A short story: Grey Hunter

Here is a story a certain friend insists I should put up online (she knows who she is): Grey Hunter “The evening air in the southern town of Dyor was foul smelling and noisome. Like most towns in the country of Unarita, it was protected by a mud and wood wall, and had low, poorly constructed buildings of dried mud and wood framing with thatched roofs. The ditches were the open sewers of the town, it was nothing like the country of Daixi, where cities had aqueducts, closed, belowground sewers and were constructed of stone harvested from the coastal mountains. I had come here for one reason, to kill a noblewoman named Sarah of Knad. Because of my ability to change my physical appearance, mimic people’s voices and my skill with cloak-and-dagger activity, I was the obvious choice. Except I did it of my own will, I Alin, the so-called ‘Bloodstained Daughter’, carried out my own assassinations. Sarah knew she was risking herself, proposing the killing of all of my kind, the ‘Grey Children’, so named for our white-grey eyes we had at birth. Being born a ‘Grey Child’ was a random occurrence, approximately one in every 2,000 births in Daixi, according to the figures I knew of. A ‘Grey Child’ began to grow up normally, except they were able to imitate other people’s voices, and, from age 9 onward, they matured at an exponential rate until stopping growth altogether at age 12, and are able to change form at that time as well. Noblemen and women, like Sarah, saw us as a threat, and so the purge of Unarita began. Being 13 at the time, I was able to flee to Daixi by changing my appearance to a Daixi woman.

The sun hung low in the sky as I stalked the streets, appearing as a blonde haired, blue eyed servant girl. I knew her house, it was the one behind the cathedral with a steel portcullis guarding the entrance. I searched for my target’s servants, carrying out the whims of their foolish mistress, they were bound to be within the town at this hour, fetching dinner items or else trading shifts. After finding myself in front of a dusty pub, I ducked into a nearby alley, and changed my physical appearance to an older, much less pretty woman with a worn look. After entering the tavern, I found one of the younger maids, conversing with a manservant from another noble’s house. She had a heavy tankard of stale beer in her left hand, and a pipe of tobacco in the right. She sat, chatting away at a table off to the right side. I seated myself at a nearby table, keeping her in my sights but not looking at her directly. I ordered a glass of wine and waited until she was good and drunk as I sipped my glass of vinegary wine, the horrible taste just bearable to keep up the façade long enough.After a few more minutes the maid’s friend left, staggering out. I followed him outside, and hit him hard and fast on the head. Dragging his body into an alleyway, I stole his clothes and took on his appearance, a well-groomed but drunk manservant. I hated having to change my physical state to a man’s, but it was to get the maid’s outfit, so I suffered through it. Feigning drunk, i reseated myself opposite the giddy maid, intoxicated. Once I popped the question, she naïvely agreed to sex, so I called over the barman and tossed some coins on the table for a room. Upon inside the room, I drugged the maid with sleeping draft, enough to keep her asleep for several hours. I undressed her, changed my body to match her’s and then slipped into her clothes. I waited until it was deep into the night, and I slipped out of the tavern.

Making my way through the clouds of bugs to the portcullis, I hailed the gate guard, who raised the portcullis, commenting how I was out late for a servant. I crept though the large house, searching for the woman. I intended to kill her slowly, as I did all nobles. I decided I was going to gag her and then stab her lungs, and watch her suffer. I was particularly hateful towards her, she was responsible for my mother’s disappearance. I had never actually met my mother, but I knew she was a rich woman, powerful, and that she loved me despite being aware I was a ‘Grey Child’. She disappeared from northern Unarita about six months after my birth. I later learned that Sarah had something to do with her disappearance, Knad was the governing town of Ura, where I was born. I stalked the halls, looking for her bedroom. I found it after many minutes of searching, and I opened the door and walked inside. A silhouette was illuminated in her canopy bed. I retrieved a purple handkerchief, purple representing nobility, that I left in the mouth of all my corpses, symbolising them choking on greed. I wrenched the woman’s mouth open and shoved the handkerchief inside, gagging her. I bound her hands, then sat her upright in a chair. The darkness surrounded me as I tied her to the chair securely, the moon obscured by thick clouds. I whispered in her ear, ‘You’re lady Sarah of Knad, correct?’ The woman screamed into the gag, but it muffled her, she would not be heard.

I turned her around to face me in the darkness, then reverted myself to my natural state, my long brown locks replacing the tightly bound black hair of the servant and my shining grey-white eyes replacing the servants’ dim brown. Before her eyes her expression hardened, but she understood. She was going to die by a ‘Grey Child’ and could do nothing. I plunged a dagger into each side of her chest. As I removed the gag and said, ‘Any last words to the person whose mother you killed, because i was a “Grey Child”?’ The moon illuminated my face in full. The woman whispered a scant few words, followed by her death rattle. 
 To this day, I regret what I had done. Because, as those words hit my ears, I recognised the voice. And I burst into tears and fled the mansion, wailing uncontrollably. It was that voice I had unwittingly mimicked before, the voice that had belonged to one person - my mother.