✏ write abt drift
Born of the water, to the water, named for its ebb and flow.
A tribe, a people who valued each other more than their natural calling.
The first time they let her into the water, she knew it was her place.
Drift’s formative years are dappled with memories of breaks in the foliage, revealing crystalline water just tantalizingly out of reach. Nights spent running to the shore, submerging herself and knowing she was safe -- there was no need to resurface. Yet, every day, she did. It’s laughable, thinking she once held some sort of connection to her tribe. Her family.
They would go down to the shore in organized groups, the fire, water, earth and air genasi all in their robes, clustered together. Teachings by the elders from each group, teachings Drift never listened to -- they spoke of gods and forces beyond them, ignoring all they needed: the permanence of the world around them, the chattering of birds and the rolling waves.
Every day was like this, always going to a location significant to one of their four tribes. Sometimes it would be the mountaintops, sometimes the remains of a burnt area of the forest they called home. Always the same chatter, always the same burlap robes, scratching against Drift’s flesh and leaving small pock-marks from where they irritated her skin.
Drift the Drifter -- constantly in trouble for altering her robes, for wandering from the group and for feeling a pull to where she was meant to be.
---
and something else that didn’t quite fit otherwise:
The first thing Drift did when she left was to throw those damned robes overboard, slashing a piece from her sail to tie around her head and reveling in her nakedness otherwise, free from the sameness of it all. There was no home but her ship, no need for any protection other than the cloth about her head and the staff lying on her floor. There was only Drift and the crispness of the open sea.
