Frieda POV: Dream and Hope.
In the quiet, lamplit evenings before Elsbeth was born, Heinrich and I would weave a future for our child out of hopes and firelight.
Heinrich sat beside me, his calloused hand covering my hand, rough from years at the forge but gentle now.
"What do you think she'll have?" he asked quietly.
"She?" I smiled. "So certain it's a girl?"
"Call it a father's intuition." His thumb traced circles on my hand. "Golden light. That's what I hope for."
His voice was soft with the vision. “Gentle and warm. A healer’s touch. She’d be able to help everyone in this village. The whole village would cherish her.” I could see the dream in his eyes: a daughter safe, revered, her value as clear and bright as the magic she’d wield.
I’d smile, my fingers working on a tiny blanket. “Or perhaps the wind,” I’d say, feeling the familiar, cool swirl of my own affinity stir in response. “Like a whisper. She could be a scholar and see the high castles; she could learn the knowledge of the whole world and maybe teach people about the knowledge.” I dreamed of a daughter with laughter like a breeze, able to glide above the petty constraints of our small world.
We were painting her life in the colors of our own quiet desires—his for security, mine for knowledge, and both of us for her happiness.
The day she arrived was a chaos of pain and triumph.
When the midwife placed her, red-faced and perfect, in my arms, we both held our breath. The room seemed to wait. Often, the first flicker of a child’s magic would show then—a spark, a wisp of color in the air.
There was only the baby’s furious cry and a strange, blank stillness around her.
“It can come later,” the midwife said, but her glance at the unmarked infant was careful, neutral.
It came a week later. Not a flicker in the air, but a mark upon the skin. A small, intricate sigil, the color of clear water on a pale stone, appeared on the downy skin of her forehead. It was neither gold nor sky blue. It was colorless; a polite silence made visible on her skin.
The disappointment settled, weighty and suffocating, over the room. Heinrich turned away, busying himself with the hearth. My own breath caught. All our carefully woven dreams—the golden respect, the windy freedom—unraveled in an instant. The future was no longer a painting; it was a frightening, empty page.
The first test came with Liana, my friend from the next village, who arrived with a honey cake and eager curiosity.
“Oh, Frieda, she’s beautiful!” Liana cooed, peering into the cradle. “Such dark hair! And what is her affinity?” Her hands hovered, eager to see the baby’s magic.
My heart clenched. I stepped between her and the cradle, scooping Elsbeth up. “She’s sleeping poorly,” I said, too quickly. “The noise of the market today upset her. Would you like some tea? I have that mint you like.” I chattered about the tea, about the unseasonable warmth, about anything but the silent, pale mark on my daughter’s brow.
Liana’s eyes darted to the baby’s forehead, then back to my face, confusion turning to dawning understanding, then to pity. It was a look that stung worse than scorn. “Of course,” she said gently, accepting the changed subject. “Mint tea would be lovely.”
After that, I became a master of deflection. A wall of mundane chatter to shield my child from that first, defining label. I learned to carry her with her face turned inward, to distract with questions about the asker’s own children, and to make my love a shield against their judgment.
By the time Elsbeth was two, the dread had softened into a weary, protective rhythm. I made her a doll from scraps of a worn-out dress of mine, its face two stitched dots for eyes and a crescent for a smile. It was a ragged, lumpy thing.
I held it out to her, a silent offering. She looked at it, her serious grey eyes wide. Then she took it, clutched it to her chest, and rested her cheek against its woolly head. She didn’t need it to be beautiful. She needed it to be hers.
One afternoon, Liana visited again. We were talking when we heard Elsbeth’s soft babble.
“Da ja pu ai ne ta jena,” she whispered to the doll.
“How sweet,” Liana said. “She’s talking to it.”
I smiled. It was the only magic I needed then.
Elsbeth took the doll everywhere. To meals, to bed, to the forge where Heinrich and Wilhelm worked. It became loved to pieces. A button eye fell off; I sewed it back. An arm tore; I repaired it. Each mend was a small act of love.
When Elsbeth was four, she left the doll beside her bed.
Then came the day I had to teach Elsbeth about money.
The coins felt cold and greasy under my fingertips. I arranged them in neat, pathetic rows on the kitchen table. Rent. Flour. Salt. The numbers, as always, came up short.
A sigh caught in my throat, thick with familiar dread. More laundry work. The thought sent a phantom ache across my shoulders—the memory of the scrub board’s relentless rhythm. My wind affinity was good for gusting dust from corners and drying sheets on the line, not for filling a coin purse.
We would manage. We always did. I would just have to bend my back a little more.
Then came the forge.
The memory is a nightmare of sound: Wilhelm’s shout, the whoosh of rogue flame, and the smell of singed hair. I tried to smother it with my wind, but my magic only fed the inferno.
Then Elsbeth, my little girl, did the impossible. Water bloomed from nothing to douse the flames. Then, a soft light knit made Wilhelm’s burned skin whole.
Two magics. Water and light.
Heinrich made us swear secrecy that night. “To protect her,” he said, his voice raw.
From that day, I knew my daughter was not empty.
Later, I found Heinrich at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, his big shoulders shaking. “It’s my blood,” he rasped. “This lack. I doomed her.”
I went to him. I took his face, rough with stubble and tears, in my hands. “Heinrich, listen.”
He didn’t look up.
“She would sit for hours watching Wilhelm work,” I went on. “She doesn’t flinch from the heat. She doesn’t complain about the noise.” I swallowed. “Do you know how long she watched a ladybug once? Long enough for it to crawl off her finger on its own.”
His breathing slowed, just a little.
“And when the other children ran past her, she never chased them. She just watched. As if the world were something worth learning before touching.” I said.
At last, he raised his eyes to mine. They were empty, frightened.
“People call her colorless,” he said, his eyes hollow.
“People will talk,” I said, holding his gaze. “But we are her world. And in our world, she is everything.”
He began to watch her not for defect but with a father’s dawning wonder.
Then the sky tore open.
It began with a wrongness—a pressure, then a smell like a thunderstorm cooked over a forge. I ran toward the screaming.
What I saw was not a monster. It was an unmaking. A being of pure, intelligent fire, turning our world to ash.
My magic rose in a panicked gust. I tried to pull the air from its flames. It was like trying to blow out the sun. The heat hit me, a solid wall that scattered my power into nothing.
I saw Heinrich shove Elsbeth to the stones. I saw the whip of white-hot flame.
I heard the sound.
I saw him fall.
And then, my little girl broke.
The sound she made was the world cracking. Power erupted from her—primal, ancient, terrifying. She hammered the fiery being with waves and ice and screaming gales, her face a mask of rage so pure it looked like grief. She was hurting it. She was tearing herself apart. And I could do nothing.
Then, He came.
Starlight woven, calm and absolute. His voice unstitched the chaos. The fire-beast bowed. With a wave of His hand, He stilled Elsbeth’s cataclysm, leaving a silence that rang louder than screams.
Wilhelm and Elsbeth went with Him to the church to heal Heinrich. I stayed behind with the injured.
Suddenly, light extended from the church. Where it touched the wounded, their injuries mended. Broken bones sealed whole.
Then we were called to the meeting where my daughter’s fate was decided. They called her a cataclysm and a cure. They exiled her.
I could do nothing. All I could think was, why? Is this the curse she must bear?
The next morning, the house was a tomb. Heinrich lay breathing but frail. I was adjusting his blanket when I felt her presence—a subtle chill.
Elsbeth stood in the doorway, a shadow in grey. Watching.
I couldn’t turn around.
The shame was a hot, suffocating weight. I could not protect you. When the monster came, my magic was a whisper. When your soul shattered, my arms could not hold the pieces. And now they are sending you away because I was too small a shelter.
The morning she left, she stood in the yard, dwarfed by the being of starlight. She looked so young.
Then she raised her hand. An impossible pen appeared in a shaft of cool light. She drew a single, intricate symbol in the air—a thing of woven loops and gentle arcs. It hung there, glowing, then dissolved over us like warm, golden ash.
I felt it immediately.
The deep, grinding ache in my lower back—the constant companion from hauling water and bending over the laundry tub—vanished. Not eased. Gone. I straightened, and a full, unimpeded breath filled my lungs for the first time in years.
Later, Heinrich sat up smoothly. He swung his legs from the bed, his feet firm on the floor. “The weakness… it’s not there.” By afternoon, he was at the forge, testing his grip on a hammer. The ring of it was clear and true.
The blessing.
It wasn’t a warrior’s magic. It fought the slow, relentless wounds of a hard life. It saw the burdens we carried in silence and lifted them.
She couldn’t stay. The world needed her for a war I couldn’t comprehend.
But she left us stronger.
I sat back at the kitchen table, the same few coins before me. The numbers were still tight. The worry was still there.
But my back didn’t hurt.
My husband was at his forge, his hands steady.
My son walked with a straighter spine.
And my daughter was somewhere far beyond me, learning how to survive what I could not face.
Her final, most profound magic was this quiet gift: the gift of our resilience. It was her love, made tangible in the absence of an ache and the return of a strong grip.
And as I finally let the tears come, I understood.
This quiet, enduring strength she left behind—that was her shield for us.
Ever wonder what the three different groups of villagers were thinking?
I have selected one person from each group to show their inner thoughts.
I plan to release this perspective chapter next week.
Also, before the main event starts, I will update about Elsbeth's life in the village.
Thank you for your understanding.
