I’m trying out a new character voice -- anyone want to ask her questions?
Yara was born in the Forest Arden, the child of Julian and one of his endlessly capable and loyal rangers. As a babe-in-arms, she lived with her mother; as a child she was allowed to run free in the forest. It was, in its way, a test -- to see if she could survive, to see if she would love her home the way her parents did, to see if she would run away or always come back.
In every way possible, she passed those tests.
She was a clever girl, sharp-eyed and quick on her feet. She learned quickly how to identify every plant and tree -- not only the ones that were safe to climb, good to eat, but how to find her way through the forest. She learned how to take what she needed and give back what she did not use.
And though she loved her forest, she came home every evening. She rarely slept in her bed, preferring instead to lie out on the ground, staring up at the stars through the leaves and branches of her home. She had everything she could want, but then again she wanted very little -- she had food enough, and shelter, her mother's care and sturdy boots. Anything more than that was odd and unnecessary luxury.
She was a quiet girl, a solemn one, but as she grew older the rangers who lived in the same encampment learned she had a sense of humor. She would build traps -- ones that were not dangerous, simply elaborate -- and see if she could trip up some of the more dour men who passed through. She could whistle like a bird and grunt like a boar, and some hunters would find that she would lead them on a merry chase for hours, if you let her. She rarely spoke, but eventually she'd let you know she was there -- a flash of blue eyes, a flicker of a grin, and she'd disappear into the woods again.
Her father took notice of these traps she liked to build, and he encouraged her. He was no artificer himself, but he would reach out into Shadow, bring her new mechanisms to study, new materials to use. Those were her toys, as a teenager; exotic woods, fascinating stones, metal that took strange tools to work and bend. When she was old enough to move out of her mother's house she built her own, and set into a wall inside is a small scrap of every material her father has ever brought her. It's oddly sentimental, but those days were her happiest, sheltered there in the Forest.
Julian would come by, from time to time, and the two of them rarely spoke when he did. He would come into her house, make his way to her workshop, and she would smile at him and demonstrate a few things she had built. He would leave her gifts if he had them. If he was pleased, he would squeeze her shoulder as he passed her on his way out. It was good. It was enough.
As she got older, he sent other gifts, more unusual ones. A very fine horse -- nothing like Morgenstern, of course, just a flesh and blood animal from a nearby shadow -- but it was grey like moonlight and had the perfect temperament. The best swordsman of the rangers once took up teaching her to fight. He never told her why, and she didn't ask, but she knew it had been her father who put him up to it. Leather armor of infinite quality, the perfect brown-grey of forest light, that fit her with a startling precision and allowed her to move even more silently through the woods. A sword and a bow, of course, and daggers. Her house has furniture of heavy, simple practicality but any workman who sees it will know if its quality.
And best of all: tools and books. Tools of such fascinating use and quality of build that she has never had to replace a single one. She uses them to build her little traps and toys, and to construct little models of much larger machines she'd like to build some day. Books filled with ideas and physics and everything constructed, from complex poetical meters to city-block-sized computing machines. She understands so many, many things in theory -- and while she loves her home and will always come back to it, she can not wait for the day her father tells her that she's allowed to learn how to make these things in practice.
