Chapter Text
Describe your character’s relationship with their mother or their father, or both.
Her father’s hand lands heavy against her shoulder and she shifts the little weight of her pack to balance. She can still see her mother’s hand waving, the other running slow across a swollen belly too large for travel. She can still hear her little brother’s wails as he chased their small aravel as far as his little legs could carry. They are beyond reach now, but with each passing mile they traveled, she let a little bloom of foolish hope grow that her father might change his mind.
“You’re really not coming?” she asks and the fingers on her shoulder tighten. He may be here, but his yellow eyes are leagues away already.
“You are my clever and strong daughter who is not afraid of anything, isn’t that so?” His hand moves to brush against her jaw, gaze tracing the soft lines of her young face. “We will write to you often and visit when we can, as promised. You’ll be fine, my daughter.”
A shadow crosses over them and he glances up into the eyes of her new Keeper, but Keela keeps her attention on her father. She listens as he shakes hands with a stranger, feels the final kiss upon her brow and the breath of his I love you, always on her cheek, watches as the aravel turns and travels back the way they came.
She stands in the empty road until he disappears from sight and even for long minutes after that until a foreign voice calls. “Come, da’len. We have a lengthy journey ahead of us, but I do believe it is a lovely day for a walk.”
Keela looks away from the dust trail of her family and towards her new life. A thousand miles later, she wonders if she was born with this wild fire inside or if it was created that day.