Felassan was not always the slow arrow.
Wisp, Courage had named him first, wondering at the way he reached for their sharp edges, trying to touch and taste the world. And then later, when he was older and would no longer listen, willful, and little stubborn one, until Mamae would laugh, pulling Courage's hand in her own. A child will become many different people, she’d say, pressing their hands to the swell of her belly. We come to know them through their growing.
His first sister, da’adahl, did not survive to take a breath. They buried her little body beneath the silver birch that somehow managed to take root here, in the worlds in-between, finding purchase among the crumbling islands and all that sky. He does not remember their old home. It had been swallowed by the war, and the rampaging earth, but still he dreams of it — dreams of his little sister grown tall, with dark hair unbound, dancing in the tall grass.
Da’lath’in, his Mamae would call him when he woke, smoothing away the tears on his cheeks. It is a strength, ma’lath.
When one day, miraculously, the war was won, they returned to the world at last. Shiv’in, they were called; the wanderers, drawn from the in-between back into life, and indeed, the first time he'd seen the sky with his own eyes, he’d cried.
(But what a sky it was — how bright, how changing — the splashed colours of the dawn, the sudden, purpling of a storm. The fire of a sunset — and he understood then, he thought, why their people had once thought to worship the sun, lest it swallowed them whole.)
In this new, quieted world, the boy who'd grown up wandering grew strong. He had a talent for magic, for walking the fade — he could slip through dreams like a passing thought; step so lightly you could barely feel the ripples. I've'an'virelan, they called him. Dreamer, fade walker, and then later, long after he entered Mythal's service, Athras: the half-shadow. The thief.
And if this new world felt strange to him, with its static distances, and all its people, he learned to hide it. He learned to adopt their speech, their tones, until he might be indistinguishable from the rest. Layer self upon self.
(Be brave, Courage would say; be wary)
They call Mythal's pride wolf.
