Blue grey eyes dispassionately observed the elegant pair headed up the red-carpeted stairs, resplendent in shades of deep sapphire blue and topaz, ivory and charcoal, at their perfect ease in this marble and mahogany modern-day palace. Her gaze, her attentions never waiver, even when they merged with the myriad other lovely couples and all the other beautiful people making their way back from intermission, returning to the stately theatre for the second half of the ancient opera “Carmen.” It was a venerable ritual among the well-heeled, one that had carried over for centuries now, and Elke did not mind of course.

There was a great deal Elke did not mind, though whether she was born not minding these things, or had simply learned to pay them no mind over her twenty-six years of life, even she could not have said. It wasn’t that she had no preferences of her own – she did. She far preferred “La Bohème” in truth. She found the emotions far more genuine, and the music less tedious to follow though she likely could have never explained the difference, were she ever asked.

Not that anyone would ever ask, of course. Elke was not made to be asked for her thoughts, and her opinions mattered precious little beyond the confines of her own head. And in truth, she did not mind that either – or had long since learned the art of seeming so. No one ever asked the guard dog his thoughts, after all. And though she looked the part of an opera goer in her pale green, floor length sheath gown, her expensive, real leather shoes and clutch bag? She knew her place.

Maintaining an appropriate fifteen pace distance at all times in public. Guard dog, born and bred and raised to oversee the sparkling woman with the burnished bronze hair, the sea green eyes and that resplendent sapphire dress. Her Moira. Elke’s charge, her sister-like, the closest thing she’d ever had to a friend in all her long life.

Not that she minded. It was in her DNA, it seemed. Genetics was all, and she had been born to be what she was, who she was. In her more nostalgic moments – or at least, as nostalgic as Elke ever got – she imagined the parents she never knew spent every last credit they had to give their unborn daughter a life they could only dream of inside the walls of the New Boston-Columbia District, far from the grinding poverty just past its impenetrable, fortress-like gates. Solid concrete and steel that was still one of the best building materials known to man, spanning some quarter mile into the sky above. 

At least that was what Moira had told her about her parents, huddled together beneath blankets as the little girls they'd once been. And Elke liked to think her sister-like would not lie to her about such things.

Not that it mattered. Elke ne Sonnengirata was as bound to Moira Sonnengir the Truth-teller, as she would have been to Moira Sonnengir the Liar. But it gave Elke something very like pleasure to believe these good things of Moira, beautiful, brilliant, talented, shining Moira her sister-like, as kind as she was lovely, and already renowned as the brightest mind of their generation. And so that was what she chose to do.

Elke padded up the stairs after the pair lithely, nimbly, utterly unaware of her feline grace, or the poetry of precision in her every least movement from tucking the clutch purse beneath her arm to tucking a stray strand of silver-blonde hair back behind the ivory skin of one perfectly shaped ear. Muscle and sinew and bone moved in perfect synchronicity, an almost inhuman dance in every least movement that screamed – despite the clothes she wore, and the comely feminine shape of her body – that she was something entirely apart from this affluent crowd of ancient opera aficionados. 

And they gave her path a wide berth as she followed after Moira. It was simply the wise thing to do, in the presence of a Genaltata birthed as a Guardian, bound to her charge to the day she died or became too old – often around the age of fifty or so – to carry out her duties. Then the Guardian would be replaced of course, by another Genaltata Guardian, to live out the lifetime of the charge and… 

Well, Elke didn’t actually [i]know[/i] what became of Genaltata Guardians after the age of 50 or so. Her kind were exceedingly rare and staggeringly expensive to birth, and so she’d only met a handful or so in her entire lifetime. And it wasn’t as if they simply “kept in touch” with one another; there was simply no community meant for the Guardians, beyond whatever notice their charge chose to allow them.

Elke did not dwell, of course, on this thought concerning her future. She found it… [i]Discomfiting.[/i]

Not that she should have minded.