My daughter is one of the brightest, independent, charismatic, darling children in the world. She's beautiful, lovable, smart, childish, snarky sometimes, caring, and a bundle of joy to everyone in the mansion. I'm one of the happiest people on Tasega, getting to see that smiling face everyday.
She's also one handful that I can never understand. I don't think I ever will, either.
Yesterday had been our birthday, and I finally got to celebrate it despite all the obstacles that were bound to come and flood us again. My daughter is also a very strong trouble magnet, one that can't go a single day of her life without encountering some sort of out of the ordinary problem.
Curse wraiths? Done it.
Frying Church member's brains and waking up from a deep coma? Of course.
Traveling the world? Why not?
Hell, why don't we add getting the scorn of an ancient Dragon (my father) and the Fae Queen, befriending an impeccable vigilante, and getting a spriggan prince for a fiancé?
Oh, and you can't forget that she can make hops across the world in seconds just to make a little cake delivery.
But the one thing that I absolutely cannot wrap my head around: how?
There are many "how's" that I ask myself everyday, questions I know will never be answered.
So, I let it go. If there are things you can't understand, accept, know, then just let it go.
Besides, do I have to understand my daughter? She's mine, and that's all that matters. She loves us, we love her, we are a family. No one really understands each other, so who am I to question her ways?
That was my thought process, up until I picked her up off the ground after she passed out from doing some impossible magic. The sheer force of it baffled me, the amount of mana being something I'd never experienced before.
Unearthly, impossible.
I was breathing heavily and trying to keep the tears back when I noticed she wasn't breathing, remembering the time she had turned out to be a stillborn and I felt I had failed my family.
My husband, Earl, ran out of the gates and slid down next to me. Tears were already coming out of my eyes and I was going into shock.
He picked up my daughter in one arm carefully, then pulled me up and brought me into the safety of the gates. The barrier was down, so that was a major loss, but that didn't mean we were utterly vulnerable.
I still needed to do my part in helping, so I numbly stumbled off to a mechanism that popped out of a wall and started pouring mana into it to create a pseudo barrier. Earl continued dashing inside with our baby girl, looking for Liza and her apprentice.
After pouring all of the mana I could stand to give away along with many other magicians, the night was over several hours later.
It was time for Kitri to come and do the collection in Basusda, but after finding an extreme amount of carnage and total destruction in his midst (or at least more than usual), he flew over here.
In front of our gate, for hundreds of pouriks, there was white and silver ground. The trees looked like they'd been in a major snow storm, eternally white. The grass and trails and roads, the dirt and gates and walls, all of it was white. Even if you dug deep into the ground, scraped off the trees, or anything else, it was white. The stones of the wall were not just white on one side, but were white on both sides and inside.
My daughter had created a winter wonderland, or at least that's what my other children called it. To the rest of us, we understood that she made what people present day called "Holy Grounds."
Once Holy Grounds are made, they never fade. Anything that was whitened wouldn't deteriorate. Ever.
I was standing in the midst of it all when it was being created, and something in my very bones seemed to be affected. There were no physical mutations or anything, or mental.
For now.
Once Kitri came and saw the remains of what looked like a battlefield, my shellshocked self and moping people, he tapped his feet down on the white ground.
"Ana, what...happened here?" He looked around and shivered from the pure feeling radiating all around us, unused to such a feeling. Or, remembering what it felt like after probably a millennia of absence of such magic.
"I..." I sat on the steps to my mansion, a blanket on my shoulders that had been placed there without me knowing.
Seeing me unable to answer, Kitri gave a pitying face as he saw my lost expression.
Magaris came down the steps and saw him standing there with an uneasy expression, then explained the events up to now.
"Fir..." I mumbled forlornly.
Kitri visited her and saw that she wasn't likely to wake up anytime in the next few hours, days even, so he went back to Larjulias to see what he could do there.
Finally, after a week of exhausting ourselves while maintaining the barrier from dusk till dawn, Fir woke up. It was only for a few minutes and since she was uncharacteristically crying like the child she was, I put her back to sleep with Hera and Adri. The next day she woke up again when Magaris came in, and then I found out. Magaris had said Fir was acting funny, so that made me run even faster.
My shock was evident and ignored as Liza and Thérèse talked over me, to the point that I snapped.
All feeling was lost in my limbs when I realized, as I was talking to her, that she wasn't looking at me properly. In fact, she'd been looking at the floor or had her eyes shut for some time, making me wonder what she was doing. My mother-in-law did the same thing sometimes to hear better by turning her face away, so when I made that connection at the same time as Liza we started waving our hands around to see if we would get a reaction.
She didn't react, didn't move, just frowned.
She was blind. Even with how amazing Fir was, I realized at that moment, she wasn't invincible. I remembered that she was only human, needing rest and love and consideration too.
I wrapped her in my arms when I remembered that, thinking about all the times she had gone off on her own. I'd worried a lot at first, until I came to the conclusion that worrying was useless. She could take care of herself and had displayed that well enough.
But this...even with the coma, with the disappearance, with everything, I'd never worried so much in my entire life to the point that I passed the next few days in a gray zone. I didn't eat, sleep, just...worried. I didn't even notice I was hurting myself, since being part Dragon meant I could withstand more of the pain than normal people. A little hunger pang wasn't going to get me down.
That's what Fir must've thought.
Everyone was already exhausted from work, busy thinking about Fir, but I burdened them by making them start to worry for me, too. I didn't notice until the three days rest period I'd assigned Fir were over, and she woke up to see me with a pale complexion and red eyes.
She flipped out, acting the same as I did the first time she woke up.
Her hand reached into a blank space and out came a hot meal, which I was startled to see. Where did that come from?
That was obviously not Fir's concern as she placed the plate on a table that appeared before me all of a sudden, a spoon in my hand and a fork in the other.
There were noodles on a plate, chopped up meat, and red sauce. I found the concoction curious, and my tired mind didn't understand what this all was.
"EAT!" Fir exclaimed, putting me in a barrier that was timed to not let me out until I had done as she commanded.
I blinked many times, wondering what was going on. The fork in my hand trembled as I reached over and twirled the noodles, the spoon used for scooping it up.
I don't know how much time passed until I finished it, and then the barrier fell away. After that I was forced to stand and then pushed through a portal, ending up in my room.
I fell on the bed, then moved into a comfortable position that lulled me to sleep after finding it absolutely irresistible...
I guess my daughter's not the only one that needs to be taken care of.
AN: Happy Late Halloween! And early Veteran's Day! And whatever holidays I've missed!