-- COME WHAT MAY

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complete; it's kind of all over the place, apologies! open to anyone, rineke was not quite sure what she was doing so far from home. she had thought maybe to have one of those, one of those -- oh! what were they called, again? -- adventures. yes, an adventure for someone her age was acceptable, if not desired, for what family wanted their youngest to mope about the house, no hobbies, no dreams, and no social life to speak of? to be honest, such a thing was unheard of, especially amongst the members of her family, and being a Voskuil meant meeting, if not exceeding, certain standards and expectations. certainly, as the youngest, her parents were undoubtedly more lax with her than they had been with their two previous children -- adrijan was a knucklehead who grew under the care of lady luck, and was now leading his own household, which was a-flush with children one too many, and he boasted a prestige that seemed to suffocate the very room with its massiveness; myrthe was born far too beautiful and was quickly betrothed to a prince in some far, far away kingdom; rineke only remembered ever meeting her once and could not, to this very day, recall what she was like or who she might have been. both of her siblings then set upon above her a high bar in which her parents never doubted she would one day leap -- except that one day turned into one year, and one year turned into three, and then five, and still, there was nothing. rineke had never thought that would be her claim to voskuil-fashioned fame, nothingness, but she was prepared to accept it readily. her parents, however, were not.

that was why she had wandered too far down the ever-winding road, delving deeper between the trees than she had truly thought to go before: adventure! her parents had exclaimed (not at the same time of course, but when they had a moment to spare to examine the trifle state of their third and last child; a moment which was hard to come by, for rosemarie was a townswoman -- a gossip too -- and could not stand still for longer than the beat of a hummingbird's wings; and her father, matthias, was solid in his ways, set as rigidly as the mountain stone, and no child of his was going to dilly dally while there was life to live -- or so he thought at least), go on an adventure, feel the sun on your back, taste the wind between your teeth, let it whip through your hair; just something! the pressure of their dual, icy blue stares was enough to make any dead man roll over in his grave, and rineke was too much of a coward to deny them what they so longed from her.

cowardice is what it boiled down to, after all. rineke had never traveled more than a few feet from her family's close-knit fox hole and probably never would have had she not been bullied into doing so. her entire life had been spent sheltered, hiding behind her mother's skirts in some instances, or locked within the reassuring grasp of her father's overprotective yet minimally affectionate hold. her skin therefore was lily-white even as the wilting sun overhead dyed it orange depending on where she tread beneath the high canopies; her red hair was a shock in stark contrast, and her eyes, which were black-rimmed and pacific blue at the core, even more so. the truth was that she was a lovely girl, lovely without being the same outrageous beauty as her unseen, unknown sister: she was slight in structure with toothpicks for legs and somewhat knobby knees, though that fault was easily overlooked thanks to her tucked waist and the eloquent way in which the sharp point of her hips seemed to jut just so and, to be frank, rather alluringly. her hair was her most noticeable feature and that was because there was simply so much of it! she was a redheaded rapunzel, her wild, untamed curls trailing the floor. her mother would shriek to see such a sight, especially because of all the leaves and twigs that had snapped off in her hair while she wandered mindlessly, but her mother was not here, now was she?

rineke was suddenly feeling the giddiness that every youth experiences their first time away from home; she had flown further than anyone had anticipated -- in fact, her parents had grudgingly expected her to be gone for only half an hour, and were quietly beginning to grow worried at her continued absence -- even herself. her steps were light and agile as she ghosted through the trees, admiring each oak and ash with an endlessly blue stare that studied and absorbed every fine detail detected. it was needless to say, rineke was, for the first time in her life, filled with a wonder that she could not hush and smother down into a dull whisper; there was something to this adventure thing that made her ... well, she did not quite understand it at first. she did not even know how to describe it. but it was a word she had heard often, a word that had been shouted from the top of four lungs on certain nights, and from the rooftops on others. that word? it was want. she wanted more, and even though the sun was close to setting, she continued walking.

_{post placement: autumn, year 1.}