*COMPLETE* There are whispers across the kingdoms that the Paragon, that strangely gifted person who can wield all four Skills, has been found.
They're wrong, of course. No one has caught the Paragon. Allayria should know: she's it.
But Allayr...
She found out she was the Paragon when she was twelve. All Skills develop around that age, though some people find their abilities later or, occasionally, sooner.
She had, like her father, shown an aptitude for Nature-calling early.
At the... —even now, six years later, the line of her mouth curdles at the name—Academy of Accomplished Young Ladies, her classmates had all been very excited to see what they would get. Most, their parents both possessing the same Skill, already knew what to expect if they developed anything. Others, whose parents were Beast and Nature, or Nature and Smith, were presented with a couple of options.
Of course, there was always the handful that didn't manifest anything. It was every kid's worst nightmare—to go through the year with no calling. Some developed a Skill in the terms after, but by the age of fifteen you knew either way. Allayria had been filled with such pity when she saw them, the older students that didn't have a Skill.
That simple fact—Skilled or not—had torn down the popular or exiled the already downtrodden at the Academy. It was the idiotic social hierarchy of adolescence, and your place hinged on dumb luck.
So it came as a thunderclap of shock when Allayria discovered she didn't just call for one Skill, she called for all of them.
Her heart rate always seems to pick up when she thinks about it. She was scarily lucky, finding out when she did. She had been in the courtyard, practicing water-summoning—trying, really, to get it to solidify into ice, and it had been early dawn.
She was out there, alone and unwatched, because snotty Abelle Brinsworth had snarked about her inability to make snowflakes. Abelle had commented in a rather loud voice in their dorm room that perhaps Skills had subsets of talents and those who couldn't produce such simple things like snow had best just give up and pretend they didn't have any Skill at all. She was a brat and Allayria had been determined to shove a fist of newly-made snow in her face.
It was not going well. Allayria could get the water to pool in her palm, but she couldn't wrap her mind around cooling it. She tried pushing with her fingers and then her mind, then blowing on it, but nothing worked.
Then she thought of Abelle's stupid, smirking face; a flush of fury shot through her and fire spurted out of her fingertips.
She was so surprised she had jumped backwards and half-fallen over the side of a bench.
One hand flat against the seat of wood, she had stared and then lifted her fingers. She thought of Abelle's face, and then the fire spurted out again.
She sat fully on the bench then, and had gaped at her hands for almost fifteen minutes.
At about that time she had come around to the idea that she was indeed awake and yes, there were small wisps of smoke coming from her fingertips. She was torn—on one hand, she relished the idea of setting Abelle's hair on fire, on the other...
Her heart palpitated and even at that young age, she admitted it right then: she was afraid. Afraid she was right—she was the Paragon, and all that responsibility, all those duties, would fall on her head; and she was afraid she was somehow wrong, and would be thought of as such a fool when found out. It seemed far too soon to confide in anyone. She had produced fire, yes, but what about manipulating metal? Or calling to animals?
She practiced beneath the guise of classes, one hand underneath the table, fingers twisting and turning toward silver pens dropped on the floor or beetles on the chair legs, coaxing them into her palm.
She practiced in the dark, under her blankets, and in the pale dawn light, hidden in a thicket of bushes. At lunch she sat on the windowsill, an ear turned toward a Beast-calling lesson in the courtyard below. She watched her classmates practice, and shadowed their movements. There was nobody, no welcoming teacher to inquire, no friend to catch on, and the more she lied, the easier it became.
History, which had been such a dull subject only weeks ago, became much livelier when the Paragon would pop up—to mediate a conflict, challenge a corrupt regime, or occasionally be brutally murdered.
While her classmates' eyes went blank and mouths slack, Allayria found herself following a complex web of politics between the High King of Solveig, the Chieftainess Jorlei of Roften, and Paragon Roishi. It turns out Roishi had been taken from his home as a child and raised within the confines of Leonilith City to be the Chieftainess's advisor and (eventual) lover.
The instructor skimmed over Roishi's abduction and twenty-year confinement, but Allayria did not. And when the lesson ended just as peace was restored, Allayria continued it, learning in the library that peace lasted not even two years—long enough for the king to poison Roishi at the dinner table.
A story that once might have been only vaguely exciting suddenly seemed ominous. Roishi was no longer a character from the past, but rather a very real example of Allayria's future.
She was not enthused.
Even so, death is an abstract idea for a twelve year-old. A dark shape in the night; present but not yet fully-realized. What was altogether more real to her, more apparent to her, was the confinement that came with being the Paragon.
While others might have seen the position as an immense opportunity, a chance at real power and influence, Allayria saw in it exactly what she had been raised in. On the occasions and holidays that she did go home, she had been educated on what would be expected of her when she graduated from the Academy. As the daughter of diplomats, there would be social events to attend, important people to befriend, and, of course, marriage to be considered.
She hated it. Not because she disliked going to parties and meeting new people—maybe a few of them even young men. It was the way that it had to be done.
Stand this way. Talk about this, never that. Eat this, but not too much. No running, no laughing, no climbing, no outdoor games, no teasing, no singing, no anger, and Gods above, no fighting.
So when the skinny-ankles, gangly, twelve year-old Allayria looked at the Paragon she didn't see poisoning or the murder: she saw a cage. It was a role that would strip away more of herself than even a diplomat's daughter did. Behind closed doors a diplomat's daughter could take off her uniform and be what she wanted to be; there were no closed doors for the Paragon.
So she ran away.
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Note: the header art is not a character in this particular novel (she's from a past one of mine.)
A full view of it can be found on my deviantart account here: http://asimsluvr.deviantart.com/art/Dysphoria-323956110
