Aurora’s World: Atecia: Aurora: A Death in the Family

[k_a_webb]

This entry is part 23 of 35 in the Aurora's World collection

Aurora had always known that her father was a magic user, even though there were people who said, loudly, that telling a six-year-old the truth about what had happened was a mistake. She heard them all, because they seemed to think she was oblivious to what was happening around her, but she wasn’t. Being young didn’t make someone stupid and yet that was what everyone seemed to assume. They thought she was too young for the truth, as though she wouldn’t learn their version of the truth anyway, once they stopped criticising her mother and started gossipping about her father instead. Fortunately, by then, thanks to her mother’s belief that she was old enough to understand what was happening, she already knew what had happened.

This entry is part 23 of 35 in the Aurora's World collection

By then Aurora had learnt that her father had been born with magic, had bloomed on his eighteenth birthday and survived, and had done his very best to help others in the same position until someone learnt about what he was. As with many of the other magic users he’d helped he’d made the only logical choice. He left for the mountains. She realised that, really, they were lucky. Their city was close enough to the mountains to make it a relatively easy journey, compared to what some of the others had been through, when they travelled through from the outer reaches of the kingdom looking as though they wondered if it was all worth it. Of course her mother already knew that she knew more than she let on.

Children were often seen, but that didn’t mean they were noticed. Their cottage was often used as a stopping point for the travellers, somewhere they could have a hot meal and sleep in an actual bed before carrying on their journey, and those travellers would talk to her father or her mother about what they’d been through. Aurora could remember sitting on the floor, between her mother’s legs, listening to the story of one of the travellers as she had her hair braided for school, and that was when she realised that life was dangerous for them. If anyone found out what they did her parents would be executed and she would be an orphan. Being an orphan became something she prepared for.

When her father left it became more than something she prepared for. It was something she was almost certain would happen, in the not too distant future, although she didn’t say anything to anyone. She was six. Why would anyone listen to her? Although she knew that her mother would listen she was someone she chose not to talk to, because the last thing she wanted to do was remind someone who was already reminded on a daily basis about their mortality. To her it seemed better to keep quiet and hope that she was wrong, because she didn’t want to be alone. Every day she had with her mother was another day she breathed a sigh of relief, when she’d give her mother another hug and say ‘I love you’, before going to bed with the weight of the world upon her shoulders.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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