Free Claiming Crystal by Kayleen Knight Page A

memories.
    She quite suddenly felt claustrophobic with the trappings of someone who lived within orchestra tions that were bigger than they were. She had tried to run away when she was a little girl, and then once more before her second awakening, but she had not gotten far. These things that were bigger than her saw farther than her, and moved faster than her, and they would capture her if she dared to leave their confines without their permission. She was trapped in the same way of prisoners, although she was told that she was free, and although she had gotten used to her trapping, and sardonic with the realities of a noble borne life, she occasionally found herself faced with humbling moments like these, when the excuses she told herself became quiet little voices, scared and child-like, that did not convince but actually made her despair for her future.
    It was a good thing to be fed and watched over and tended to, but when one was fed and watched over that meant that one was owned, and when one was owned that meant that one's actions were not their own to decide. The life of a peasant, without food and without care, was horrid for its ruthlessness, but also freeing in that carelessness which let children go wherever they chose it, for the world did not care for them the way the world of this kingdom seemed to care for Crystal. It was a difficult royalty to complain about, for Crystal had heard stories about the famines and murders that plagued the poorer class every day of their wretched lives, but misery was not a thing for class – it was a universal balance that gave people without the freedom to have anything, and gave people with everything the confines of retaining that wealth at all costs.
    The relief she had experienced when she first realized that she would not be arranged to any suitor after her first puberty had been a turning point in Crystal's life. The notion of the arrangement had very nearly killed her, not physically but spiritually, and now that low feeling was rising up again from the pits of her stomach where unpleasant things stewed away like the cauldrons of witches who thought to cast spells of horrors and fears and suspicions. She had to practically bite her lips to keep herself from imagining the many orchestrations she would fall into if she arranged herself to another noble, entering into their schemes and plans, finding yet another confine in yet another kingdom, where she could have her fun with her servants but otherwise remain behind the bars of very ornate doors, watched by trained guards and instructed to live a very particular life for a very particular reason.
    Crystal was a jewel, a symbol of worth, as all noble people were, and maintaining that symbol took the discipline of a passionless person. It was no longer so many of the high born took the poor and peasant for their secret mates, enjoying their hungry passions, and taking pleasure in the way that their arousals starved the same ways as their bellies. For noble people who had always been fed and tended to, the hungry passions of love were distant things that could not be inflamed by two people who ate with the same silver spoons.
    Even the gentle man who had his very manhood removed showed signs of his noble breeding, and it was like a poison sapping the live out of these people until they became nothing more than machinations doing what they ought to at the cost of nothing, in order to gain wealth that was nothing, so that they might become someone who was nothing. It was enough to stir a woman into a restless night's sleep, but luckily the food the queen had prepared her made Crystal tired before the stroke of midnight, and she finally dropped away from her thoughts and entered into a distant sort of dreaming where many faceless people passed before her, presenting themselves like peacocks, displaying their feathers and doing their dances of mating, but perpetually faceless, without characteristics that made them human, and