Northstar Vale girl, with an accent of blood

Home. Once, her home had been the Tines and her haven and the swell of her mother’s belly; the taste of milk and the feel of warm things, before she’d been looking through eyes bleary with red, stinging with salt and the burn of starslight. Once, her home had been hanno who had returned to her and then left when phayanarō had already done so twice and the silver had been shrouded in a choking anguish. Now, her children had become her home — as near and as far as they are to another. And she had told them that above all they must find the father of their family because he had been home, and so he’d been found, but at the cost of her own banishment and the fraying of all four ties to another.

And now she’d returned, in a sense.
Should she have stayed, regardless of the contempt for that creed that only’d festered further and further?

With torn lips brushing the waters — saw her eyes, her guise, felt her innards seize — she could only say,  “It is good that they tend to those amongst them, still.”  Her tone just as impersonal; another lap following her words.  “I am sure you have been thriving there, no?”  If she portrayed herself as ill and wry, Aure either didn’t notice or did not care; her words, as she learned, were prone to affront those she meant to understand, well-meaning as she tried to be. 

She wasn’t up for trying today, though.  “I only mean, never allow yourself to feel inferior, should your philosophies differ.”  A frown tugging at one corner,  “Speak your mind to what you believe should be.”  It was an immense effort, however, when the contradictory was said and absolutely everything you longed for was plunged into turmoil. ...Such was life, though, she supposes.