Safina was ten years old when she killed her mother.
"Disgusting! How can you expect me to eat this?" Kylara's shrill voice lashed at her young daughter, causing the sting of tears behind the girl's eyes.
"I'm sorry! I'll try again. The pan was too hot! Please mum!" Safina cried, stepping back, away from the expected blow.
"Go to your room, I have lost my appetite, I shall speak to you later!"
Safina fled, slippered feet masking her hurried retreat. Once in her room she began to tremble, her entire body wracked with terrible shudders. She knew her mother's retribution would be devastating, fear closed off her throat and for a few heart-wrenching moments, she struggled for breath. Her mind span with the possible ramifications of her actions.
Starvation was unnecessary, her mother had not fed Safina for nearly two weeks. She managed to scrape by with stolen scraps and rifling through the rubbish heaps behind her block. Already trending to a slender figure, Safina was horrifically underweight. Every bone in her body prodded visibly through almost transparent skin. Dark rings hovered underneath her enormous brown eyes and gave her the appearance of a girl much older, in early teens at least. In a world where image was everything, it was not uncommon for girls as young as she to develop eating disorders, and a child from the 'Roots' was over-looked much more readily than a child from a wealthier district.
Her mother was, amongst other things, a severe alcoholic. It is a story that has been told before and will be told again. Safina was caught in a terrible crossfire that she had no power to escape. Kylara would drink and she would strike her daughter. She would wake up and she would scream and insult her. Kylara would look upon her beautiful, clever child, and hate that she herself had been an ugly girl, and was a much uglier woman. Kylara would look upon her daughter and see her life disappear into obscurity. An obscurity that she had always dwelled in, though never realised as much. Hatred and jealousy spiralled inside her warped mind until all she had lost, and all that she had never had, was the fault of that one tiny child.
Safina had been five years old, her life, though far from normal or happy, had been easy and simple in the way only a child that young can perceive it. At five years of age she had tried a pair of her mother's shoes on her tiny feet. Warily she proceeded, hobbling across the room, proud of her accomplishment and watching herself in the floor length mirror. Of course she fell, she did not cry, that never brought anyone anyway. Instead, she huffed and struggled to untangle herself from the shoes. It was at that point that her mother entered the room and saw her shoes, which had cost her more Credit than she could afford, in a tangled mess on the floor, a deep scratch across the polished toe of one of them. Her scream was heard three floors up and as many down.
Safina wore a cast on her left arm for three months after that incident.
The sound of her mother muttering to herself carried down the hallway to Safina's tiny bedroom. They abated to make way for the sound of liquid being poured, with little finesse, into a chalice. The young girl could sense her mother's anger reaching fever pitch, the vivid red buzzing of her mother's thoughts were at the forefront of her mind and Safina knew that there was more than the usual viciousness to Kylara's thoughts. She attempted to probe a little deeper, but could not find away through her mother's natural shields. She could hear the basics of the older woman's thoughts and they filled her with dread. If she allowed her mother to touch her tonight, she knew she would not survive.