She is birthed to the world a stranger in her own skin.
Her pale gold eyes open one winter morning, and she is alive again. She is older than she was the last time she took a breath (at least, she remembers being smaller, taking mother’s warmth in her lungs). Her legs jut out from her prone position on the snow, longer than they were before. A dark strand of hair falls and curtains her gaze, grown from its former wispy existence along her neck. These differences she notices first, but they hardly matter. What she realizes next is that she is alone. Then, that she doesn’t remember why – she doesn’t remember anything, really.
She remembers love, but little else.
It is a golden glow that starts in her heart and warms her from the inside out. It keeps her calm on the frozen ground when she should be anything but, when she should be anywhere else. I don’t belong here, she thinks, not moving. The fleeting images of her young life are few and far between, as if they’ve been stripped or shorn away. She sees the cutting peaks of the Mountain in the distance and her chest constricts, but she doesn’t know why. She watches a family of deer as they filter slowly out of the forest, emerging from their night-hollows, and she blinks back tears.
Because it is not only her memories, sometimes foggy and sometimes missing entirely, gone from her. The worst part is the gaping hole in her very soul – the feeling that she has been halved, torn asunder. She is a diminished thing there on the snow, with eyes glazed with unshed tears. She is a lost child of the Reckoning, robbed of the life-force that should be pulsing alongside hers’. I do not belong here, she wants to cry into the snow.
But she doesn’t.
The inky girl quakes but stands on her new legs. She shakes off her mourning veil, shakes her head until a smile bobs to the surface. She remembers love, the golden glow of it that matches her own radiant skin. She keeps her love, and she remembers her name. And Vael moves forward.
Vael
and I swear I'm not a pretender