allthatgoes | like fool's gold and fireflies

She wasn't of this world. That wasn't her fault. It was never going to be her fault, either, and no one was ever going to blame her, because when they found her, she was only four and she had fallen down in the dust of the ditch outside. They had no idea what to make of her. She looked like a simple human child, but she felt far different. She felt like something none of them had ever felt before – and the few of them who couldn't really feel magic, well, they didn't notice. Some of those who could didn't notice either.

It wasn't magic, about her. It couldn't be. Not in a child of merely four.

She knew she was four, but she couldn't speak, so she couldn't tell them just yet. It was not that she did not know their language – though this, too, was true – but mostly that she simply couldn't speak. The fall had taken the words from her.

Slowly, they came back. Too slowly, though, for her to explain anything, and it was not as if she could explain anything, so the people who had found her took her in and kept her, and asked her if she understood what they were saying to her. She tilted her head, bewildered, and they took this to mean simply that she did not.

(They were correct; the language was foreign to her. It didn't take them long to teach it to her, though, and within weeks she had come to understand some words. She still spoke none.)

Weeks passed, and they began to tell her stories of the place she lived then, introduce themselves to her, say that they supposed until they found her family they would be her parents. In the end it never mattered; none of the three knew if she had ever had parents before. She didn't remember. Whatever she had known before, whatever language, whatever home and people, it never returned to her. Not even a single memory. Nothing. It didn't trouble her, not much did. She was young and excited and eager to learn, and the family who had found her were eager to teach her. They adopted her as a daughter, or a sister, or a cousin, depending on which of them one would ask. She became family.

They gave her a name: Aithne, because it sounded like it suited her, and they were never going to know how close they came to being right. Perhaps she was no more a child of Fire than they were, but it felt right to call her that, and it felt right to her to answer to it, and whenever someone called out Aithne her head would pick up and she would turn and smile.

(She always smiled, those first few years, smiled at everything because if it was an insult she didn't understand. This, too, changed as she grew.)

When school started for the other three children in the fall, she was going to go there with them. They were going to teach her more of their language, and maybe get her to come a little more out of her shell – she was looking foward to it, in a way. It would be something that would allow her to see the rest of the world, because in the cottage in the woods away from the city she very rarely got to see anything at all. Just because it wasn't her world didn't mean she wasn't curious. There were things she wanted to know. She was curious about everything in this world she had found herself in and she was curious about everything in general just because she was a child.

They started to let her go for walks in the woods, because the woods, they knew, were safe.

They should've known that just because the woods were safe didn't always mean home was.

Her new mother, who had come to love her like any of her other children, held her in bed at night and sang to her, goodnight my angel, time to close your eyes and save these questions for another day.

Two years later, Aithne had learned to speak the local words, even if she didn't do it very often. She could form the sounds, she could mimic the accent, she could pretend the words were hers. She could pretend the city they saw on school days was her city, too, even if she got lost sometimes. All children got lost sometimes. She had a few friends. She loved the family that had found her and chosen her, and still hadn't given up on trying to find the family that was hers despite that.

(Aithne didn't know who they were, because she couldn't really remember much of anything of where she'd come from, couldn't remember much of anything at all before that first day in this world. Not to say that she remembered a lot of that time, either. It was long ago and she was filling her brain with many new things. There was always something to learn.)

She was going to start school for herself soon.

She went for a walk.

When she came back, everyone else was gone.

They left me, Aithne thought, only she didn't think in this language. She thought in her own.

The mess didn't really startle her. The house had been ransacked. That didn't matter to a child. All that mattered to a child was that her family had gone; she hadn't thought that perhaps they might have been killed or kidnapped. She knew there were things missing. She could have figured out there was money missing.

Aithne hadn't learned about what things like crime were.

She knew that there were people missing, and she stayed there and waited, and hoped they would come back.

(She stayed in their bed at night and sang to herself, goodnight my angel now it's time to sleep, and tried not to worry too much.)