Flauraan, Abigail is 15

My brother’s wedding is going forward less than a year after Sophie left, really not that long after their engagement, and I am still in this state of desolation that I fear I may never emerge from. I have never had a great relationship with him, and I haven’t been looking forward to the wedding, not least because we have to travel to the city where he lives on the other side of the continent for the event. The thought of going that far makes me feel ill, and this is amplified by the bad blood between us. I don’t think he or Mari have forgiven me for stealing their thunder when I accidentally deduced the reason they were engaged when they announced it. He has also been cruel to me about Sophie, and my involvement in the Weraynian scare on Flauraan and the incident on Halapatov, though our parents have scolded him for this. I am not sure how I am going to cope with this wedding.

We travel over a few days before the event, and our little family is welcomed into the house of Mari’s parents, who my parents have only met once before. It is a nice house, very ornate, and Mari’s family are polite hosts. I still feel a strong sense of unease staying in a room in someone else’s home, unsure how to navigate socially and practically in an unfamiliar environment. Staying with us also are Mari’s extended family, siblings, grandparents and cousins, and also my grandparents - my father’s parents who already lived in the city and were the reason my brother moved here in the first place - and my mother’s mother, who has lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle since her wife, my other grandmother, died and my mother took over caring for their portion of farmland. I haven’t seen any of them many times in my life, and though it’s nice to see my parents’ warm reunions I feel isolated and awkward. I don’t really know any of these people.

The day of the wedding we dress in finery and join a processional in a very old stone building with stained glass windows. A council official waxes at length about marriage and family and legacy. It all sounds unfathomable to me. Mari and Nyles are in dark shades of green, and stand with arms crossed over each other and intertwined, with family flanking them in all purple. They don’t have a proper tree planting like I’m used to in our town, but Nyles does have our mother and father bring one of the saplings from the council nursery in a delicate piece of pottery to present as part of their role in proceedings. Mari and Nyles offer tokens to each of us and then to each other. As they speak vows of commitment to each other the words are transcribed into a bound tome, in which us guests are later to add messages of inspiration and support. It is all very meaningful and beautiful, to them. It completely washes over me without effect. Maybe I am the heartless, selfish child my brother thinks I am. I think we are just too different. I haven't thought much about getting married, but I can't imagine a wedding for myself resembling this in any way.

In the midst of the recessional, standing alien and alone in this foreign city, so unlike my own home, I try to envision what I might want, what a future and a wedding could hold for me, but all I can conjure is the image of myself abandoned on the hill, heartbroken and afraid. I shudder in the warm air, and rejoin my family, disappearing back into my role in the wedding as sister of the groom.

After, I will be praised by my parents for being so accommodating to my brother and helping his special day be so perfect. I bristle with the knowledge that there is a version of me that picks a fight in the face of mine and my brother’s storied hostility, and reflect that I am yielding to Nyle’s vision in the absence of any sense of self worth clinging to. There is simply no fight left in me.