Sabra Knight
"Hmm..." Vyvala sat before the little dressing mirror in the corner of the single bedroom she shared with her family. She sat up straight and neat as she'd been taught, with her crimson eyes peering ahead unblinkingly and assessingly into the mirror. "Mm." She puffed out her cheeks and jutted out her bottom lip, turning her head this way and that to see all of the angles. She shoved her hands into the thick wad of red curls that sat atop her head and tugged lightly. "You'll have your mother's hair," Seziah's friends had told her. And it had sounded like a warning.
But that aside, she looked as she always did: a small girl with dark skin, red hair, and red eyes like the majority of people in the city. Vyvala poked one of the dark crystals on her cheek, frowned, and huffed at her reflection. Perhaps not exactly alike.
Her mother had always told her how beautiful she was, how perfect, a gift from Vyvala's father's gods. Nothing in the known world was so treasured, Vyv had been assured. Seziah treated her children with something so close to reverence that the other mothers who came into the shop, both younger and older, wondered if it were really appropriate for her to spoil them so... Vyvala, in all her seven-year-old glory, was also starting to wonder.
She'd heard her mother's boss, Jeine say on more than one occasion, 'unrealistic expectations.' Vyv couldn't possibly know what exactly that meant, but it sounded like what she felt it meant. Not everyone thought Vyvala was beautiful and perfect.
Vyv narrowed her eyes to the point where she could barely see and reevaluated her reflection.
It wasn't often that the twins were permitted down to the shop while their mother worked, but when they were, the shop patrons would coo at Vyv from afar, then squeak and retreat in startlement when she was near enough that they could see her eyes. That black around the red... That was what made mama's Oban customers wonder if she was ill or 'right.' That was what made her 'ugly.'
Seziah was in the shop now, why Vyv and her twin were left upstairs. "Val?" Vyv prompted as she swung her legs around, twisting to face the room rather than the mirror. "Do you think I'm pretty?"
It probably wasn't the most fair question. Valek, for all that he looked normal to Vyvala, pretty like their mother, was more abnormal around Obans than she was. His eyes were exactly like Seziah's, and if the black of Vyv's was startling to random passerby, Valek's dark sclera and milky irises was at least as unwelcome to people who didn't know them. Vyvala tried to reason that it was only sometimes that people were unnerved. All of their mother's friends treated them with comfortable familiarity. It was only those who were already uncomfortable with Seziah that were especially uncomfortable with her twins.