[ @theworldofprompts is hosting a great OC-tober list and I will try to join in this year. Here you can meet Velorum, a young girl in a fantasy setting. Enjoy!]
Fitting in can be scary. It doesn’t matter how old you are; whether it’s a new job, or strangers at a party, or your first day of 4th grade. The apprehension climbs up your spine. Your words get stuck in your throat.
And then there’s the stares. You enter the room and you fear you stand out, and faces turn to see. You’re certain their eyes dig into you, you’re certain you stick out, you’re certain you’ll never fit in here.
Velorum Navis feels this all too keenly when she transfers schools. She is too young to know why her parents live on the outskirts of town or why they don’t invite guests over. She is too young to know why her parents trained her at home for three years before letting her go to public school. But she knows she is a magical oddity, and meeting her classmates only makes this more apparent.
The benefit of living in the slums by the border is that strange magic can lead to strange appearances. Velorum is hardly the only kid who doesn’t look elvish. But even then, the other kids stare when she is introduced.
Her vacant eyes are solid black, so her new classmates have no idea which way she is looking as she blinks shyly back at them. Her strawberry blonde hair floats around her cheeks, defying gravity. She tugs nervously at a piece of hair, hoping to cover the sides of her face where normal kids have ears. The lights in the classroom are bright like a hospital, hiding the fact that her hair gives off its own soft glow. Tiny spots seem to wander with a mind of their own across her tan skin; her dad calls them freckles, but she knows they are nothing like her mom’s freckles.
Velorum had been so excited for school when she left the house this morning. She had put her favorite bows on her shoes, the ones shaped like very cute bats. She had worn her favorite leg warmers, the pitch black ones with the bugs on them, because she wanted her classmates to know she wasn’t afraid of bugs.
Well she is afraid now. But she doesn’t know that some of her classmates are more scared of her than she is of them.
And she doesn’t know that far away, her mother is also scared. Scared of letting her only child out into the wide world. Scared of being labeled a traitor and a threat. Scared that their family will lose control of their powers.