Amontillado
					"Well, Triss, I think that is about the best that we can do for today," Amontillado said to her bronze flit as the last spiderclaw was placed in the burlap sack strung across her shoulders.  The sun was just beginning to sink, the lowest tip of it glowing red as it touched the horizon, shadows cast by the girl and her flit long in the late summer's light. Collecting spiderclaws had long been their job, as Amontillado's slight physical handicaps kept her from being of much use in the other chores at their cotholding.
		Her handicaps really weren't that noticable until you looked closely at her.  Her pinky finger on her right hand was bound to her ring finger by a skin of flesh that was almost like a webbing, while her left leg was about an inch shorter than her right.  She acted and looked like a normal person, but whenever it came to working with some of the more complicated equmipment and sewing, she was hopeless. Maybe it was because she had a large mental block towards all of those activites; she'd been told that she couldn't do it for the longest time, and eventually came to believe it herself.  Erilam, her younger sister, was the only one who truly believed that Amontillado was capable of doing everything that normal people did, but Erilam voiced herself too often to be listened to.  Or so Amontillado thought. Triss had been a pity-gift from her mother on her eighteenth birthing day.  Amontillado had always wanted a dragon, and had actually been Searched to places before.  But every time she had to turn it down, because she knew that with her hand she would never be able to properly tend for a dragon.  Erialm thought she could. Amontillado was never fully sure if she loved or despised her younger sister.  Her youngest brother, Ohmsford, was easy to like, except for whenever he was asked for advice.  Then he tried to be extremely logical, and only ended up looking like an idiot, and making you angry at him.  Sometimes. The young woman wasn't ugly, although she wasn't stunningly beautiful, either.  Her hair was a soft, reddish-brown color, cut to just a bit past her shoulders and left to hang free.  She was average in height and build, and had a tendancy to mince or prance along that she'd never been aware of.  Fair skin burned almost constantly, but left a small spattering of freckles across the line of Amontillado's nose.  Her eyes were perhaps her most stunning feature; they were a soft gray-blue, large and expressive. By the time that Rukbat's last rays had disappeared from the horizon, Amontillado and Triss had reached the cotholding.  "Good," the young woman said sarcastically as shadows passed in the lighted window.  "Erilam's already there.  She can give me a lovely talking-to about how I should be doing normal things, and then apologize to me tonight."  That was how Erilam acted almost all the time. The moon and stars cast the only light besides that cast from the glows inside the house.  Shifting the sack to her other shoulder, Amontillado walked slowly into the house, half-dreading the prospect of dinner, where she knew that Erilam would make a large speech about how Amontillado should be expected to do all that everyone else in the family did. Continue...