when: 16 December 1978; at the beginning of the attack
where: the Great Hall
who: Eavan and @lucianflint
A lady is more than her beauty. It was one of the first things Eavan’s mother taught her, never content for her to take the easy road. A lady is witty. A lady is gracious. A lady is talented. A lady is never surprised, unless it would be charming for her to be so. A lady is never surprised, especially when she actually is. A lady is never hysterical. Other young girls may be, but not Eavan, with her mother’s tan skin and her abuela’s dark hair; she can’t afford to make herself different any more than she already is.
So when a dragon interrupted the Yule Ball, crashing through the grand window as if it were less than glass, Eavan was not one of the people running and screaming. A part of her brain told her to do so, but years of her mother teaching her to be still and wait and listen overrode her survival instincts. Instead she found herself frozen, rooted to her spot along the edge of the dance floor, and feeling strangely detached from the terror filling her, almost as if the whole scene was happening to someone else.
As the great hall erupted into chaos around her, Eavan vainly studied the dragon like a problem to be solved. She was keenly aware that neither her extensive book learning nor her social graces would do her any good in her present situation, but somehow she couldn’t do anything else, like she couldn’t think of anything else to do, despite the panicked racing of her heart telling her to get out. Eavan found herself jostled as she, alone, stood still in the crush of people fleeing toward the back of the room, desperate to move out of the dragon’s way.
Someone pushed against her too roughly, and, the next thing she knew, she was on the floor and presented with a new problem, which felt no more real or immediate than the first. No one was paying attention to where they were going, which the distant and detached part of her brain sniffed at, and Eavan realized she was now less likely to be injured by the dragon itself, and more likely to be trample by the crowd. A graceless end to a graceful girl, it nevertheless, in Eavan’s addled state, seemed like a fitting metaphor for her life. She’d always been afraid of losing herself to what other people wanted, she’d just never thought it would happen quite so literally.
