Aurore's Origins

The sun scorched sands and molten glass made for tricky footing in the Whispering Sands, but Aurore's paws were numb to the heat, despite how little she usually walked across the sands. She much preferred to fly over the boring stretches of dunes until she'd gotten to someplace more interesting. The wild forests and bustling cities were much more intriguing to her, despite all the noise.

Her mother in Vitrun was a blacksmith by trade, fusing the beautiful glass into blades and decorative armors. They were mostly ceremonial, but you had to create a few functional pieces to get to her level of craft. That was mostly how Durna operated, ornate speech from her years spent in academies, layered over harsh and direct statements. She had studied water magic, by the coast, comfortably rising the ranks of scholars. At least to start. The Tree knows how she'd ended up here, but she refused to talk about it, even to Aurore.

Perhaps specifically to Aurore. Durna had never wanted children. She made that clear at every opportunity. Not that she was cruel, she had gone out of her way to give Aurore a good place to live, when she realized the young thing would not leave her be. She'd been on a pilgrimage to the Tree, and Aurore had always had an eye for trinkets, and that was that.

But Aurore much preferred the beautiful shimmering and brilliance of the city, which often distracted newcomers, to the emptiness of the desert itself. It was much harder to hide from the sun here. She also couldn't take Bow on these treks, having to leave the Ayserai in the cool nook of water that Durna had always kept. He had been a gift, for Aurore's second hatching day, and she had clung to his beautiful scales and slippery movements, watching through the glass window of the tank in the shadows of their basement. Still, she wasn't out here alone, at least.

She plodded through the swirling shadow, paws spread and wings out for balance. She snuffled against the sand in face as the wind kicked up, watching the layer of sand atop the rocks sway. There had been sightings of some Sand Skitters out here recently, and she had volunteered her time to catch some. It wasn't a well paid job, nor in favorable conditions, but Aurore enjoyed the hunt, as well as the thrill that shot down her spine any time she landed where Sand Devils might surface. She had never faced them head on, of course, but she had been raised far too familiar to the sand and the threat of the beasts to be scared off by them. It was just as risky for her as the tricks of the Avilli who preformed aerial swoops and twirls around the top of the tent during festivals, and no one stopped them.

She couldn't see any Skitters at the moment, but they probably weren't the prettier varieties out here in the wild, so she wasn't too worried. Her guard, and psuedo-brother, was already groaning about the heat, so this was already a fairly ordinary trip. Aurore dropped smoothy to her stomach. She may not be able to shimmy beneath the sands, but Skitters had far less patience than her.

"All set!" She called up, allowing him to move his conspicuous shadow elsewhere. The sun was at least setting by this point, and in a few minutes the dunes would cast their own harsh shadows. It made Aurore much more comfortable, despite the increased risk of missing the signs of a Sand Devil, if only because the sun on her feathers was unbearably hot, even for her.

As expected, the second all movement ceased on the surface of the Skitters' den, she could hear the faint sounds of chittering beneath her. Despite how nomadic Sand Skitters were, they needed safe places to sleep and raise young, so they seemed to share a network of caves, cracks, and crevices across the desert. This one must have been larger than she thought, but it was hard to tell. Up until a season ago, any hard rock had been completely hidden by sand, and it was impossible to know how deep it went. Still, for her to be able to hear even the smallest reverberation through the stone and sand meant there was either a abnormally loud critter, or a whole mass of them.

It wasn't until the sky began to change color that the sand began to shift. Aurore kept her muscles relaxed and her wings spread, not twitching a muscle. Whatever was beneath the sand didn't need any more indication of where she was. The flash of beige beneath her jaw made her heart freeze, but regardless she had her paws slapping down on it in an instant. It squeaked and gave way under the strike, a maple-colored body flapped harshly against the sand, as tails rose up around her. She grabbed the soft Skitter in relief, trying not to shudder at the memory of the first time it had been hard scale beneath her paws.

In a few moments of rush, she had managed to grab a couple of skitters by the tail, alongside the one she picked up with her jaw, and flared her wings as she took off, letting her white ribbon feathers catch the last of the suns rays. They were the brightest part of her from above, and let her brother know she had sprung their trap. In moments she dropped them in a basket and returned to her hunt. She followed the few flashes of color. She had never caught a silken skitter before, but anything other than a maple skitter would make more money than the few she had already caught. If she made enough off of this, she would be able to travel to the woods, any woods, really, again. She desperately wanted to walk on loud plants, and hear noisy creatures that she could never find, despite how they sought to broadcast their location.

It was sheer luck that the pink flash surfaced. Aurore's shadow was hidden by the dune, and the poor creature must have thought it was safer as the sky turned the same shade as it. She wrestled with it, it's tail held defensively in the air, and it's body smacking harshly into her wings. It made a dive under the sand, and Aurore had never wished so much for a Voxi's claws as in that moment, knowing her own were not suited for digging. Harshly, she swept an outstretched paw over the sand, catching a glimpse of that same pink, more gray with the sun almost set, and kept turning. She didn't have a prehensile tail, like her mother, but she had some practice regardless, and the tapering point was the only thing she trusted to bury into the sand fast enough. She was blind, rooting deeper, hoping she could stun it again.

Sand skitters were not used to the touch of fur or feathers, their bodies smooth and their predators' scaly, and so often reacted with confusion when they felt a Avilli or a Voxi's touch for the first time. Confusion and panic might make it thrash again, bringing it back to the surface.

She felt nothing but sand. Her stomach filled with disappointment, cold and heavy, but expected. She would have to find some other source of coin if she wanted to explore again.

...

Aurore traded the last skitter to a pet shop. It was a juvenile, so it couldn't really be sold to a breeder or as livestock for the Voxies, and none of her own family would eat it, so a pet it was, lucky thing. The nearest pet shop that took in wild-born creatures was on the other side of the center of town to Durna's  house, so she left it for last, meandering through the stalls with her meager earnings. She didn't usually spend much outside of business, but she still liked to look at the wares.

The main street in the main tent of Vitrun was an open-air market. The stalls changed constantly, eagerly snatched up by artists and vendors of all sorts. It was, at least, mostly reserved for residents, even if it was a bit of a tourist attraction. Behind these stalls were restaurants, cafes, and public spaces, such as the central oasis, or the glass parks.  They were the buffer between the noise of the public sector and the personal dwellings. The wealthier neighborhood were even cordoned off by giant tapestries, paintings, murals, or statues. Her own home was protected by a series of arches of stained glass. Nothing out of the ordinary for Vitrun, where glass was overflowing from the ground, but it sold high to outsiders. Durna had decorated the outsider of her hut with simple sheets of fur, most of which she had hunted herself, but her connected shop/smithery was surrounded by a cage of elegant metalwork, and otherwise left transparent glass. It was a little bit of a trick, since there was only a small layer of sand between the floor and the basement carved in stone, with the stairs hidden by her main displays and counter.

The nice thing about a shop made of glass, was that displays could face the wall, and still be displaying works. Aurore often had to remind herself that she had to enter shops outside of Vitrun in order to see their wares. The downside was the heat. When the vent for forging was open, it was about the same temperature as when the flames went out and the vent closed.

"I'm back!" She called to her mother, sidling through the quaint wooden door into the cool of the shaded bedroom. It was a cramped space to fit more than Durna but Aurore never complained. "I almost caught a pink one this time, I think in a few years I might be able to catch up to the speedy ones! Maybe then I'll make enough to get further out."

"There aren't enough hours in the day for you, Child." Durna grunted, pushing a plate with a large desert grub covered in a fruit sauce towards her on their tiny table. "You're far too restless of a spirit to stay stuck with me."

"That's not true!" Aurore cried, sliding into a crouch next to the wall, hovering over her untouched dinner. "If I can get further out than Lanris, even just to Arglass, I could--"

"I wouldn't bother, child. If I were you, I'd find something else to occupy my time. Travel is dangerous and lonely. I do not want that for you. I'd rather you stay out of the desert at all. You are an artist, not a fighter. It is the one thing I knew I could teach you."

"Of course, mama, I only meant that it would give me access to more materials if I could harvest them myself. Then I could supply you with sketches and wood, and perhaps even preserve some plants!"

"You have never preserved a thing before."

"I can learn! I want to learn, and I know Kitry might know how! He has to dry stuff all the time."

"He dries food, dear, it is not the same. You can not expect everyone here to be able to teach you all that you want to know. You'd need a teacher for that."

"That what it means to teach, mother, to be a teacher."

"Not quite, my dear. Here." She doesn't have to stand to reach the chest at the foot of her bed, simply twist around. She takes a piece of paper from it, placing it firmly on the table between them. "I got this from a friend a few days ago, and I wasn't sure when to give it to you, but this man has offered his training in magic to a select few citizens of the city. It's a great honor, but it's binding, you would have to stay in the city during your education. He is a high level artisan, a fire mage. Think about it."

Aurore blinked down at the paper in shock. It was beautiful, covered in the thinnest layer of glass, she almost hadn't seen it in the dimness of the hut. How was it even stuck to the paper like that? It was a marvel, for sure, and she desperately wanted to question its maker.

She finished her dinner in silence, and left without a word to the basement.

Face to face with her fish, Bow, she placed the paper against his tank. Aurore felt the wash of guilt come over her. It was a golden opportunity, with a golden shimmering ticket attached, but she could not take it. She wanted to, for her mother, for her art, but the idea of staying under the tarps and canvas of Vitrun made her wings strain to spread across her room. She loved the art, really, she did, she loved the city with all of her heart, but something about it was just a little too wrong. It ate at her, how trapped some of her friends and neighbors felt in the city, unable to save up enough to get the supplies to move away. She might have traveled outside the Whispering sands, but it was always on business, on her mother's money, for supplies or deliveries.

She could have stayed on the other side of that border a dozen times. She didn't want to, but she could.

It burrowed into her heart to see strangers gawking at them, or to see the people around her who gawked back at the outsiders with no will to learn about the world outside of their city. The people who decried tourists as pompous and somehow lesser, despite how little they knew about even their own city. Aurore had once met a Voxi who had never left the smaller tent she'd been raised under, who didn't even know of the schools in Vitrun. She hadn't been unhappy, but she had lamented that she hadn't known about some of the programs in the city she might have been able to participate in. She could have volunteered in a garden, or gotten an education, but she had never bothered to look for it; didn't know it was out there.

Said Voxi was an avid gardener now, growing what plants she could, shaping them into beautiful spirals, speaking at length about each variety and the shapes they could make. Aurore was glad to have met her. Serrin may or may not have tried to adopt her a couple of times, even, because she was a sweetheart.

Aurore needed to be learning. She couldn't stop. It was just wrong. Her mother thought that you could only learn through institutions, but she didn't want to learn about stuffy principles of magic. Well, no, she did, she really wanted to know that, but she *also* wanted to know about how to take care of animals, and fly through trees, and make art. Not just physical works, but make art, to move in the ways artisans perfected, to leave in her wake a number of writers and gardeners and explorers.

Plus, Serrin may have connected her to a traveling merchant based in Vitrun who was teaching her magic already, and it wasn't fire magic.

Not that it was too late to switch, she had not actually cast any shadow magic of her own, not really, but... well, it would certainly be frowned upon, if her mother knew. She liked shadow magic. So far, it had felt, right. Compelling, quick, omnipresent. It would allow her to travel faster, to hunt and blend in with animals.

It was so much quieter in the dark. Bow lived here, and the sand skitters slept here, and she wanted so desperately to learn what that was like.

She gathered her things. She knew it was cruel to leave her mother so abruptly, but Durna would understand. She was just as brusque herself, sometimes, and this would not break their bond. They never fought. It was not in their nature. They simply expressed their disapproval and continued on. Durna had said it over and over again: Aurore was aloud to do whatever she wanted. She had chosen to be a family, she could choose to respect that as she wished, and she Durna could only help with the consequences as she was able.

Aurore was choosing to leave nothing but a note for her mother to find, and to try to weasel her way into her teachers caravan for a discount tonight. She would have to leave Bow, and she'd visit her friends before she went, but she needed to know if she was right.

She'd follow her teacher wherever he went, even back here, but first up, Ardglass. The largest city state in Kyvalore.