Gia was always behind, the last one to let go of her childish ways, the last one to catch on to new trends, the last one to mature and move on. She felt it too, like she was always one step behind everyone else, not even on the same plane as the rest. Her sisters were already so much further ahead. Vivi with her girlfriend and apartment in the mortal realm, Taryn with her suitor, Jude with her ambition and dreams of knighthood. But where was Gia in all of this? Still clinging to the peace before the storm, as her family began to go on and away with their lives. She felt stagnant, and she hated that feeling above all else. Sure, she had a plan for her future just as everyone else, and of course, she had her passions, in which she drowned herself in. Somehow, she still felt lost in limbo. She was always one to be both things, both of faerie and the mortal realm, yet not exactly entirely whole of one realm like her sisters, like her family. She always lay somewhere in the middle, like an other. Gia could live with it for the most part, but when those waves of stagnation and loneliness came, she felt like she was treading the sea on a boat with no sail during a storm. She always felt like this when something was about to happen, something good, something bad, just something significant. She felt it before her parents were murdered, and she had felt it before Orianna and soon after Oak came to Madoc's Stronghold. What was going to happen? What was coming? Was it coming for her? How long would it be until her dreams whispered the answer to her questions? Even with answers, what enigmatic code would she have to decipher to make sense of the scrambled arrangement of distorted clues and reality enmeshed into one? Whatever it was, death clung to it like a vice and suffocated like a noose. The smell of rot was fresh, yet spirits of the past had wept. It was unnatural and malicious, however, necessary. When Gia thought about it, soil comes entirely from rot and decay; plants need this rot to grow anew. Perhaps it would be the same for what was coming.
