I'd always been a bit strange, and I'd always known it. I was the only one in Ardon who saw the little people dancing about the rest of the world, oozing and dripping shadows like tar, ribbons instead of hair. The only one who saw the long feathery dragons sliding through the air like banners, or twirl about fruit trees. And certainly the only one with a personal anomaly stalking his movement where ever he went, or at least doing so when it wasn't already in him. I don't actually know what it is. It's been seeping into my skin since I was a child, finding the nearest available flesh wound and hiding inside my body, taking up home with my blood, running through my veins like a wolf running a trail. I've seen it as a wolf. And a dog. And a girl, with long antlers and the speckled lower body of a newborn whitetail. I've seen it as a bird, I've seen it as an ordinary child, boy and girl, and I've even seen it take the form of one of the dragons, with twin tail feathers longer then my arm, and a mouth like a lamprey. I cried out in fear when I saw it like that, because the teeth scared me, and it immediately turned back into my favorite form, the delicate navy colored fox with the shining stars speckled across its fur like diamonds and the tiny black horns that curl behind it's white ears and the long dainty paws that leave the marks of its pad glowing on the ground. It's my favorite, simply because it's the prettiest thing I've ever seen. I'm probably also the only one to name such a creature, and certainly the only one to give it such a ridiculous name, but I was young at the time, and only learned to regret such things recently.
Yeah, I named her Bob.
xXx
Now, first of all, I feel I should probably introduce myself. My name is Emerald. And I was born to do great things. At least, that's what my mother always tells me, whenever I do something strange and everyone else oohs and ahhs like I've preformed a miracle. Whenever one of the little people in the shadows, the imps, conjures something pretty for me to play with, or one of the dragons make it rain so I can dance in the puddles. They give me the credit, because one, they can't see the imps and the dragons, and two they're too afraid that if they give the credit to a non-human, we'll suddenly not be the most powerful race anymore. I don't see why they think that. We were never the most powerful race to begin with, that would be the angels. Yes, I've seen angels. My awe at the sight nearly blew my head off, and Bob had to block my view of the beings before I could go insane. Yet for months then on, I can only enter a room left foot first or I'd go ballistic, so I'm not sure she was all that successful. Afterwards, she looked me straight in the eye. She was in a dog form at the moment, a giant papillon with a striped tail and forepaws, and eyelashes that look like daisy petals around a glowing green center.
"Emerald," She said, tight faced and grim as all get out. "You shouldn't look at angels. They'll blow your head off, and do so gloriously, and you're liable to burst into flames if they meet your gaze."
"Are angels bad?" I'd asked her, curious for the answer. As it turned out, her answer had just made me wonder more.
"No more then a cockatrice, dear. They can't really help it that they destroy you, it's just how they are. It's involuntary, usually." See what I mean? Raise your hand if you knew what a cockatrice was by the time you were seven. Yeah, I didn't think so. Still though, since then I don't just go looking pointlessly up into the sky, now do I?
Anyhow, the point is that I don't really do half of what everyone else in the village thinks I do. When I get upset it's not me throwing those things around, it's that ghost that likes to visit me seeing an opportunity to cause mischief and pouncing on it like a cat. (Her name is Millie, so I didn't do so bad that time.) And when I mutter strange things, I'm not reciting spells, I'm just talking to the invisible butterflies with the pretty wing patterns I sometimes see fluttering about when it's hot outside.
And I'm certainly not the one who talked a deer into coming to the town square during a famine so we could eat it. To be honest, I was just walking in the woods and she joined me. I didn't mean for her to die. I cried when it happened, big fat tears, and the adults all started apologizing, but they kept chopping her up and rationing her anyway so I don't think they really meant it. And even though I was too old to cry, none of the other kids would ever dream of teasing me for it, because once a bully tried to push me over and Bob bit him. And Bob can be poisonous if she wants to be, so he died two days later in bed. I think his parents were the only ones who cared, but everyone else was sending flowers so I sent some of my own. Later, when my mother came to me, I learned that what I had sent weren't flowers, but thorns. I had thought they were pretty though, because they had little bright red tips. Turns out that was just my blood from when I picked them. But Bob had loved them, so.
That was when people started praising me more, as if trying to keep on my good side. Someone's doing that now, the town drunk. He's fawning over me like he always does ever since I asked one of the imps to steal him a bottle, because he was crying in the ditch and I didn't know how else to make him stop and shut up. Millie joined in and between the two of them they stole upwards of a dozen bottles. Since then Millie still leaves him one every now and then, and it's become a game for the imps to sneak sips. Then they wonder tipsily around for hours afterward and bother me until I rub them between their horns.
Imps have pretty little horns, that're more like antennae, just harder and they don't taste the air like the butterflies antennae do. They're more like liquid ribbons that have been stuck to their skulls with tree sap, or something, or have just grown into them. Either way, they like it if you rub right at the beginning, like a cat likes with its ears.
The drunk mumbles something to me, and I flash him a dazzling grin.
"Sir, excuse me!" I tell him cheerfully and dart off, Bob hanging off my shoulders in the form of a cat with bat wings and fangs like a vampires. Vampires are actually pretty decent creatures, as long as you don't let them bite you. They like water, and sometimes gather around a set of pools out in the woods in the evening and swim, as long as it isn't sunny, and I've joined them before.
As I run through the village several people call out to me, greetings and well wishes. A group of several girls I know start running after me and I slow down so they can catch up. All children in Ardon are taught to run and jump and swim from an early age, regardless of gender, so some girls are just as fast as the boys. As they get older though it gets harder, because of all the skirts, one once told me.
Girls in Ardon were at least three skirts, minimun. The first one is really short and usually black or white, and made of really sheer fabric. It takes several layers sewn together to get the desired puff like style, and then it just gets covered by the second skirt, called a ghiri. Ghiri's are just an inch or two shorter then the outside skirts, and usually bright and patterned. Last are the outside skirts, and you can have as many of them as you want. They're always solid colored though, and usually have lots of pleats so that they bell out around you. Then for shirts girls wear a hemmed up rectangle of whatever fabric they want, called a chzech and it buttons up in the back, and in the winter they wear shawls to cover up their shoulders, but during the rest of the year they don't because no one in Ardon really burns anymore. And you may be wondering why I know so much about girls and their clothes, but actually the reason is really easy. Until you're big enough, both little boys and little girls wear skirts and chzechs, and then when we're big enough boys start wearing leather leggings and these pretty beaded sashes around our waists to hold the leggings up. We can still wear chzechs, but most boys wear the shirts traders bring, and I wear the linen shoulder things decorated with beads that future mages wear to mark us as special. They're basically like two sashes that go over my head to form an X over my chest and back.
I don't think I'm a mage, though.
One of the girls catches up, one of my friends, an older girl named Mayle. She's wearing a purple outer skirt and a metal bracelet on both wrist, and her black ears stand out strong against her dyed yellow hair. Mayle and her mother came here from Birk, so their ears are darker then any of us, because everyone in Ardon had fair hair and pale ears. Mayle died her hair to fit in better, but her and her moms ears are still black, and they're long, so long they droop a bit, and my mother calls them ridiculously fluffy.
"Emerald!" She greets, panting a bit, and I slow down to a trot so that she can catch her breath and the others can catch up. There are three other girls, one in brown named Jesse, one in grey named Jenna, and the little one with tritails I think is named Juliana, but I'm not sure. With them is one of the boys, Jinx, and he nods before grabbing Jesse and Jenna and pulling them away, telling them that their mother wants them home by now.
"Meaning he just doesn't want to get caught up with you." Bob comments from my shoulder, but no one else can hear her, and sure enough I can hear him grumbling to his sisters about hanging out with me as they walk away. Sometimes parents tell their children to stay away from the things they fear, Bob told me once. I didn't cry that time, I just felt mad. I'm not going to hurt their children. Mayle and Juliana stay, though, and the latter is giving me a smile and pointing to her mouth proudly.
"Looh, Eh-er-al!" She says and grins at me and then I notice a telltale black hole in her smile that explains her difficulty in pronouncing my name.
"Oh! You lost a tooth!" I only have a few teeth left to lose, since I'm ten, but Juliana is only six so this is just her second, I think. "That's amazing! Good job, I bet you'll get lots of presents tonight!" In Ardon, losing a tooth is like losing part of you childhood, but not in a bad way. Like, once they're all gone you're almost ready to be an adult, but until then you just get a gift each time one comes loose. Juliana giggles happily and runs off to show someone else, leaving just Bob, Mayle and I.
"Thank you, Emerald. She's been wanting to tell you about that since it came out earlier." She tells me, fiddling with one of her bracelets, and I smile as gently as I can.
"No problem, she's a nice little girl. Do you need anything?" She looks puzzled for a moment, before blushing and waving her hands.
"Ah, no! Um, do you need to be somewhere?" She asks, and I nod as politely as I can without looking annoyed.
"Oh... Goodbye?" I return the farewell and bolt, an imp joining me and bouncing at my side and Bob flying behind me. She looks somewhat tired though, so I decide to give her a break. I slow down a bit and lift my arm to my face, then bite myself at the wrist. It's a messy wound, and blood seeps out immediately, making me feel dizzy already. When I first started doing this for Bob, my mother thought I was possessed and had screamed each time, but eventually she grew used to me biting myself and nothing happening. As I pull my face back blood begins to drip from the gash, and I see Bob eyeing it eagerly. I hold my bleeding arm out, offering it to her, and with a quiet "thank you" she grabs it, sticking first her paw into the wound and then her whole leg begins to melt into it, like water seeping out of a hole in a water-skin, but instead of dripping out she's dripping in. I've stopped moving by now, and am standing around the edge of a building where no one can see me as the rest of her silver tabby body follows her leg, taking shelter in my body and joining my blood. It's kind of ghastly but I can't look away, I never can, because it's grossly fascinating, almost addicting. It feels funny too, like you're being filled to much and you're supposed to burst any moment now, but you never do. You're just left feeling too full until you get used to the feeling, and then when she comes out again I'm suddenly too empty. It's weird.
When she's in me the wound seals up, the skin being pulled together from the inside, and I wipe the blood off as best I can with a handful of grass before heading home. My family lives outside the village, on a hill, and I have to make it there in time for supper.
xXx
So there you go, another story from Ren that is hopefully not too bad. And if I do finish this, then yeah, it's going to be Harry Potter. But this is like the founders time, not when the books take place, so it's not really going to be Harry Potter. Just, like, in the same universe as Harry Potter.
Please review, and thank you for your time!