Vesha Goodblu

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Vesha is four years old and built like someone who has been in motion since she could stand and has not seriously considered stopping. Her scales are a bright, clean blue, her father's coloring worn light and vivid, and her eyes are his green too: the particular shade that reads as genuine and open and slightly too aware of what is funny about the current situation. Her hair has grown out considerably from the small red tuft she started with and is now full and bright and divided into two high pigtails she insists on maintaining herself, with the results that implies. She wears a dark leather vest over a simple tunic, with a pair of studded bracers on her wrists that are slightly too large and were clearly not made for her and that she cares about deeply regardless. Her tail moves with her mood, which means it moves constantly. She is, in any given moment, either running, climbing, balancing on something, or briefly between any of those three things.

Vesha has her mother's physical instincts: the balance, the quick read of a surface, the way she places her feet when she is doing something that requires precision, which is automatic and comes from nowhere anyone has yet taught her. She has her father's green eyes and her father's complete inability to walk away from something that needs doing or someone who looks like they need a friend. The combination produces a child who will climb the tallest thing available and then come down to check if you are all right. She still has the habit of reaching for the nearest hand when she is uncertain without checking whose it is first, though she does it less than she used to, because she is four now and that is not something four-year-olds do in front of their school friends, as she has made clear.

Vesha was born to Durkum and Skreecha in the small village they had built from nothing, and her arrival was the happiest event either of them had ever experienced. Durkum held her for three hours without setting her down. Skreecha watched him and cried, which she has never admitted to. For the first months of her life, Vesha knew only warmth, noise, two people who loved her completely, and the soft sounds of a home being kept.

Vesha was still an infant when the Faceless came. She has no memory of it. She does not know she died. She does not know that her father crawled out of the ruin of their life and spent over a year carrying her memory like a wound he would not let close. She knows none of this. She is four years old, and the world is enormous and interesting, and her father is very tall and her mother's hair is very red and everything is fine.

On Frostnight 2, 1304, a wave of magic passed through Goodberry's graveyard and Vesha opened her eyes in her mother's arms. To her, it was simply another moment following the last. She did not know there had been sixteen months of nothing between them. She looked around at the crowd of confused and weeping strangers, grabbed her mother's collar, and pointed at a beetle walking across a gravestone. Skreecha laughed, the kind of laugh that is almost crying. Somewhere nearby, Durkum dropped to his knees.

Goodberry is the only home Vesha consciously remembers, and she has taken to it with the wholehearted enthusiasm of someone who has correctly identified a good situation and intends to enjoy every part of it. She knows the market vendors by name and most of them by what they will give her if she smiles at the right moment. She knows which parts of the settlement grounds have the best climbing and which ones her parents think she does not know about. She knows the other children who live here, and has opinions about all of them, and has made firm friends with several of them, and is in an ongoing rivalry with at least one about who can balance longest on the log beam in the yard. She is, by any measure, a happy child in a place that suits her exactly.

Vesha started school and found, broadly, that she approved of it. There are other children there, which she considers an improvement over most situations, and things to learn, and an outdoor yard with a balance beam that she has dominated since the first week. The sitting still parts are harder. The listening parts are easier than her teachers expected, because she has her mother's quality of sudden total focus when something genuinely earns it, and when it earns it, she is right there. She has made friends with a confidence and ease that her parents privately find extraordinary given everything that produced her, and that is, if you understand where she came from, perhaps the most Vesha thing about her: she walks toward people without fear, the same way she walks toward the balance beam, the same way she walks toward anything interesting, which is everything.

The relationship between Vesha and Durkum is the kind that other parents watch from across a yard and say nothing about because there is nothing to say. He is enormous. She rides on his shoulders and is the tallest person present and finds this completely correct. She has his eyes and his instinct for gentleness, though hers comes out differently, as action rather than stillness: she sits next to the child who is alone at the edge of the yard, she hands things to people who are struggling to reach them, she notices unhappiness the way Durkum does and moves toward it rather than away. She is four years old and she has no idea she is doing this. He knows. He watches. Some nights, after she is asleep, he sits in the quiet and holds the fact of her like something he still has not entirely learned to trust, and is still learning, slowly, that it is real and it is his and it is going to stay.

There is a specific child at school who has held the record for longest balance on the log beam for two weeks now, and Vesha is aware of this, and has a plan. The plan involves practice. She has been practicing. This is currently her most pressing concern and she is approaching it with the focused seriousness her mother applies to problems that matter, which is considerable.

Vesha does not think in these terms. She is four. But the shape of what she wants is legible in everything she does: the friends she keeps close, the way she runs back to check on people who fall, the way she climbs to the top of the highest thing available and then looks for her parents before she does anything else. She wants the yard and the friends and the log beam and her father's shoulders and her mother's red hair and the beetles and the rocks and the whole enormous interesting world. She would like all of it, please, and she would like it to stay.

Vesha is the daughter of a retired rogue and an F-grade Swolbold fighter, and she has inherited something from each of them that has not yet declared what it is going to become. She has her mother's physical instincts and her father's heart. She is fearless in the way that comes not from not understanding danger but from having decided it is not going to be the thing that stops her. She is four years old and she does not know she died once. Whatever she becomes, she has already, without knowing it, done something remarkable: she came back, and she did not bring the dark with her.