The Day of Endless Night

by **Avela** on January 12th, 2018, 8:01 pm

43rd of WInter, 517 AV

Avela dreamed of her mother.

She dreamed that she was chasing the woman through a field of flowers, each of her frantic steps kicking out a spray of brightly colored petals. Though Avela was running, and her mother walked at a sedate pace, nothing Avela did could close the distance between them; her mother always seemed on the edge of the horizon, just a step from fading away. Avela ran with arm outstretched, trying to reach her.

In life, Avela had no memory of her mother, but she knew, knew with the certainty of a dreamer in a dream, that the slight, silver-haired woman walking away from her had to be her.

"Mama!" she called in Kontinese, one of the handful of Kontinese words she knew. "Mama, please!"

The woman paused in her walk, turning back to look at Avela. Her eyes were a pale blue, the same as Avela's own, and she was smiling. She stretched out a single hand, marked on the back with a stylized lily. Avela put on a burst of speed, desperate, the fingers of her hand straining to reach for the woman. The wind picked up around her mother, a swirl of flower petals obscuring her from sight. The dream faded in a flash of color, Avela still struggling to reach out.

"No, mama! Mama, please, no!"

"No!"

The scream carried her into the waking world. Avela came awake with a start, breathing hard, staring up at her ceiling. For a moment, she was confused, wondering why she wasn't running. Then, her thoughts steadied themselves, and she touched her fingers, gingerly, to her face. They came away wet. Tears, she thought. She had been crying.

She took a breath, slow and deep, to steady her racing heart. Sleep tugged at her, trying to claim her, but she refused it for now, not wanting to go back to the dream. As she started to calm, she realized something odd. It was still dark in her cottage, still quiet, but surely she'd been sleeping for a while. Surely...

Memory returned to her. Yesterday. Yesterday, the sun had never set. She'd spent part of the day working, and the rest...

Her eyes tracked towards her window, the winter wind rattling at the latch. Kairen, she remembered. Her little brother had been just as energized by the day of sunlight as the others. He'd climbed into her cottage while she was out, made a mess of things while waiting for her.

If there could be a day of sunlight, why couldn't there be a day of night?

She lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She should go back to sleep. She'd hardly slept the day before, enjoying the unnatural sunlight. It was cold, and she was tired, and she should sleep. But the fire was burning low in the hearth, and it would soon grow colder, and if she slept, the dreams would be waiting.

Dreams...

With a groan, Avela tugged the blankets off of herself and sat up, getting to her feet.

Purchases :

by **Avela** on January 14th, 2018, 1:41 am

It was surreal waking up in a world without the sun. Avela still felt as though she was dreaming. She stood in the center of her one-room cottage, in a billowing nightgown likely a shade too large for her, in slippers on the wooden floor, her silver hair floating around her head like a halo. She felt like a ghost walking the world, a figure in her own dream.

After standing around for a moment feeling lost, Avela made her way to the window. The first thing she did on every morning, the first indicator of just how well her day was going to go. She wiped some of the condensation off of the glass on her side, peering out into the streets. The glow of streetlights illuminated the snow that had piled up in drifts just outside, surrounding the banks of a small stream that ran down the alleyway outside. A glance out the front door told her that the street outside her house had been replaced by a gaping chasm. There would be no leaving that way.

Assuming she intended to leave at all. Avela closed and latched the door, shivering against the cold wind that had come into the cottage. It was impossible to tell what time it was supposed to be, but the streets were empty. Today, it seemed, would not be a day for industry.

After a moment of thought, Avela's eyes drifted towards the desk where she usually worked. The desktop was a mess of candlemaking supplies, droplets of wax coating the surface along with scraps of paper that detailed plans and the disastrous result of Avela's last attempt at engraving. There was something buried in the mess, something that Avela tried hard not to think about. Not because she didn't want to think about it, not because it meant nothing to her, but because thinking about it always made her feel twisted inside, tied her stomach in knots and left her with a feeling of unease.

She didn't like thinking about it, but she couldn't stop herself from thinking about it now.

Avela lit the failed candle--while it produced a good enough light, the mess she had made of it meant that it would be no good to sell anyway. Its flickering flame illuminated the desktop, casting odd shadows on the walls. She reached into that mess and carefully unearthed a leather-bound journal, running her fingers over the well-worn cover. Handling its pages with care, she opened them, looking through them.

Pages and pages of words jumped out at her, black ink on the page, occasionally interspersed with drawings and what looked like crude area maps. Her mother's journal, the book detailing the epic adventure that had taken Ayana from the White Isle all the way to Kalea's most mysterious city. There were stories in this book to rival the best adventure novels, tales that even the most reticent bard would want to sing about.

Or at least, that was what Avela assumed. Because she couldn't read them.

The journal was written in Kontinese, a language that Avela had a poor grasp on at best. Familiar words jumped out at her from unfamiliar sentences, grammar and syntax and slang made even the most simple sentences seem like an impenetrable fog. Once, when Avela had been a child, she had made an attempt at studying the language. She felt as though she'd gotten pretty far. She could introduce herself, say her name, order a wine and talk about the weather. But her mother's journal eluded her, and after a while, Avela had given up.

It was just too hard. It was still too hard.

It was too hard to see these words and not understand them. Too hard to try to read them, through the tears that blurred her eyes. Too hard to face this part of herself.

Avela shut the journal with a snap, suddenly feeling like the walls were too close around her, like the cottage held too much of herself and her failures. She looked around for somewhere to go, and her eyes landed on the window.

If Kairen could climb in through it, Avela thought, certainly she could climb out.

It took her a moment to pull her red coat on over her nightgown, the bright red lending her a flash of color. She pulled on her boots and blew out the candle, then, after a moment's thought, took the key to the cottage with her and made her way over to the window. She unlatched it, dragging her chair underneath it. Climbing up onto the sill was easy with the chair to help her, and Avela carefully maneuvered herself until she was dropping down, feet-first, into the snow drift below.

Purchases :

by **Avela** on January 14th, 2018, 1:52 am

The wave of cold hit her as she landed, like leaping face first into a bowl of cold water. Avela shivered, but looking back at the window, she felt a thrill, a sort of self-satisfaction at having done what she had done. She was standing in the snow, in the street outside of her own house, in a nightgown and coat with no one to mind her, no one to tell her otherwise.

It was terrifying and thrilling and freeing all at once, but Avela had to wonder where she would go from here.

She looked up and down the street, listening to the trickle of water from the stream become a crashing sound as it fell into the chasm that blocked the road outside her front door. Neither direction particularly appealed to her. She had no desire to try to cross that chasm, and she didn't particularly want to get too far away from her house. That was, of course, until her eyes moved up.

Perhaps it was part of the illusion, or perhaps it was something she had never noticed, but had her house always had those rough patches in the exterior wall? They looked almost like they could be handholds. After a moment of hesitation, Avela laid one hand onto a handhold higher than her head, curling her fingers around it and testing to see if it would hold her weight. It would. A test of a foothold showed that it would do the same.

Was she really going to do this? Climb her own house in the middle of the night? She could already hear her stepmother's voice, telling her she'd fall and break her neck, and so much the better.

And yet.

She was alone in the world, alone under the sky. What better to do than to take chances?

With a deep breath to steady herself, Avela placed her hands on the nearest handholds, levering herself onto the footholds below her. If Kairen could do this, she could, she told herself. After all, he was only nine, and she was twenty-five. Even in Konti years, that had to count for something.

With slow, deep breaths, Avela began to climb.

Credit to Gomer Caitiff

by **Avela** on January 15th, 2018, 6:42 pm

It was slowgoing at first. Avela's fingers ached with the strain of having to support her body, slight as she was, and she paused to cling to the side of the house several times, breathing hard and too scared to take the next step. Once, not too far from street level, she slipped, falling into the snow drifts that had piled up against her house wall. But there was something in the night that gave her courage, something in the night that made her feel reckless, that made her want to push herself to climb higher and higher. She stood up from the snow, shook out her curtain of silver hair, and pressed her hands to the wall, a look of determination on her face as she pulled herself up inch by grueling inch.

One step in front of another. One movement at a time.

Letting her fingers close around the rim of the rooftop of her cottage, scrambling up the last few feet to push herself onto the sloped roof--that felt like a triumph.

Avela lay there for a while when she managed it, breathing heavily, her face flushed with the exertion. She let out a giddy laugh, rolling onto her back with her arms spread around her. From this position, she could see the sky. A blue moon hung high in the heavens, and around it, the stars were rearranging themselves, a dazzling feat of illusion. Her laughter echoed in the air around her as she beheld the sight. Like she was now, she could almost pretend that the stars were rearranging themselves for her.

Avela watched the stars until the rising and fall of her chest slowed and calmed, then smiled, pushing herself up so that she was sitting. Though the vantage point of her rooftop wasn't much higher than from the ground, she could see the streets and houses around her. The streets were empty aside from a huddled figure moving with a shuffling gait about two streets away--Avela studied the figure with curiosity for a few moments before determining that it might be a transient, or someone who was quite mad--and the houses had undergone their nightly shift. This day, her house was closer to the Temple of Ionu, visible for once. It stood apart from the other buildings of the city, the shadows of night clinging to it so that it presented itself only in silhouette.

The sight of the temple dampened Avela's mood, quieting even the barest hint of breathless laughter inside her. She remembered her dream, the lily mark on her mother's hand. With a sigh, Avela flopped back down onto the rooftop, raising her own right hand towards the stars so that she could look at the back of it, the unbroken stretch of pale skin. It had been her father who explained this to her, her father, who had heard it from her mother. Konti were often marked by Avalis or Rak'keli at birth, like her mother had been.

Like Avela hadn't been.

It made her think, like she sometimes thought at nights like these, when sleep tugged at the edges of her consciousness but didn't claim her, that Avalis hadn't intended to create her at all. That she was an aberration, an accident, a Konti that lived like a human.

Sometimes, in the night when the darkness threatened to drown her, she wondered if that was why her mother died. If she was at fault for that somehow.

"But that doesn't make sense, does it...?" she muttered, more to the wind and the stars than as any actual prayer. "You don't hate me, do you, Avalis? You just maybe...didn't expect me to be born..."

There was no answer, but Avela didn't expect there would be. Why would there be? It wasn't as if she had shown Avalis any particular devotion, other than a handful of prayers here and there. Or any of the gods for that matter. With a sigh, Avela pushed herself up, looking at the Temple again.

Like most Alvads, her family worshiped Ionu, though they weren't particularly devout about it. Avela felt as though she shared her family's casual reverence. When was the last time she had gone to the Temple of her own accord?

As if in answer to her thoughts, the Temple flickered at the edges of her vision, vanishing in an eye blink. Avela sighed, and blinked the shimmer out of her eyes as she studied the blank patch of ground where the Temple had been. Might still be, maybe, if she was inclined to look. She wasn't.

"Was that for me?" she asked, her voice soft as she wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on them. "Or was that random?" The hard part about worshiping Ionu, especially in Alvadas, was that it was difficult to tell. But the constellations continued to rearrange themselves, so Avela contented herself with watching the display, picking out shapes and features in the stars.

I should pray more.

It wasn't really a resolution, just an idle thought, but it nagged and nagged at her like nothing else. If anything, she thought, she couldn't continue to live like this. Couldn't continue to live half in one world and half in the other, but be lukewarm in both. Couldn't continue to sit at her desk, make candles and claim to be living.

Praying more would be a good start. Ionu and Avalis, the two sides of her nature. Illusions and visions, lies and truths. Being unable to decide didn't mean that she should ignore both.

The thought of her mother's journal came back to her, those impenetrable words and beautiful drawings, and Avela felt a pang of guilt.

Maybe, she thought, just maybe, while she was at it, she could start learning Kontinese again.

The thought scared her. Learning Kontinese was daunting, but not as daunting as what it represented. The expanse of her future, unknown, rising up to meet her. But maybe it was like climbing the roof, she thought, rubbing at her arms.

Maybe the important thing was just taking that first step.

by **Madeira Dusk** on February 5th, 2018, 9:30 pm

Grades Awarded!

Don't forget to edit/delete your grade request!

Avela

Skills

Endurance: 2xp
Climbing: 2xp
Observation: 2xp

Lores

Endurance: fighting sleep
Lore of identity crisis

Awards & Retribution

Notes
Congratulations on your first graded thread! This was a wonderful, emotional introduction to Avela's motivations and development. I look forward to seeing more from you!

If you have questions about the grade, please PM me.

Solo The Day of Endless Night