Chapter Text
The sun was at its zenith over the Ring when a tern landed on a girl’s vaha. Beneath the shade the girl drank deeply from a coconut and sighed. She still carried some visible markers of childhood in her cheeks, but something about her marked her as having had to mature too quickly. Her father called her noua as a term of endearment, which meant this was probably some sort of sign. Their eyes met; the tern’s deep black eyes reflected like a mirror. The girl’s eyes, ringed in the dark circles of exhaustion, seemed to carry a weight too great for one as young as her. They had lost their sparkle and had gone distant. She stared at the bird, silently hoping it would stay. It waited for her, listening, watching. That quiet moment made her certain. Talking was going to help. She offered the bird some dried mango, and began to talk.
“After the velioi arrived, the fashionable thing to do was address someone by their name and a needlessly gendered Shaian honorific—” Her eyes rolled in the way that only a teen’s can as she continued, “at first, it was almost funny. At least, I think it started out as something humorous and then kept going on without the irony. I fucking hate that.
“‘Sayo’ this and ‘Sayo’ that.” The girl glowered as she spat out the Shaian words like they had turned to rot in her mouth. “I really hoped the velioi might help change what it meant to be like me. They made it so much worse. If I could still cry, I would.” The pain she felt roiled beneath the mask of calm she wore to not scare away her new friend.
“I already hate my name, but this fad is the latest thing to cut into me. You know the kind of cut you get from coral? It's like those. No one cut is ever deep enough to cause real damage, but there are just so many. I never have time to heal before the next. It feels like a slow death. I’m so tired of fighting it in secret.”
The girl hadn’t noticed that she was crying when she restarted, “the Paramount—wait he wants me to call him El. El knows there’s something different about me. We talked about what it was like for people like us when we went fishing together during his last visit to Loaloa. My father knows that much too; he’s the Tanà. But no one knows exactly how hard it is. I think they think I’m like El and his Emperor. I guess I am in some ways, but I’m really not.”
She was bitter as she rambled, “I mean El can still be Paramount Chief. He can still live his life. I’m stuck here in a body that I hate. It keeps changing and making me worse. He has something and someone. I’m suffering with nothing to show for it. Nothing to live for.”
The girl took in three deep breaths as the gentle surf swayed her vaha in time with her breathing. She calmed herself and said, “No, that’s not fair. His pain isn’t mine, but it’s still real.”
She paused for a moment that felt like an eternity, then inquired of her friend, “Should I talk to my father? He is the Tanà. What do you think?”
The tern grunted, then shouted its seabird laugh as it flew away, leaving behind a downy white feather.