AN: This story is a bit more personal than others, so it would be nice if you were gentle with your reviews.

Set about three minutes pre-Lina

Seyrun is the white magic capital of the world, but when you grew up in it, being there isn't a new start full of possibilities. In fact if you are there too long it is more like jogging in place. You already know what places you like to go to eat or watch slapstick routines or just sit and be alone, which is great, but each place is full of memories. Not just good memories, or bad ones either. Just a million memories of when you were there before. You stay in the same place too long and it is just deja-vu after deja-vu.

No...Amelia's brow furrows. It's not deja-vu, because deja-vu is when your brain gets confused and gives you the feeling of remembering something as it commits it to memory. This isn't that, she truly is doing the same thing over and over again.

Even this, sitting on one of the cliffs over looking the harbor and pouring angst into her diary, is something she has done a million times before. Once, when she was eleven, she was up here staring out at the sparkling waves and thinking of nothing at all when she heard an awful grating noise. Her hands flew to her ears and she saw that part of the cliffs not half a mile from where she sat were sliding down the incline as though they weren't a part of the coast at all. There was a white hot flash of terror, but it faded into one trembly after shock as everything went still and silent again. A few minutes later the only unnatural thing in the vicinity was the way her heartbeat pulsed in her ears.

It hadn't been fun, but it had been...

Amelia shook her head and rolled onto her back. She wasn't going to think that. She wouldn't. She had money and power and peace. She didn't need excitement in her life. She had excitement! It was just, um, less exciting. Why, last week a prince and a princess had fought a duel for her hand. That had been fun.

She closed her eyes and watched the golden glow behind her eyelids. There was a sensation like an echo in the back of her mind. This was the same thing she had done at the duel. It hadn't been much of a fight. She could tell the two were more concerned about doing flashy moves to impress her rather than beating each other up, and that had sucked all the fun out of it. Also, she had to watch. When she was little her dad loved to tell her stories of girls who fought their own suitors and would only marry those who could best them on the battlefield. She was starting to see the appeal. The spectators box was too dark to read inconspicuously and too stuffy in the summer heat to be comfortable. At least fighting them would have been an exertion.

No matter if she did or didn't need more excitement in her life Amelia loved the feeling of her heart racing. She loved the moment at the end of a long run where you stop and your body catches up with you, aching and throbbing, your brain overwhelmed by exhaustion and endorphins. It was better than cold cream cake or an amazing book. Better even than the feeling of actually winning the race.

Amelia rolled back onto her stomach to review what she had written so far. She idly tapped the slight levitation spell under her, just to make sure it was still up. She always casted one when she came here since the landslide incident. Excitement was great. Being dead was not.

Speaking of nasty things, her shoulders were starting to crisp. A decent sign that it was time to go home. Still, she picked up her pencil and tried to put her feelings into words before she left. Sometimes turning a thought into a physical thing helped it to make more sense.

Sometimes hero's adventures end with their deaths. Sometimes in the course of their travels they lose their way on the the path of justice. I can't pretend I won't, but, still, I want the chance to find out. Even if it means

She erased the sentence before it could be finished. With that she slapped her journal closed and got up. She was not going to think like that. She was not going to put herself in harms way because she was bored, and she certainly wasn't going to run away from home and upset her father for it. No adventure could be worth that.

Not that I would know.