the boy.

"Thanks," said Rose.

"What made you do it?" The boy asked.

Rose shrugged, "Dunno, maybe he looked tasty."

The boy laughed.

"Wanna cookie?" He asked, holding one out to her. He'd stashed them in a small bag he wore under his dress.

"So you really did steal something?" Rose said, accepting a cookie. She was surprised at his wickedness, but it delighted her.

"Yeah, I'm never allowed to have these at home. My mom makes everything with applesauce you know, and they're just so much better with sugar."

"Oh," said Rose, who'd never considered anyone would make cookies without sugar before. "What's a 'mom'?" The word stirred something uncomfortable in her, and she couldn't say why.

The boy stared at her like she was crazy, "What's a mom?" He repeated, realizing that he'd never had to explain what a mom was before, and didn't quite know how what to say.

"Well..." he said after a while, "a mom is the woman who gave birth to you, and raises you I suppose. If you're lucky, she hugs you and gives you things and makes you feel better when you're sick. But at the very least she makes sure you stay alive," he said. His mom was decidedly ambivalent about being a mom, but it was a requirement of the cult, so she made sure he knew she was responsible for keeping him alive, but if he wanted anything more then he should go to someone else's mom for that.

"Oh..." said Rose. She thought maybe she'd had one of those once. There was a vague memory of a kind woman with light hair, and a song which she thought of when she went to sleep at night.

"Don't you have a mom? Everyone has a mom at some point," The boy said, feeling pretty certain this was true.

Rose shook her head, "Not me, I've got aunties. They adopted me from the orphanage when I was little. I guess I might have had one before the orphanage, but I don't remember." Something churned unpleasantly in her gut as she searched her memory. She remembered the heat of fire, and screaming.

"Uhhhh... you're scorching the grass..." the boy said. He sounded slightly concerned, but not afraid.

Rose looked down at the grass under her right hand, which she was leaning on, and small tendrils of smoke were rising from a charred spot which was spreading out from her fingers. She snatched her hand back.

"You a witch?" The boy asked, eating another cookie.

"I'm no witch!" Rose said, offended.  "Some man* came to test us last year to make sure we could take communion from D'Lorde.  He would've said something."

She wasn't precisely sure this was true because though her cousins were cleared when she'd walked into the room to be tested he'd taken one look at her, squeaked something about having another appointment, and run out the door. She assumed she wasn't a witch, but realized he might not have tested her at all. She thought his reaction may have been because she'd tried smiling at him like Auntie Elsie told her to, but maybe she was wrong.

"Hmmm, well I won't say nothing if you won't tell anyone I stole the cookies," said the boy.

"Deal," said Rose, and they shook on it.  His hand was warm and rough like hers and she liked the feel of it.

"Well," said the boy standing up, "I'd better be getting back. It'll be sundown soon and that means dinner. Hey, what's your name?"

"Rose," she replied.

"I'm Arien," he said, "Thanks again for rescuing me."

"My pleasure," she said, since having an excuse to bite the Baker brought her immense joy. "Thanks for the cookie."

Rose walked back toward the town and Aunt Laura, and Arien walked off toward his cult. Rose thought maybe he was what some kids described as a friend. She'd never had one before, and it felt nice to have someone to talk to who wasn't always trying to get her in trouble.

Unfortunately, she wouldn't see him again for eight years, because when she got back to her cart she found Aunt Laura wrestling the Baker in the street because he was making crazy accusations about Rose and what had begun as a shouting match quickly devolved into a full-fledged fight. The magistrate had to step in and Rose, who enjoyed the chaotic and interesting reactions people had when the truth was told, confessed to having bitten the baker.

Auntie Laura was so mortified by Rose's actions, she promised the magistrate Rose wouldn't be let anywhere near the town again until she could control herself.

Rose also found herself in the doghouse.

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Next time on The Dark Heir...
The doghouse is incinerated.
The history of the Commune is revealed.
Oren is tipped off about Rose's true identity.
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*
In actuality, Rose could make herself invisible to others, but she didn't realize this and so thought it was the effect of her extremely bland outfit.

**
The man was Gerald, who spent his time jumping from odd jobs to make enough money to buy more alcohol at whatever bar was closest. He hadn't realized he'd inadvertently traveled to Rose's home, but his second sight alerted him immediately. Feeling Fate nipping at his heels, he left as quickly as he could to escape it again, fleeing back to the capital, and sobering up for the first time in 8 years. It didn't last.