Moira Lyttle was a classic Irish lass. Her flame-red hair fell in wavy rings to her waist. Her body was lithe, her skin milky-white and free of blemishes beyond a light dusting of freckles at shoulders, on the tops of her flawless breasts, and across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were green and piercing. Any boy caught in her gaze would immediately be smitten.
Unfortunately, all of these wonderful traits were to be forever hidden away from men. With her father dead at a young age, and her mother unable to pay for any type of college, at the age of 18, Moira found herself being whisked away on a northbound train to a remote convent. She'd been told that the Mother Superior was a distant relation, some kind of umpteenth-removed cousin.
Most girls would have rebelled at this. Run away, gone to the city, and made half a life for themselves working as waitresses and what-have you at dead end jobs. But Moira had been raised in the country, and raised to obedience towards what her betters told her. She was quiet and unobtrusive by nature. When her mother helped pack away her bags, Moira had silently helped, hugged her goodbye, then boarded the train with ticket in hand.
The train ride was uneventful. Moira dozed fitfully, and awoke when she felt the temperature dropping. She put on her gloves and huddled into her coat, staring out the window as the train passed through farmland and empty moors. It got colder and colder, and Moira watched as the window slowly began to frost.
When she arrived at the Lake Seelie station, she was the only one to get off the train. She stood on the platform with her one suitcase, pulling her wool coat tighter around her and watching her breath freeze in the air, she wondered how she was going to get to the convent. As far as she could tell, there was no real town anywhere nearby, just a platform between two hills with a bramble thicket on the other side of the tracks.
As the chill was beginning to set into her bones, she heard a car pulling up. Lifting her suitcase and walking to the end of the platform, she saw an old, much-maligned station wagon. It coughed and sputtered to a stop. The door opened a out stepped the figure of a nun. Moira could smell cigarettes as the nun used the door as a fan, trying to air the smoke out of the car. Moira noted that she wasn't actually wearing a full habit, it was a more casual, "nun in training" affair, though at being a severe, heavy dress with mini-habit to cover her head, it was a far cry from the jeans and sweater that Moira had grown up wearing.
The nun turned, and Moira was surprised. She'd expected an old woman, or at least someone her mothers age, but this was a girl, who couldn't have been more than three years older than Moira at best. She had mocha skin that was too dark to be a tan, not that she could've gotten one in Northern Ireland in the dead of winter, and strands of thick, rich brown hair were slipping out of her habit here and there. When she looked at Moira she smiled instantly, as if they were old friends reuniting instead of new acquaintances.
"Mother Superior doesn't allow smoking," she said. "So I have to sneak in a faggot when I can." She winked at Moira conspiratorially, and Moira felt a warm rush in her stomach at instantly being treated like a bosom buddy.
"You are Moira Lyttle, right?" asked the dark girl.
"Yes," Moira said, sticking out her gloved hand.
"I'm Seetha," replied the other, giving her a firm handshake, "Or Sister Seetha, once we're around the others."
Seetha hefted Moira's bag suddenly and tossed it into the back seat. "Hop in," she said. Moira had barely closed the door before Seetha was rushing off down the road. Sister Seetha had her window open despite the cold, obviously to remove the last vestiges of smoke. She chatted away a mile a minute as they drove. "I don't usually smoke, but in the winter, it just gets so goddamn cold (don't worry, I'll say a few Hail Mary's for that later) and it just warms me right up. Of course if we had a little rum or something at the 'vent, that would do it too, but it's drier than Hell itself in that place, not a drop to be found."
Moira realized that Sister Seetha's immediate openness had bound her. She knew that she would probably have some moral imperative to share this information with the Mother Superior, but Seetha was so trusting of her that Moira instantly knew she would never do it.
Once Seetha rolled her window back up, the car began to warm. Outside they passed through a seemingly endless stretch of frosty green grass. "I know what you're thinking," Seetha was saying. "Isn't there any kind of civilization out here? There's actually a small town about ten miles south of the station, it's where we get supplies."
Seetha talked through the whole trip, and Moira occasionally chimed in, though mostly she just listened. The abbreviated version of Seetha's life seemed to be that she was of mixed Indian and Welsh heritage. Her father had been a wealthy Welsh noble, and her mother an attractive maid of mostly Hindi descent, although how far back it had been since her family had emigrated to the UK, Seetha didn't know. Her mother had died in childbirth, but it seemed that the noble had had a soft spot for his illegitimate child. Unfortunately, when Seetha was nineteen, her father had gotten married, and suddenly the bastard daughter wasn't quite as welcome in the house. Try as she might to fit in, Seetha was a rebellious girl by nature, and it wasn't long before the new woman of the house had had her packed off to the convent.
Coming around a corner, Moira found herself looking out across a long, narrow lake. It was set in a deep valley of grass and rock, and to the north a small river was barely visible feeding the lake. Deep, cold mists rose randomly throughout the valley, almost preventing Moira from seeing the castle. She gasped at the sight of it. It was tall, and clearly ancient. There was a high wall about thirty meters away from the castle itself, and as the car passed through the front gate, Moira noted that it was mostly ruined and torn down in places, in contrast to the castle's spotless facade. It had two high towers rising out of either corner of it's western wall. The southern tower was wide, about ten meters across, while the northern tower, which was easily the highest point on the castle, was merely two across. The main structure of it was long and and broad, and had what appeared to be a new roof (new in the sense that it was probably made only four hundred years ago, as opposed to however old the rest of the castle was) that resembled the points and arches of a major cathedral.
