[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/BMj7gan.png[/img]
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwudm0Pe4mE][color=A52A2A]♬[/color][/url][/center][hr][hr][color=b4867b]Tyrel could recall, as if she were still there, the satisfying creak of the floorboards underfoot: so well-worn by the thousands of feet that must’ve come and gone over the years. The scent of pine needles in the burgeoning stresia remained as vivid as if she were nine years old again, pacing about, talking anxiously and excitedly with the other girls, swinging her lone foot back and forth when she’d forced herself to sit. She could picture it perfectly: the smoothed and ancient nail that she’d rested the toe of her boot against. It had stuck up just enough to act as focus for her racing mind. The warm sun and the faint songs of dowsingjays had visited her from the large, curved windows, and dust motes had swirled and sparkled in the golden air, ethereal.   

There had been five of them, at first, remembered as colours, sounds, and feelings: Ailette, mousy brown, spectacles, and a rigorous, factual energy that flirted with the edge of aloofness; Ynorii, black-haired, Nikanese, foreign and shy but, when she opened up, warm, goofy, and… perhaps more mature than the others; Pluurii, white hair, pale, cynical, and awkward, fingers contorting themselves, foot tapping incessantly, glances stolen at a limb too recently lost; Thantra, red-orange, laughter, a best friend for a day, bright and energetic, hands held, games played, and circles upon circles danced. They were supposed to have kept in touch. 

Five girls, they had been, all of an age, all with a burgeoning gift for magic, and made one-legged through birth, calamity, or illness. Then, there had arrived the woman with the bird-eyes. Tyrel did not remember her name, but she remembered her bearing. It was that of a bird, and not the friendly dowsingjays that her people so often kept as companions. She had walked like a gastornis: tall among the children and seated parents, with measured steps and eyes that flicked about, seeking either predators or prey. She had smiled like the other adults and spoken similar kinds of words in her lilting Constantian accent, but Tyrel had not liked her. Some animal part of the girl's mind had instinctively avoided the woman, but she had not been able to avoid the little shadow that pooled behind her legs, dark and clumsy and desperately wishing not to be noticed: Juulette. 

There had been something in Tyrel that day, and she had shared it with Thantra. She had wanted to kick Juulette. The tiny girl had looked at them with these huge, dark, fearful eyes, flinching when they’d taken so much as a step toward her. She’d thumped and clunked about awkwardly on her crutches, bumping into the bird-woman more than once and recoiling in apologetic horror, but never too far away. Instead, she’d just lurked, leg drawn up, gripping her elbows with her hands, eyes burning into their backs as they’d played but then fleeing whenever Tyrel or Thantra had returned their gaze. Were the bird-woman not there, they might’ve talked to her, maybe in the cruel fashion of children or maybe out of sympathy. She was like a wounded rabbit in rezain: either something to be nursed back to health or put out of its misery. 

When the priestesses had asked their questions, she had mumbled and stuttered and lisped and Tyrel had flushed with both revulsion and shame for looking down on someone so clearly less fortunate. It was hard to recall, now, a time when she had not been the Avatar of Vyshta, but a fear had nestled inside of her, just as she assumed it had in all six of the girls present, that she would not be the one. She would just be an unremarkable girl with a missing leg. Only, she had [i]passed[/i] the church’s battery of tests. [i]She[/i] had been chosen and consigned the [i]others[/i] to that fate. Only Pluurii had seemed unbothered. Tyrel remembered the sight of small girls burrowing their faces into the folds of their mothers’ clothing. She remembered Juulette silently running away and she had followed her. 

“It isn’t me. It isn’t [i]me[/i],” the tiny girl had repeated with rhythmic obsession, sitting on a tree branch, hugging her knee to her chest and crying. Tyrel was unsure, to this day, whether those had been tears of failure or tears of joy. Juulette had shaken, but her back had been turned and the sight of her had been unnerving. Whether it was anxiety, relief, or madness' silent laughter, one could not say. A nine-year-old Tyrel had stood there, in the shadows where the floor above loomed over the balcony, for a good long time, her stomach squeezing itself weak and hazy. She hadn’t known what to say. She’d only known that she needed to say something. Then, a door had opened, the bird-woman had arrived, and the Avatar of Vyshta had fled like a small animal.

It was but a speedbump. An entire two years early, she'd been granted the honour of a cognomen. Some had pushed for her to take ‘Vyshta’, as was her right, and she might’ve been Tyrel’vyshta’dichora, but her family had already been calling her Tyrel’yrash for years, to differentiate her from her mother, so she’d kept the humbler name and was glad of it. Damy would not like arrogance. Every night, she knelt by her bedside and prayed to him that she and he might be reconciled when she ascended. Fate and Fortune did not need to be enemies, so she would tell anyone in her official role as a living goddess. Yet, if she was lauded and beloved, heralded as a prodigy, a centre of attention, so had been a hundred other Avatars before her. They had all died by their twenty-fifth year and, every so often, when she did not have Chad for sex or Miret for comfort, when she was alone, Tyrel wished some other girl had been chosen. Let it have been Juulette, or… It felt wrong to place the burden on anyone else. 

Of the other five, she’d seen only Ailette, in passing, as she was some sort of chemist at the academy now, speaking in incomprehensible mathematics, using instruments of science to create and destroy and eschewing magic as an end unto itself. They had never had much in common. The Avatar shifted in bed, the space too big for her. Miret was out late… being what she was. Chad was absent. There had been too many whispers that he was more than a luush’elar - that they were exclusively wedded in the fashion of humans and other lesser peoples - and so he attended to others, as one of his status was expected to. Sweet Chad and the genuine person behind his put-on arrogance and winking jokes. He consumed her. Tyrel lay there and stared at the swirling patterns of the ceiling, where branches had been woven together to form it. Virtuous. The Avatar of Vyshta must be virtuous and seen as such, or she would not live. A tear weighed on the lashes at the corner of her eye and she let it slide away into her pillow. [/color]
[hr][hr]