Hanina Angerel

Hanina’s birth was not greeted with celebration but with silence. The house into which she entered was already waning. A once-proud line grown brittle with debt and discord. She was the last child of a family that could no longer sustain itself, the final thread of a tapestry unraveling at the edges. Her earliest years unfolded in half-light: long corridors that smelled of dust and smoke, hushed quarrels bleeding through walls too thin to contain them, and the ever-present knowledge that hunger lingered closer than comfort.

Her parents, shadowed figures in memory, spoke seldom to her, their voices consumed instead by arguments over coin, land, and the remnants of pride. Her mother’s hands, when they touched her at all, were cool and perfunctory; not cruel, but distracted, weighed down by burdens heavier than affection. Her father’s presence was fleeting, glimpsed more often in departure than arrival, his face blurred by resentment and fatigue. Hanina learned early not to seek warmth where none was offered.

She grew like a pale flower forced through stone, nourished not by tenderness but by absence. In her world of austerity, the smallest gestures; a crust of bread left aside, a glance that carried no edge of anger, became her luxuries. She learned to slip soundlessly between moments, a child who observed rather than intruded, who measured every word before allowing it to escape her lips. Silence became both shield and companion, until at last it came to define her.

There were days when the household seemed to forget her entirely, and she wandered the dust-choked halls like a miniature specter: unseen by mother, unmissed by father. In these lonely wanderings she made her first apprenticeship to watching. The house itself was her tutor, the creak of rotting stairs, the groan of timber in the night, the wavering shapes of candlelight pressed against the walls. She memorized these patterns, stored them as if they were treasures against an otherwise barren inheritance.

Children crave constancy, but Hanina learned instead to read change. She recognized the shift in her father’s tread that heralded anger, the faint slur in his speech that marked wine, the brittle edge in her mother’s laughter that betrayed despair. To her, the world was never steady but always trembling along hidden fault lines, and so she became still. All the better to sense when it shifted beneath her feet.

It was within this cultivated stillness that her first unsettling quality revealed itself. Her gaze lingered too long; her silences stretched too wide. Even as a child, those who met her eyes often recoiled without knowing why. There was no cruelty in her manner, nor open defiance, but something in her attentiveness unsettled, as though she were not simply listening, but studying. Not merely present, but bearing witness.

Thus, even within her own family, Hanina remained an outsider: tolerated, ignored, occasionally scolded, but never embraced. She existed as a presence on the periphery of their unraveling lives—neither anchoring them nor disrupting them, a muted echo where a daughter should have been. And for a time, in her silence, that seemed enough.

Yet silence, however carefully tended, cannot keep ruin at bay.

The end came as it so often does, not with warning, but with flame. Hanina was still a child when the fire claimed what little her family possessed. The night had been heavy with summer heat, the air stagnant and suffocating, when she woke to the crackle of timber and the sharp bite of smoke filling her nostrils. Her fur bristled along her spine as instinct prickled at her, a warning she barely understood. The house with its corridors of dust and argument, that hollow inheritance of hunger was alight.

Shapes flickered in the shadows. She smelled the acrid tang of burning wood and fabric, and her ears twitched at every snap of flame, every collapse of timber. She remembered her mother’s voice, sharp and panicked, her father calling her name only once before vanishing into the smoke. Figures flailed, silhouettes dissolving into the roaring orange. Her instincts urged her to flee, but curiosity and fear tangled with desperation. She reached for her mother’s sleeve, teeth gnawing at the urge to cry out, only to be shoved aside, forgotten in the chaos.

The air burned hot against her muzzle, stinging her whiskers and making her eyes water. Every breath was a battle. Smoke clawed at her throat, and her lungs heaved, unnatural in their panic. The roof groaned above, beams sagging under their own heat, and she felt the tremor of fire in the floor beneath her paws. The house that had never truly been hers seemed eager to consume her, swallowing walls and memories alike.

It was not her family who carried her out. Hanina staggered toward the threshold, tail tucked tight, fur singed at the edges, claws scraping against charred floorboards. Rough hands that were neither familiar nor gentle snatched her up, pulling her into the night. She collapsed into the dirt outside, ears flat against her head, nostrils flaring at the sharp smoke, eyes wide as she watched the flames devour the home that had shaped her in silence. Her parents did not emerge. Neither did their quarrels, nor their debts, nor the hollow comforts of lineage.

The fire took them all, leaving only her: a small child with fur matted with soot and ash, trembling with heat and terror, and the memory of a place that had never truly welcomed her. In the glow of those flames, Hanina understood the sharp, bitter truth of abandonment. She whined once, a raw, instinctive sound that rose and broke in the night air. Even that release felt hollow. By dawn, she had already learned the lesson that would define her: grief is useless without witness, and silence is a stronger inheritance than love.