DWC June 2026 Day 4: Inadequate
@daily-writing-challenge
The sunlight in Quel'Thalas was wrong.
Not wrong in any way Ridley could properly explain. It was warm, golden, and honeyed through the canopy of red-leafed trees that arched over the estate's courtyard like the ribs of some enormous living cathedral. Boralus’s light was gray, and Dampwick’s in particular had been the brown of old puddles and lamp-smoke. This was something else entirely, and standing in it made Ridley feel like a stain on clean linen. He leaned against the stone balustrade of the upper terrace, arms folded while he watched Sybil and Agatha far below in the paddock yard. Agatha's shriek of delight carried clear up—she'd found the hawkstriders. One of the juveniles, its plumage still mottled with the dull fawn of adolescence, had lowered its ridiculous feathered head to inspect her, and Agatha had seized its beak in both chubby hands with the fearlessness of a child who assumed all animals were secretly her mother's friends. Sybil stood beside her, one hand resting on Agatha's shoulder, her sandy hair catching the golden light. Even from up here, Ridley could see the tilt of her head—that particular sideways listening she did when something only she could hear was talking to her. "She has a way with them," Jilene said from behind him.
Ridley grunted. He didn't turn around, but he shifted his weight to make room at the railing, and after a moment Jilene drifted up beside him. She moved the way she always moved—careful and peripheral, as though she were trying to take up as little space as possible in a world that had already told her she took up too much. His aunt was tall—or maybe she only seemed tall because she was so narrow, built like a candle that had been left to collect dust. Her snow-white hair was pinned in a half-up braided style that looked meticulous and slightly outdated, as though she'd learned it once and never found reason to change. Her robes were fine but faded, the embroidery at the cuffs picked loose in places by nervous fingers. She held a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, both hands wrapped around it like a ward. "Aggie's got no bloody sense of self-preservation," Ridley said. "Gets that from 'er mum."
"Or from you."
He cut her a look and Jilene's mouth twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile, more the ghost of one that had died on its way to her lips. They watched the paddock in silence for a while. Below, Agatha had somehow convinced the juvenile hawkstrider to sit down, and was now attempting to climb onto its back while Sybil steadied her with both hands, murmuring something in that lilting way of hers. "Place looks good," Ridley offered, because he wasn't sure what else to say. The estate did look good—immaculate, even. The hawkstriders were in magnificent condition: glossy-feathered, bright-eyed, and their legs clean and strong. He'd noticed the way every bird in the yard moved with an alertness and ease that spoke of careful handling, good feed, and someone who knew what they were doing. But he'd also noticed the empty stalls in the lower barn. The paddocks could hold three times as many birds as they currently did. The staff he'd seen numbered two, maybe three.
"It's...quieter than it used to be," Jilene said. "Father kept forty breeding pairs at the height of things. I have eleven now. Well, Nine hens and two cocks, so eleven feels generous." She gave a small, fluttering laugh that didn't reach her eyes. "The Farstriders used to place orders a year in advance. Now they go to the Dawnsong ranch in the south. Bigger operation. Better bloodlines, they say, though I—" She stopped herself and smoothed the front of her robe out of habit. "Well."
Ridley said nothing. He recognized the shape of that sentence. Better bloodlines. “Jil.”
"Mm?"
"You ain't gotta perform for me. Yeah?" He looked at her properly then, with the flat directness that made most people flinch. Jilene didn't flinch, but her fingers tightened on the cup. "I know what it looks like when someone's holdin' the whole fing togevver wif spit and prayer. I grew up doin' it."
Her chin trembled, just once, before she set her jaw. For a moment she looked almost like Merrick—not in cruelty, but in the stubborn refusal to crack where anyone could see. "I manage," she said.
"Yeah, I know you do."
The hawkstrider below let out a warbling trill as Agatha finally got both legs over its back and she threw her arms up in triumph. "Do you remember your father at all?" Jilene asked softly, not looking at him.
Ridley's jaw worked as he stared at the treeline—focusing on those perfect red-gold leaves, every one of them exactly the right shade, not a single one brown or curled or rotting. "Bits," he said. "'Is 'ands, e’had long fingers. He smelled like, I dunno—somefing floral. Couldn't tell you what. Merrick remembers more, or says 'e does." He paused. "Don't fink Merrick remembers 'im so much as remembers bein' angry at 'im. Two different fings, innit."
"Lanril was..." Jilene began, then seemed to lose the thread. She turned her teacup in her hands. "He was the talented one. The heir. Everything came easily to him—magic, combat, society. Mother adored him, and Father staked everything on him. And I was just..." She made a vague, diminishing gesture at herself. "The spare." Ridley looked at her. "I couldn't do what he could," she said, and her voice had gone thin. "Not with magic. I was thirteen before I could manage a basic illusion, and even then it flickered so badly the tutor asked me if I was doing it on purpose as a joke. "Father used to make me practice in front of him. I had to stand in the study and cast what I learned in front of him." Her voice dropped. "I would shake so badly the spells fell apart and he would just...sit there. He didn’t even look angry or disappointed, he just looked—bored. As if watching me fail wasn't even worth the energy of being upset about." She shifted her jaw slightly. “I was in the paddock at dawn one evening, sitting in the mud with a skittish yearling that wouldn't let anyone else near her, doing the slow patient work that no one wanted to do and Father said I handled them like a human." The word came out as though she were quoting someone else's disgust. "He meant it as the worst thing he could say."
Something cold and old shifted in Ridley's chest. He knew that feeling, he knew it like he knew the taste of dock water and the weight of a too-thin coat in winter. "Merrick can do it," he said, low. "The magic, took to it like breavvin'. Me—" He stopped, clearing his throat before he started again, rougher. "I got th’ears, but the one fing that actually matters?" He held up his hand and turned it over. "Nuffin. Can’t light a candle wif it without gettin’ a headache. Not wivout a rune or a glyph or some bit of kit to do the work for me." He dropped his hand, grasping the railing with it. "So I got guns, I got traps, and I got fings I built wif my 'ands because my blood didn't give me what it was s'posed to." He swallowed. "An' every time I walk through this place, every time I see the spires and the enchantments and I fink: you don't belong. Not in Boralus, not 'ere, not anywhere."
Jilene set down her tea and her hand found his forearm, light and tentative, the touch of someone who expected to be shaken off but he didn't shake her off. "I think that too," she whispered. "Every day in my own home. In the house I grew up in, with the birds I raised from eggs, in the country that's supposed to be mine—I feel like a guest who's overstayed."
Ridley's throat ached and he looked down at her hand on his arm. Her fingers were long and pale and ink-stained while his were tanned, thick, and as rough as old rope. Same blood in both, and same in their insufficiency. "'S a right pair, ain't we," he muttered.
Jilene let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Lanril got all the magic," she said. "And then he died, and the magic left with him, and what was left behind was...me. Trying to do what he did with half the gift and none of the confidence. And you and Merrick—" Her voice caught. "You got the hardest part of him, the absence. And I couldn't even—I should have done more, Ridley. I should have come to Boralus and brought you both here. I should’ve fought Father on it—"
"Don't." His voice was gruff but not unkind. "You 'ad your own weight, but y’tried. You sent parcels when we was kids. Books, clothes, dried fruit—wrapped in that blue paper wif the hawkstrider stamp." He paused and worked his jaw. "Merrick pretended 'e didn't care, but I kept every one."
"I was afraid," she corrected, very quietly. "That's different from having weight. I was afraid of my family, I was afraid of them finding out I cared and I couldn't afford to be diminished any further. So I let two boys grow up hungry in a slum and told myself sending parcels was enough because I was a coward."
Ridley stared at her for a long moment. He stood there, rigid and uncomfortable and utterly useless with this kind of thing, until something in him, the part that Sybil had pried open, overrode the rest. He put his arm around Jilene's narrow shoulders. Stiff and awkward, like a man who had learned tenderness the way some people learn a second language: late, clumsily, and with an accent that never quite smoothed out. "Yeah, well," he said. “You wanna talk 'bout bein' a coward? I sat next to Merrick for years watchin' 'im do fings that made me sick and told meself it's just business, it's just 'ow it is, 'e's family, what else am I gonna do." His gaze drifted back to the paddock. Sybil was lifting Agatha down from the hawkstrider now, pressing a kiss to the girl's wild dark curls. "Took a girl 'alf my size wif witch eyes to make me see I 'ad a choice. An' even then I nearly chose wrong."
Jilene followed his gaze and watched Sybil settle Agatha on her hip, the child's arms looping around her mother's neck with the absolute trust of someone who had never once doubted she would be caught. "She's extraordinary," Jilene said.
"She's mad as a bag of cats, is what she is," Ridley said, but his voice had gone soft. "Talks to trees n’bones, and answers questions no one's asked yet. She told me last week that the bread wouldn't rise ‘cause the house was sad." He paused, before adding "Th’bread didn’t rise."
Jilene smiled, small and wobbly, but genuine. "You love her very much."
Ridley's ears went pink and he cleared his throat, adjusted his gloves, and looked at the trees, the sky, the distant spire of a magisters' tower catching the sunlight, anywhere but at his aunt. "She sees me," he said finally. "Not th’ears or what I can or can't do wif magic. Just me. Ain't no one ever done that before." He hesitated. "Cept maybe you.” At that, Jilene bowed her head and leaned into him without another word.
Below, Agatha's bright voice rang up through the golden air: "Mummy, mummy, the bird likes me, tell Da the bird likes me!" Sybil tilted her face up toward the terrace and even from that distance, Ridley could see the knowing curve of her mouth. She lifted Agatha's hand and helped her wave. Ridley raised two fingers from the railing in return, his aunt still tucked under his arm.























