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I sat slumped in my seat, bored, absently drawing pictures
on my sheet of paper. Mr Noakes was going on about potato farming or something
like that. I couldn’t be sure. I had stopped listening an hour ago.
Then suddenly, there was a knock at the classroom
door, startling everyone in the room and making me sit up straight.
The science teacher stopped in the middle of
a sentence. “Come in!” he called. The door opened and in came the school secretary,
a red Lenny called Miss Danvers. She whispered something to Mr Noakes. He nodded,
then turned towards me.
“Daymien, would you please go with Miss Danvers?
With your things,” the teacher added.
Startled, I stood up and gathered my pencil case
and all of my notebooks and paper. I stuffed everything into my bag. As I walked
out of the room, following Miss Danvers, I glanced at my friend Hilsburlyng.
The Elephante winked at me. I grinned back.
Miss Danvers left me at the door to the principal’s
office. I knocked, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
The principal, a blue Grarrl, was sitting behind
his desk. He smiled and motioned for me to sit down, which I did.
“Well,” he started, “my boy, I talked to your
mum just now. She has a bit of — a problem.”
I sat up as straight as I could. “It’s my sister,”
I said automatically.
“Yes,” the principal replied, surprised. “She
has disappeared.”
* * *
I stepped out of the office. The principal had told me that I didn’t have to
go back to class because the last bell of the day would be ringing in five minutes.
He said that I could wait outside until the bell. When it rang I had to go with
Hilsburlyng to his Neohome because Mum had “things to do”. Everything had been
arranged with Mum, the principal, and Hilsburlyng’s owner. Without me, of course.
No one ever asked me to arrange anything. But if they had asked me right then
what I wanted to do, I know what I would have answered: I wanted to go and look
for my sister!
I could have gone, too. But if I did, everyone
would be worried, and I didn’t want THAT to happen. They were already worried
about my sister…
* * *
“Gone?” Hilsburlyng repeated for the sixth time. “She’s gone?”
“Yes,” I replied. “And we’ve got to go and find
her.”
“But we don’t know where she is! We could be
looking for hours!”
“I KNOW where she is,” I snapped. Then I stopped
myself. “Sorry.”
Hilsburlyng grinned for a second. I was glad
he understood the cause of my anger. Then again, he had to understand. He always
did. Some people thought that Hilsburlyng was simple-minded because of his bad
marks in Neoschool, but he wasn’t simple-minded at all. He had understood more
things in his short life than anyone had ever understood in all their lives.
Then my friend became serious again. “How can
you know? Neopia’s so big, she could be going anywhere.” He paused for a second.
“You knew that she was going to leave, didn’t you?’
I sighed and ate the last bit of my blueberry
roll. This was going to take a long time, but I had to do it, or else Hilsburlyng
would never accept to leave his cosy warm Neohome to go look for my sister.
So I told my friend the story, starting with
that faithful day almost two years ago…
* * *
It was a freezing cold day at the beginning of the month of Celebrating. I
had gone out — not without a scarf and a hat and I was still freezing — to go
buy my owner, who I called — and still call — Mum, a present. I immediately
found her something — a set of furniture which she’d always wanted — and was
heading back home when I passed in front of an old, rundown Neohome. A young
boy was standing near it, yelling something. Curious, I went closer, and saw
that beside the boy was a shivering white female Lupe, digging slowly in the
snow. The boy hovered over her, saying loudly,
“Hurry up, you good-for-nothing Neopet! If you
haven’t found it in two minutes I’ll leave you to survive on the streets!”
Outraged, I ran up to them.
“What are you doing to the poor thing?” I shouted
angrily. “Can’t you see that she’s sick already?”
The boy was taken aback. He glanced at me somewhat
fearfully. Then he composed himself again.
“Be quiet, Kyrii,” he said, frowning. “That’s
my property you’re on, and what you’re doing is trespassing.”
“Well, what YOU’re doing is killing her!”
He had a scary grin on his face. “She lost my
best weapon, an Attack pea, worth millions of Neopoints. And she’s going to
be digging until she finds it!”
I was about to open my mouth when the Lupe spoke.
She was so weak that she could barely keep her voice above a whisper.
“I didn’t lose it. You dropped it and blamed
it on me.”
“BE QUIET!” the boy shouted at her. “Did I give
you permission to speak??”
The Lupe was quiet again. The boy thought that
it was because of him and was satisfied, but I knew that it was just because
she had said what she wanted to say and didn’t need to say anything more. She
was letting me do whatever I wanted, whatever I thought right.
The boy turned to me again. “Lillabeth is mine,”
he told me, “and I can do whatever I want with her.
I shook my head and grinned. “Not anymore. Come
on, Lillabeth.”
The Lupe smiled, and I realized that it was the
first time that she had smiled for a long, long time. She hadn’t been truly
happy for a long time…
She gathered up the last of her strength to tread
over to me. And somehow, we managed to get home.
Mum, of course, loved her immediately. She always
used to say that that year during the month of Celebrating I had given her two
presents: the furniture set and Lillabeth.
And after that day, Lillabeth and I were the
best of friends. We weren’t very alike; we enjoyed quite different things; but
we were both reserved, and it must have been that which made us such good friends.
And it must have been that also, which made us understand each other so well—for
we could understand each other with a glance. I could always understand everything
that Lillabeth did, everything that she liked.
Except for one thing, which began about six months
ago.
Mum was out, visiting some friends or at the
Marketplace, I can’t say I remember which. All morning Lillabeth had been in
her room, I had been in mine. Neither of the doors to our rooms was closed but
we were in our own world, and if Mum had been there she would have known not
to go in.
I had been reading a book of short stories and
was getting bored so I went out of my room and knocked on Lillabeth’s door—only
for good measure.
She put down what she had been reading as I came
in. I glanced at her, surprised. She was positively beaming. Her smile seemed
too big for her face.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi,” she replied excitedly. She grabbed what
she had just put down. It was the week’s copy of The Neopian Times. “Look at
this!”
She thrust it into my paws. It was open on an
article about a princess — Princess Lilac. I glanced at the text quickly and
was about to hand it back to my sister when I glanced at a picture at the top
of the page. I caught my breath. It wasn’t — it couldn’t be — she couldn’t be
in — then I saw the name below the picture. Princess Lilac, it was written.
Slowly I looked up at the white Lupe in font
of me.
“Lillabeth — she looks exactly like you,” I
whispered.
And it was true. I couldn’t spot a single difference
between the picture of the princess and my sister.
“Neat,” I said as I handed the article back
to Lillabeth.
She smiled and looked down at the picture, her
eyes bright, her gaze fascinated. We both found it amazing.
But I didn’t think that it would change both
of our lives. I never thought of that.
For awhile everything stayed pretty normal. Lillabeth
was her normal self, and I thought that she had forgotten about the princess.
But one day I discovered that she hadn’t forgotten — far from it.
It was late at night, Mum thought that I was
sleeping, but I had spent the evening playing with Lillabeth and hadn’t done
my homework yet. I was about to start on my math when I realized that my book
was in Lillabeth’s room. I tiptoed out the hallway and quietly pushed the door
open. I expected to find Lillabeth asleep, but her light was on and from the
doorway, I could easily see what she was reading—a ragged copy of the Neopian
Times, at a page on which there was an article about a princess…
It was the exact same copy of the Neopian
Times which Lillabeth had shown me weeks ago.
It scared me so much that I scampered out of
the room and dove into my bed.
The next day, I got in trouble for not having
done my homework, but that wasn’t what mattered to me. What mattered was that
Lillabeth hadn’t forgotten the princess after al — she seemed just as fascinated
with her as on the day she had first found that article.
But then I told myself, “No, Lillabeth hasn’t
necessarily been thinking about the princess all this time. She had probably
but the article somewhere, forgotten about it, and just found it again last
night.”
And I tried to convince myself that it was true.
But that night, at midnight, I glanced into my
sister’s room. She was looking at the picture of the white Lupe. At 2 in the
morning, she was still there. At 5, she still hadn’t budged!
For a week, every night, at different times,
I went to see what Lillabeth was doing.
I came to the conclusion that she spent her nights
staring at the picture and had been doing so every night since the day that
she had first discovered the article.
And when I realized that, I started to notice
that Lillabeth wasn’t completely her old self after all. She often just stared
into space and didn’t seem to hear us when we spoke to her. She had never done
that before. She had always been attentive to everything around her.
And gradually she changed even more. She stopped
playing with me, stopped talking to Mum and I. She stopped being with her friends.
At Neoschool she was always alone, and she stopped paying attention in class,
when she had always been so clever and eager to learn. I had to drag her to
and back from school every day. Everyone made fun of me — but I always stuck
up for her.
Eventually Mum stopped making her go to Neoschool.
She kept her home instead, although it didn’t help. Lillabeth spent her days
staring at Princess Lilac’s picture.
She changed slowly, but it seemed to go so fast.
I couldn’t figure out what was happening — until one day it hit me. My sister
was slowly going mad — and Mum and I couldn’t do a thing to help her.
One night, about a month ago, I woke up with
a start. I took me a moment to realize where I was and by the time I had figure
it out my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness — and I realized that I
wasn’t alone in my bedroom.
The Neopet came to the edge of my bed. It was
my sister, although for one wild moment I thought that it was Princess Lilac.
“Daymien,” she said softly. She hadn’t spoken
to me in months. “Daymien, I have to go. I have to go tell Lilac the truth.”
“But what’s the truth?” I whispered, awed. For
one short moment I hoped that Lillabeth had gotten over her madness, but my
hopes were crushed immediately.
“We are twins.”
“You aren’t!” I cried before I could stop myself.
She nodded grimly. “We are. But I won’t forget you, Daymien. You saved my life
two years ago.” She turned away to go, then stopped herself. “I know you think
I’m crazy, Mum and you. I promise you I’m not.”
And with that, she was gone.
Gone in spirit from the house.
But still there in body for another month.
* * *
“So that’s where she’s gone,” Hilsburlyng said grimly. “To see the princess.”
It was a statement, not a question. I nodded
anyway.
“We can leave tomorrow,” Hilsburlyng offered.
I looked at him gratefully. “Wouldn’t you mind?”
“Of course not. Anything for a friend.”
“4 am?”
He looked a bit shocked but he nodded. “Right.”
Then he added, “Where does Princess Lilac live?”
“Happy Valley,” I grinned. “Close your mouth,
there are flies flying in.”
“It’s the month of storing, Daymien! We’ll freeze!”
I shrugged. Nothing mattered anymore — nothing
except finding my sister.
* * *
We ate a bit at Hilsburlyng’s house and set off, leaving a short note for our
owners. We took a boat to Terror Mountain and when we arrived, we bought a small
lunch from an isolated shop.
We walked on as we ate. At one point Hilsburlyng
stopped.
“What if she’s right?”
“About what?”
“What if Lillabeth’s right and she and the princess
really are twins?”
I snorted.
“No, I’m serious,” Hilsburlyng continued. “How
could they look exactly alike and not be related?”
“It could happen,” I mumbled faintly.
“And you don’t know anything about the past,
do you?”
“No,” I said reluctantly. “But she probably
just came from the Create-a-Pet Centre, like you, and me.”
“You don’t know, though! Maybe that boy stole
her from the palace when she was just a baby!”
“That’s dumb.”
“It’s possible, though.”
I couldn’t find any arguments so I didn’t reply.
But all the way to the Princess’s palace — the Crystal Palace — I thought about
what Hilsburlyng had said. And the more I thought about it, the more it made
sense.
* * *
We knocked on the big wooden doors and a Usul dressed up in armour came to
open them.
“Good afternoon,” I said politely. “We would
like to speak to the princess… if that’s possible.”
The guard looked at us for a moment before turning
around and shouting at a Blumaroo who was passing by,
“Siegen, tell the princess that there’s a Kyrii
and an Elephante come to see her, will you?”
In a few moments, the Princess was before us.
It was unbelievable. She looked even more like my sister than she had in the
picture.
“Please come in,” was the first thing she said.
“You look half frozen to death.”
“More than half,” muttered Hilsburlyng. Luckily
I was the only one who heard him.
When we were all seated around a table with cups
of hot Borovan, I asked Princess Lilac,
“Has a white Lupe by the name of Lillabeth come
here? We are looking for her.”
The Princess nodded. “She’s resting for now.
She was exhausted when she arrived. But who are you? Who is she? Why is she
here?”
“I’m Hilsburlyng,” my friend said before I would
utter a word. “That’s Daymien. And Lillabeth is his sister.”
“We aren’t related,” I hastened to say. “We
just have the same owner.” Then, slowly, I told the princess everything that
I had told Hilsburlyng the day before.
“I realized that we looked alike when I saw
her. But I didn’t think we were…” the princess said when I had finished. She
stopped, then started again. “She was telling the truth. I don’t know how she
guessed it, but I did have a twin sister by the name of Lillabeth, and it must
be her…
“It was my father who reigned before me. My
mother died a few days after I — we — were born, and my father died three years
ago. The evening of his death, he said to me, ‘You are not an only child, Lilac.
You have a twin sister, but she was stolen from us just two months after her
birth. Find her if you can… She is called Lillabeth.’
“I nodded, though I didn’t really think about
what he had said, then my father closed his eyes, and he was gone…”
Gone in spirit, not yet in body.
* * *
“You’ll come to visit me, won’t you, Lillabeth?” Lilac asked anxiously.
Out of respect, Hilsburlyng and I were a few
metres away from the two sisters, but we couldn’t help overhearing them say
goodbye to each other.
“Every month,” said Lillabeth simply. “I promise.
And you’ll come to see us.”
“I won’t be able to come as often — I have my
Valley to watch over. But I’ll try.”
A few moments later we were on our way — on our
way back home — Hilsburlyng, Lillabeth, and I.
Lillabeth stopped and turned to look one last
time at the palace.
“Are you sure that you don’t want to stay here?”
I asked her gently.
She nodded without turning to look at me. “I
thought I belonged here, with my sister, and that’s why I decided to come. But
now I know that I don’t belong here. I belong with you and Mum.” She looked
at me and smiled. “Even if you aren’t my true brother and if Mum isn’t my true
mother.”
We were all silent until Hilsburlyng voiced what
was lurking at the back of our three minds.
“I’m a bit cold, shouldn’t we start walking
again?”
The End
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