Averei

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

C-grade beauty sits on Averei as something qualitatively different from what her D-grade siblings carry. Where Rayeene produces in a room the effect of an extraordinary person being present, Averei produces the effect of something that should not quite exist being present, a quality that observers describe afterward as light seeming to behave differently near her, or as the sensation of having briefly stood somewhere very old and very alive. She appears to be perhaps seventeen, the consequence of being a hundred and eighty years into a fifty-thousand-year potential lifespan, and the C-grade physical perfection applied to features that are already luminously lovely yields a result that stops conversations without her doing anything at all. Her skin is pale with a warmth in the undertones that prevents it from reading as cold, her hair is a honey-gold that falls to the middle of her back and catches light with the lazy richness of something more alive than ordinary hair tends to be, and her eyes are a soft grey-green that people remember specifically after meeting her, the way you remember a particular afternoon of unusual quality. Then there are the wings. Large, fully feathered, spanning perhaps twelve feet at full extension, and a white so clean and faintly luminous that in dim light they appear to generate their own quiet glow. She carries them folded against her back in the city with the easy unconscious habit of someone who has had them long enough to forget other people need to adjust to them.

Averei has a laugh that arrives quickly and fully, the laugh of someone who has never learned to hold it back for propriety, and it is disproportionately effective at making other people laugh whether they intended to or not. She crouches to speak to children at their eye level without thinking about it. She has soil on her hands or her boots or both at almost all times because she does not change after working the graves before running errands in the city, and the combination of this detail with everything else about her appearance produces a cognitive dissonance in new acquaintances that she finds endlessly funny. She has a habit of resting one of her wings lightly around the shoulders of people she is comforting, which is either the most naturally reassuring gesture anyone has ever experienced or deeply startling depending entirely on whether you were expecting it. Her relationship with death and grief is so genuinely untroubled that it occasionally unnerves people who are themselves troubled by it, until they spend enough time around her to understand that her ease with the end of things is not indifference but the opposite: she finds the full cycle so full and so interesting that grief in her presence tends to feel less like a closed door and more like a very long corridor with a great deal still in it.

Averei was the first child Faulka brought to Les'Orei. She was eighteen, Faulka walked with her to the gate without saying much, and at the gate she turned and left. Averei stood there for a while looking at the city ahead of her, genuinely curious about what was inside it, and then went in. That is the shape of the memory and it has not changed in a hundred and sixty-two years. She is aware that her siblings carry that same morning differently, that for some of them it represents the beginning of a wound that has been open ever since. She does not try to tell them their memory is wrong. She has simply never been able to find the wound in her own version of it, and she has made her peace with the fact that she may be constitutionally unsuited to carrying certain kinds of hurt for very long.

Averei found the burial grounds of Les'Orei in her second week in the city, not because she was looking for them but because she was following the most interesting smell she had encountered since arriving, a deep mineral-green richness that turned out to be the particular combination of well-tended soil, old root systems, and decades of slow decomposition that a properly kept cemetery produces. She walked through the grounds for several hours, reading what the earth was telling her, and by the time she left she had a thorough understanding of what was wrong with the drainage on the north side, what three of the older sections were about to produce in the coming season if left unattended, and why a cluster of graves near the eastern wall had never properly settled. She came back the next day with tools and began fixing things. The groundskeeper at the time found her working and asked who had authorized this. She told him she had. He thought about arguing and then watched her work for another hour and decided not to. She has held the formal warden title for a hundred and forty years. The grounds under her care are a living document of everything she has learned about the full cycle of growing things, and they are considered among the most beautiful and peaceful spaces in the city.

The wings arrived during Averei's C-grade transition forty years ago. She had been warned by everyone who knew anything about high-grade transitions that the process would be among the most physically demanding experiences of her life, and they were correct. She describes the actual transition as three weeks of something she compares to being slowly remade from the inside by a force that is not precisely unkind but is absolutely indifferent to your comfort, and the wings arriving as the final stage of that process as the strangest and most immediately inconvenient morning of her existence. She knocked over every piece of furniture in her quarters before she learned to fold them properly. She went through four doorframes that she has been meaning to get properly widened ever since. She mourns occasionally the loss of sleeping on her back, which she has not been able to do comfortably in forty years, though she has discovered that sleeping in the open air on the grave grounds on warm nights is an entirely adequate substitute and arguably better. What the wings gave her beyond the obvious capacity for flight is a quality of presence that even other C-grade individuals tend to register as something beyond what the grade alone produces. She is still getting used to the full scope of what she became.

Averei does not hold family meetings or coordinate her siblings' responses to Faulka's warrant or attempt to manage the emotional lives of five people who are each substantially younger and in most cases considerably more guarded than she is. What she does is show up. She appears at Quon's office with food he did not ask for on the days she suspects the weight of what he carries is sitting heaviest, and she stays for exactly as long as he seems to want company before leaving without making it a thing. She walks the grave grounds with Untilla on the rare occasions he comes into the city and does not try to make him talk. She sits in Ysa's studio once a fortnight and does needlework while Ysa weaves and they do not always speak but the room is less alone for both of them. She has dinner with Rayeene's children whenever she can manage it and considers those evenings among the best hours of her current century. She checks in on Aagill by leaving things at his gate, never knocking, knowing he will find them and knowing that receiving a thing without having to manage the social interaction of receiving it is the version of care he can accept. None of this is calculated or strategic. It is simply how she loves people, attentively and without requiring anything back, and it is the most direct expression of who she is that exists.

Averei has been in quiet negotiation with the city council for eleven years about expanding the burial grounds northward into a parcel of currently unused civic land that she has identified as having exceptional soil composition for the kind of deep, long-term planting she wants to establish. The council is not opposed in principle but has been slow to formalize it, in the way that city councils are slow to formalize things that have no immediate political urgency. She is not impatient. She has explained what the land would become under her care and left a detailed written description of the ecological process with each relevant council member. She expects it will be approved within the next ten to fifteen years. She is already planning the layout.

Averei wants children with a completeness and certainty that she treats as simply one of the facts of herself, the way she treats her wings or her bloodline ability: a thing that is true, that she is not anxious about, and that will resolve itself in its own time. She is not looking in any active sense. She is not waiting impatiently. She is simply a person who knows herself well enough to know that this part of her life has not yet arrived and is entirely at ease with the timeline being long. She has been proposed to four times. She declined all four with warmth and without regret. She knows what she is looking for in the general shape of it, though she does not describe it to people who ask in any terms more specific than: someone who would be genuinely good at being a parent, and who would find the grave grounds beautiful rather than unsettling. Both conditions have, so far, proven more selective than they sound.

Averei's most persistent and least grandiose ambition is to get each of her siblings through whatever they are currently carrying in a way that leaves them slightly less burdened than they were before. She does not expect to resolve Ysa's grief or convert Quon's controlled fury into something softer or convince Untilla that the city is worth more of his time than he currently gives it. She simply intends to be present, consistently, in the particular way that she is present for people, and to trust that this is worth something even when it cannot be measured. The warrant for Faulka is a part of all of their lives now, and she hopes what comes of it, whatever form that takes, gives the ones who need it something they can put down afterward. She will be at whatever proceeding results from it. She will stand with all of them. And when it is over she intends to take everyone to Rayeene's house for dinner, because a full table with people arguing warmly is the best available medicine for most things, and it is past time they all sat down together as what they actually are.