Lumen Emberlight

Lumen Emberlight

Set beside her twin brother, nobody would ever guess that Lumen and Lucien are related, let alone that they were born on the same night. Where he is all copper and grey-blue, she is pale gold and mismatched from head to toe. Her hair is a cloud of white-blonde curls that belongs to neither of her parents, and from it rise two small, curling horns, ribbed like her mother's but a burnished gold instead of pink. Her eyes do not match: the right is a warm amber and the left a clear violet, and she has a way of tilting her head so that people are never quite sure which one is looking at them. Her wings do not match either. Small and downy, they sprout from her back in two completely different colors, the right one a soft, pure white and the left a deep black with a violet sheen, like a raven's. Her right side, the family likes to say, is all light and her left all shadow. Her round cheeks are permanently pink, her smile tends to arrive just before trouble does, and at nearly two she stands a little shorter than her brother. She is usually dressed in soft, lace-trimmed blouses and embroidered pinafores that rarely survive a full day intact, and she is almost never without her plush bunny.

Lumen's wings are far too small to carry her yet, but they give her just enough lift to scramble onto things a toddler has no business reaching: the top of the wardrobe, the mantel, the middle shelf of the pantry, and once, memorably, the inside of the bread bin with the lid closed, which nobody has ever managed to explain. They also molt. Shed feathers, white and black, turn up all over the house, and the family sweeps for them twice a day for her brother's sake. Whether her molting has anything to do with Lucien's terror of loose feathers is a question the household has quietly stopped asking out loud. Lumen, unpredictable in nearly everything else, has never once teased him with one; when she finds a loose feather before he does, she tucks it into the ribbon around her bunny's neck, where he will never see it. The only other thing about her that never changes is doorways. Born under the Janus Owlbear, the sign of thresholds, she will not pass through a door without stopping exactly in the middle of it, half in and half out, for a long and solemn moment. Carry her through without stopping, and she will wriggle free, march back, and do it properly.