04-17-2023, 11:27 PM
Raea
After a lifetime of critical stares from strangers based on her appearance — her Baltia eyes and water wings, her Stratosian feathers and aura — she cannot shake the unease that she feels each time she approaches a stranger. She knows that her home’s history does not hold the same weight to the residents of Beqanna, or at least, it did not used to. While they would not resent her for being the product of warring kingdoms, she could not ignore the nagging worry that they had an entirely different — and well-deserved—reason to despise her on sight. They were, after all, a casualty in a war they had not even asked to be a part of.
But the stallion before her seems kind, and she finds herself beginning to relax ever so slightly. The nervous wind that had been circling around her, causing her feathers to stir and shift, finally quiets at his gentle greeting. The worry does not quite fade from her eyes — difficult though it may be to see such a thing in eyes so black — but she does manage a small smile in return.
She listens to what he says, and a faint frown forms on her face. “The mountain? What takes place at the mountain?” She has perhaps heard some things whispered about the mountain—a place of magic, that truthfully to her sounded more the stuff of fairytales and not something that was actually real. Where she was born they did not have a place such as that, a place where you could go to ask for gifts or partake in adventures that had the ability to shake the entire world.
She is about to explain that she is not from here — afraid that he will think her foolish for not knowing something that clearly must be widespread knowledge — when he asks her that very question. She is almost grateful for it, until she realizes she does not know the answer. Baltia and Stratos did not come from a world with a name. There was Baltia, and Stratos, and if you did not live there, you lived nowhere. And Raea, a half-child of both with no way to survive in either place, had been raised on an island with no name. “I grew up not far from Baltia and Stratos,” she finally says, the uncertainty creeping back in. “My parents thought it was safer, since the kingdoms were fighting and I…I looked too much like the enemy, to either side.” The wind had begun to rustle around her again, her sunrise-colored feathers shifting and stirring, but she offers him another tight smile through the tension that she cannot loosen, and introduces herself: “My name is Raea.”
But the stallion before her seems kind, and she finds herself beginning to relax ever so slightly. The nervous wind that had been circling around her, causing her feathers to stir and shift, finally quiets at his gentle greeting. The worry does not quite fade from her eyes — difficult though it may be to see such a thing in eyes so black — but she does manage a small smile in return.
She listens to what he says, and a faint frown forms on her face. “The mountain? What takes place at the mountain?” She has perhaps heard some things whispered about the mountain—a place of magic, that truthfully to her sounded more the stuff of fairytales and not something that was actually real. Where she was born they did not have a place such as that, a place where you could go to ask for gifts or partake in adventures that had the ability to shake the entire world.
She is about to explain that she is not from here — afraid that he will think her foolish for not knowing something that clearly must be widespread knowledge — when he asks her that very question. She is almost grateful for it, until she realizes she does not know the answer. Baltia and Stratos did not come from a world with a name. There was Baltia, and Stratos, and if you did not live there, you lived nowhere. And Raea, a half-child of both with no way to survive in either place, had been raised on an island with no name. “I grew up not far from Baltia and Stratos,” she finally says, the uncertainty creeping back in. “My parents thought it was safer, since the kingdoms were fighting and I…I looked too much like the enemy, to either side.” The wind had begun to rustle around her again, her sunrise-colored feathers shifting and stirring, but she offers him another tight smile through the tension that she cannot loosen, and introduces herself: “My name is Raea.”
@
Jesper