Prompt 2: Bolt (Cenodocia)
Ala Mhigo, 1555
Her father says she is lucky that the bolt of levin did not stop her heart. It does that sometimes, tearing through innards like a knife through jam.
But she’d been lucky, standing in a circle of runes that defused the levin’s might, wielding a wand calibrated for a child’s volatile aether, wearing robes of dampening sigils. Most young learners cannot afford such a wand, making due with rods or staves meant for larger, older hands. And most grown thaumaturges cannot afford such robes, but she is from a family full of them, and enchanters besides, and so she has robes of gold and mythrite threading, stitched carefully for a child of eight. She is lucky, a lucky girl.
“Zenobia,” her father tells her, his stern voice cracking on the last syllable of her name. “Rhalgr does not suffer fools.” The words are harsh, but the sting is lessened by how he crouches, hugging her tight.
She is lucky, very lucky, for while she felt the spear of levin as it entered her arm, it escaped just as swiftly, leaving her whole. Her heart beats. Her eyes see. All that is left is a mark on her arm (thin red swirls that dance towards her shoulder, branching and branching into twigs too small to see). The mark will fade in a few months, her father tells her. Lucky.
She tells herself this at night when she cannot sleep, whenever she closes her eyes to see only the light arcing towards her. She tells herself to breathe until her heart stops pounding like Rhalgr’s thunder, and then she reaches for the book to read. The book—her favorite book—about a princess of Ishgard named Cenodocia Véridique. No one has told Zenobia of Ala Mhigo that Ishgard has no princesses.
When not learning of Rhalgr’s ways, she swings a blunted practice sword and imagines herself as Cenodocia, smiting dragons like a hero of old. Fast and fierce, like Rhalgr’s own lightning.