A character created and formerly played by Sarah. History Born to a fairly affluent family in the House of the Golden Hand, she turned not to the sound of her mother's voice, but to the whirring and humming of the dragons that flitted around the city. As Kamila turned five, she gained a penchant for destruction, taking apart the jeweled mechanisms that her mother carefully collected, much to said parent's dismay. Later, she learned to create them on her own, taking to heart the lessons she learned while younger. Her first creation was a palm-sized scarab of dented brass; it had only the ability to lumber around clumsily. Time progressed, and so did her skill; however, few relics survive of her talents, as she continually cannibalizes them for her latest creation, her newest, smallest, most delicate clockwork bug--only the "perfect" ones survive more than a week, and even those eventually find flaws, and she destroys them. She burns to create something as wondrous as the dragons--the defnition of the impossible dream, and she knows this, but it doesn't stop her from trying. Currently, she spends more and more time away from home, and in the Garden of Prisms whenever it is open to the public. When it is not, and her father can force her to the Bazaar, she mans her father's stall, where she sells pretty, though lifeless (and worthless to her), jewelry; these is no beauty in that which there is no life. Her father wishes she would stop playing and learn the business of the market; her mother wishes she would go away, still uneasy with her only child, wondering where she went wrong that the girl doesn't warm up to her, like a daughter should love her mother. Description Kamila is of average height, roughly 5'4", and lean as a whip. Her facial features are delicate and her limbs long; her fingers possess an almost supernatural dexterity. The corners of her stormy grey eyes show tiny creases from squinting at the tiny mechanical beings she takes such joy in creating. Her hair, with a feel like silk and the color of the desert night, flows down to the floor, though it is always kept corralled with complex styles; one hair in a clockwork scarab could ruin a protracted effort, after all. Though merely in her late teens, her eyes, often tired, reveal a faint glimmer of creation-madness as she attempts to bring more and more of her ordered, clockwork dreams into a chaotic world. Kamila is curiously asexual, caring nothing for romance, or the world outside her clockwork toys. That doesn't stop her father from trying to arrange marriages, which have fallen flat since he started, around when she was twelve. Lately, he's been getting desperate. Introduction The silence was unexpected. Even the other mechanical things she had made fell into silence at the intensity of their creator's grief. She had hoped for so long, and all the effort was laying in a crumpled heap of metals on the floor. It had sung... sung so beautifully... "No..." Kamila was ready to collapse. A tiny dragon, no bigger than her two hands, she had made. Imperfect, true, but it had been a start. It had sung so wonderfully, the sweet notes piercing, so high they almost were silent. But there had been something wrong, inside, she had known, for it had suddenly taken wing and flown erratically, smashing headlong into the wall, delicate gears broken beyond repair. This one had taken over four months to create. And to all that effort... just broken... not five minutes after it had been completed... "Kamila!" Her mother stood outside the door to her room and workshop and called inside. The door was never open, and even if it had been, the woman would not have entered without asking. "I heard a crash...are you unhurt?" It was the most she could ask for. Asking if her daughter was well was as pointless as asking if the rain was dry. "Honorable Mother, I am unhurt," she replied dully. And that was all the response Kamila gave. The formality between them seemed to tear out her mother's heart. "What--I thou-- Very well." And she walked away, her footfalls almost silent, as were her tears. Its voice had been like crystal, like a multicolored band of light streaming from the heavens... Kamila knew she was obsessing, but it was hard not to. Her creation, the one she had thought absolutely without flaw, was destroyed. "Time to start again." And that pronouncement brought the other mechanical bugs to life, with the faint buzz and whirr sounding like the pounding of thunder in her ears. But not now. It was too soon, the pain suffocated her will to build. Perhaps if she walked outside, in the sun, the dragons would sing with their perfect jeweled voices. The Garden was open. Of course, that would help. If only it was open every day... Carefully checking her face and hair in the silvered mirror, Kamila pondered what to say, and what to tell her family. Her Honorable Father would snoop around in her workshop, at the insistence of her Honorable Mother, and find out what had broken this time. They only looked at her failures! Determining that her face showed no signs of the tears she wished to shed and that her hair had stayed swept up and back in the fashion currently favored, Kamila swept back the curtain of a tiny alcove and removed two stones of a rich blue hue. They were not jewels or gems, but beautiful all the same, and when they were held up to the light, they glowed from inside it seemed. Perfect for her contribution to the Garden of Prisms. * * * She trekked across the city, her light blue veil covering her face. Indeed, when she arrived at the gates to the Garden, there was one person entering, and not of the House of the Crscent Sword. She had not been wrong! Kamila knew the last thing she needed was to have another disappointment. As she hurried inside, the two stones clutched in one hand, she drew aside her veil and gazed in awe at the spectacle of lights and reflections. Kamila was not the only one so enraptured, she knew. There were others, but it was so easy to wander about for hours without encountering another person. As Kamila followed the curve of the path, her eye caught upon an unusual pattern that proved someone had been here before her. The rocks were arranged into words: "There is a thin line between genius and madness." Kamila stared at the words, laid out in stones of varying shades of gray, wondering what exactly that was supposed to mean. Then reality reasserted itself; it was only words that another had left. Her sandals crunched on the white stone gravel and she settled herself beside the message, decided to rearrange it. It would look better this way, she reasoned. Messages with no meaning ruined the beauty of the garden. After twenty minutes, Kamila had finished her creation: an outline of what might be a dragon sitting up, wings extended and the head turned toward the viewer. The finishing touch was her two stones as the eyes, and, after a moment's consideration, took her veil and weighed it with the stones, forming the wings. "Perfect." Not really, but it was nice to say. It was crude, but she loved the dragons, and maybe this would help her... She felt much better. And her head was bursting with ideas of how to improve her clockwork dragons... Grinning happily, she rushed from the Garden of Prisms back to her own house, and her own room, to try again... and again... and again. * * * "Kamila!" Her mother stared at Kamila in shock. "Where is your veil?" "It's..." She put her hand up to her face, then suddenly remembered where it was. "It's wit--" "No daughter of mine will walk around in public without her veil," the woman declared. Kamila looked at her mother like she was crazy. "Honorable Mother, I am your only daughter..." "All the more reason for you to maintain your dignity. What respectable man would want to marry a harlot?" her mother said reasonably. "Yes, Honorable Mother." What else was she supposed to say. Just agree and walk away. That was the best course of action. "What?" But Kamila had already begun to wander away back to her workshop and room. A servant was already inside cleaning up the heap. "Leave that alone!" she barked, and the girl dropped the pile of metal parts on the floor and scurried away. No doubt she was going to take the peices back to her parents so they could study them and say how horrible she was. Well, her parents wouldn't find her future projects. With a maniacal gleam in her eye, she sat down with the tiny cutter and bits of metal and began to shape the gears going by the plan laid out in her mind. * * * There was a knock at the door. When kamila didn't answer it, the door opened a crack. Behind the door was her mother with a tray of fruits and bread. "Dinnertime..." she called softly. "Go away!" Kamila didn't lift her head; her shoulders hunched over the table strewn with a half-assembled lock. The blueprint was laid out clearly in her mind: two parts would be attached inside near the door of the metal cavinet to interlock and keep everyone who didn't put in the combination out, and the third would be near the door hinge so that they couldn't be removed to get in that way. No one could steal her ideas, and she woudn't have to worry about the servants. She'd be safe. * * * "I'm worried..." The woman looked at her husband over a crystal bowl of red and purple sweet fruits. "She's pulling away from me." "Beloved, she was never very close to you to begin with," her husband said with a forgiving smile; he got a look that shot daggers of ice in return. "I'm very serious. She doesn't want to stay home; when she's home, she doesn't want to come out of her room except when the Garden of Prisms is open... and that's never sure." The woman pushed her hair away from her face; it was the same color and texture as her daughter's, but weighed down with chains of gold and xanthic and scarlet jewels set in filigree webs. "The girl goes into a funk for hours if she guesses wrong," the man observed. "Getting married would probably cheer her up." "If there were someone willing to marry her. She has a reputation!" she mourned. "At this rate, we'll have to marry her to a heathen!" "You're overreacting." He picked up a vermilion fruit in one slightly plump hand bedecked with gold rings. "But still... she should act more as a girl her age should... too much longer and she'll be doomed to spinsterhood." "Don't even say that!" * * * Lifting a stray piece of hair away from the workspace, Kamila leaned over the tiny gears with a glass lens. But her hair, in the elaborate style, kept falling apart. She set the glass down, and went over to her marble dressing table in the adjoining room. Sitting down on the chill stone bench, she took out each of the pins that kept the style in place, then shook out the inky hair until it hung free, curling in little pools on the floor. She carefully stripped off her dayrobe and changed into a shift of ivory silk. There were a few perks associated with being wealthy. Kamila arranged herself on the bench and found a tortoiseshell comb. It used to be that the one or two servants still around this late at night would pester her to let them take care of her hair. They didn't need to, she could brush her hair quite well on her own. She just couldn't style it so well when her eyes were crusty from sleep and her fingers felt numb and stiff. It took forever, but Kamila coaxed all the snarls out of her tresses. Rubbing the outside corners of her eyes, the girl glided over to her gauze-draped bed and sat down with a happy sigh. She stared from her bedroom into the space that glinted dimly with bits of metal and enamel, and realized that she would have to rise to extinguish the lamps. But oh, she was so tired.... Kamila's head gently drifted down to the pillow, and she was asleep in an instant, dreaming of dragons gliding of rainbows, singing in their jeweled voices. * * * Shortly after, her father stomped in with the full intention of telling Kamila to grow upa nd learn the responsibilities of an adult. Then he saw she had left the lamps untrimmed, and, worst of all, lit, and was going to give her a lecture on the price of lamp oil. One look at her face, though, and he decided to let it wait. With a father's tenderness, he lifted her legs onto the bed and shifted her over near the center. Sitting beside her, he rubbed one finger over the creases at the corners of her eyes; he sighed. His little girl looked so old.. and not too long ago, Kamila had looked angelic, not a care in the world, when she was asleep and unguarded. Kamila stirred and cracked open one eye. "What is it?" she asked, voice heavy. "Sleep, Kamila." her father smoothed Kamila's hair back, then patted her forehead. When her eyes slid shut again, he walked around the room, snuffing the lamps. Soon, all but one had a thin trail of gray smoke trailing from a charred wick, and he turned back. The moon was shining in through the window, and for a split second, looking at his daughter's face, it almost looked as carefree and happy as it used to be. Delusions, he reminded himself. One cannot return to the past. Besides, why would he want to? She had been such a terror when she was younger.... Read about Kamila in the archives Copyright © 2000-2001 by Alioqui & Yoon Ha Lee <shazrad@cityofveils.com> [ Return to the top of the page ]