The World Walkers: Unknown World: Sophie: Listening to an Argument (part 2)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1

The day it happened, the day the father I loved left me on an unknown world, I had no choice but to grow up very quickly. I had no warning beforehand, because it was normal for us to go off together to another world, as he’d been teaching me about the worlds the three doors closest to our house led to, and the bag he was carrying was something he often took for when we ended up looking through a market or gathering materials Mother might need for her potions. At least I had no warning until we went through a second door, one I didn’t know was there, and then a third.

I can still remember the look on his face when we finally stopped, after six doors, six worlds I hadn’t learnt about, when he told me that I needed to become useful. There was a coldness in his eyes that had never been there before and I knew then that he’d never really cared about me. Until then I hadn’t believed I really was the expendable third daughter. I thought my daddy loved me, even though he already had two daughters, because he acted the same way around me as he did around my elder sisters.

When I finally got back I remember the smiles on the faces of the three women in my family, the sisters who had always loved me and the mother who cried the night she found out what her husband had done, and the blankness on the face of my father. He stared at me for a long time, as I was hugged by the family who actually loved me, but I ignored him, because he meant nothing to me. Once I made my way to one of the dragon offices I’d sent a letter to mother, asking her why father had done it.

Seeing her reply was the first thing to make me cry since I’d got over the loneliness. It was the first time I’d been alone and I wasn’t sure how to cope with it. Fortunately it faded pretty quickly when my adopted family stumbled over me, which was something I hadn’t imagined could happen, and their anger at what my father had done told me that it wasn’t something they did on the world I’d been left on. As I learnt more about Siaral, and the other worlds of the Web, I decided that I really did want to travel the worlds, so I left them about a year later, with the promise that I would be back.

Even now I go back to see them at least once a year. We try to make sure we spend the anniversary of our first meeting together and I’ve even taken my two sisters to meet my three brothers. My father’s going to be disappointed when he finds out the my second sister has married one of my brothers, with my mother’s blessing, but back then my mother was battling to save her marriage, so I did what my father asked me to do, even though none of us were happy with his plans.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.