Elanor Goes Outside

Dead Crystal

I remember being in a courtyard. The adults there were all talking about boring things that I didn't think about, but there was something nice. On one side of the courtyard, there was a wall made of windows, and it looked into what looked like the same objects that held the weird symbols my dad showed me. It looked like a thick stack of paper bound by leather, and it was surrounded by this old, colorful art. Behind the book was this giant scepter, holding a dull crystal. There was the only other kid beside me looking at this stuff.

"Why is there stuff from Church in the museum?" she asked. She was very pale, almost white, with light hair and creepy eyes. She looked very unsettling to me like she had been scorched by the sun and her color was taken out. And her eyes looked like they were screaming for calmness, shining this piercing shade of blue that no one else has ever had.

"What's that supposed to mean? I don't know. I don't know what they keep here," I told her.

"It's supposed to be a museum for nomads. I heard the air dryads were nomads by design, but also by design, they broke a lot of barriers and stigma."

"I don't know what that means, but it probably isn't true. I'm an air dryad and haven't heard of any of that."

"You've heard of your history before, though, how there was that one event therefore years ago that changed all of your records."

"It didn't do anything, things just became different, but we didn't change. My mom was still a traveler after, and she still controlled the winds."

I felt out of place saying these things. She seemed to know so much, though she wasn't specific about what she knew. And all these adults were so well-read in all these concepts that even she picked up on stuff, and she was a kid.

"Besides the air dryads, leagues of civilizations were wiped out. The lizardfolk, the draconic demigods, the human order, the elvish hierarchy, even Friedrich's industrial empire were all wiped out overnight."

"But why does any of that matter? If we're nomads or at least the way that we are, then we've kept ourselves the same way that we were. My family is still free, and we can still see beauty in magic like that event was a part of everything instead of this big blockade."

Her eyes got wider, which made it worse. She was staring with an uncanny bitterness into the personal mechanizations of my identity. I had to search alcoves for the words to describe that, it took me five hours to write that phrase. She also looked like she used hours for research and investigation because she kept talking to me like I was an encyclopedia.

"So does that mean that others' history didn't impact your own?"

"I'm a kid! I'm nine, I haven't even started school yet, I don't know any of this."

"I'm nine, and I was taught this."

"Yeah, but do you know how to fly?"

"You can fly too?!"

"Of course, I know how to fly, you don't?"

"How could I fly?"

"How'd you get up here?"

"I walked. It's not that far."

I didn't have a good feeling about her. Maybe there was a reason she was asking so many questions. She looked out of place too.

She seemed like she wanted to say something else. She was moving around, bored, and I saw her look at me a couple of times too. I was looking too, that's how I saw her. I