Sparks in the Dark
Twenty-Seventh Day of the Twelfth Month 292 AC
As Valaena carefully peeled the crackling pages of parchment apart, her mind wandered as it was wont to do on lazy days when nothing urgent presented itself to her. She made a list in her head of all the ways her current deportment might be counted unbecoming were she still under her father's room and not under the Dragon King's distant guardianship. She was still wearing riding leathers inside, about which her mother had been chiding her since shortly after she had ridden her first pony. She was lounging on a decadent eastern divan, the kind her elderly septa had once railed against for over an hour arguing about the godliness of chairs and how they were the Smith's own gift to honest folk. Oh, and she was reading about monsters. A little thrill half-fear and half-excitement went down her spine.
It was one thing to learn petty sorceries that seemed as a conjurer's tricks, no matter how many times her instructors reminded her that they were the bricks with which greater magics were built. Within those ancient pages marked by the quill of a long dead scribe in a land she could scarce imagine she saw a glimpse of another world, a frightful one for certain, where unclean spirits might take on the flesh of the dead and warp it into deadly semblances or worse still inhuman hungers may hide behind a pale, beautiful facade and lips red as blood.
As a child the young woman had contented herself with the notion that the age of heroes had long since passed, that the last legends had died with the dragons, but here and now she knew it to be false. As she carefully committed to memory the means by which to recognize and battle the living dead, just as she had done with the many and bewildering sorts of fiends, she yearned for a chance to face them even as her more sensible side, the one that sounded startling like her mother at times, reminded her that she had never even fought a mortal man in earnest.
A knock on the door startled Valaena from her thoughts, sounding less discrete than a servant's might. "It's open!" she called out with another twinge of conscience, this time at shouting like a fishwife. She took her feet off the divan and cleaned it off with a hurried spell just as the door opened to reveal a pale dark-haired girl who could count perhaps seven years.
"Do you have
Horrors of Neffer?" she asked in what Valaena had come to recognize after all her time here as a Braavosi accent of the bastard Valyrian of the East.
"Yes," she answered, startled.
What could the child want with the book?
"Could you give it to me for a quick reference? It won't take long," came the answer.
A sorceress, then, the Velaryon scion thought. She did have an odd air about her, a surety unusual for one of her tender years, and she was not any younger than the princess. Magic or not she hesitated to hand the book to child, though. Some of the matters discussed therein were dreadful, and the images left little to the imagination. "Aught you be reading something like that at your age?" Valaena asked, trying and possibly failing to sound mature from the towering seniority of four-and-ten.
The young girl did something then which she did not expect—she giggled. "Of all those to worry about ink upon the page, I would not be one."
"Why is that?" The words had lost all pretense of chiding, leaving only bemusement in their wake.
As swiftly and unexpectedly as it had come the good cheer left the girl's face. "Because I lived something of what the book tells of."
So simply and without artifice was this said that the young woman could not help but consider that it might be true. After all, was this not the place where one might turn a corner to find not only wizards but spirits of all sorts, men that lived 'neath the waves, or even the Children of the Forest brought here from the dark and frigid North? She wanted to ask more... of how the girl before her had lived the horrors in the tome, but at the same time she was held back not by mere courtesy but by the fear of stirring up some dark memory.
"Why do you want to know?" the girl asked as though guessing Valaena's intent.
She opened her mouth to deny wanting anything, but instead she found herself saying, "Because I want to fight them..." Having gotten ahead of herself, she reasoned that she might as well explain. "I can fight with a sword and I'm learning magic. Who better than me to fight monsters?" She imagined her parents would have had an answer very different from hers to that question, but they were far away and she doubted the strange child, born of foreign lands would judge her.
"That's a good reason." A slow, grave dip of the head then a start that made her look her age again. "I'm Kyla Fairwind. Sorry for not introducing myself.."
As she listened to the girl's tale of woe, of dread, and at last of hope, the spark of wistful distant desire in Valaena Velaryon's thoughts grew brighter and more fierce.
OOC: It did not want to just do an interlude with her first cantrip, since that felt a bit repetitive, so here's a bit of a study session and a glimpse into her shifting priorities.
