Insignia: Scars of Lumierna

Fourteen

Janell never patched the missing piece of her heart after losing Faerydae. She finds herself preparing to make the small journey to her friend's house, only to have the ugly reminder reopen her old wound. It's like seeing a stunning rose. Infatuated with its beauty, you forget it has thorns until you reach for it.

So here she remains in the bakery day after day, distracting herself from her heartache by busying herself with work. Growing lonely, she leans to her son for companionship, someone whose eyes shine as bright as her friends, but he is rarely to be seen.

Jannell watches her only son leap from view day after day over the next few years. She feels as if she is watching him grow up through a gallery of paintings. As if she is walking down a hall of pictures of him side by side, representing the days, weeks, and months as he grows up. Taking only a few minutes to examine each one before moving on to the next.

They barely speak to each other anymore. When he was a small child, he would confide all his thoughts, dreams, and hopes to her. She remembers teaching him of her beliefs in the stars one night, cradling him in her arms even at the age of six when he was getting too big to hold. He was always so full of curiosity and questions. Questions she often did not know the answers to; how was the furniture or supplies in the house made, what's beyond the mountains, what's beyond the ocean, why do I have to be a baker?

Some of the days Giles forces Stirling to stay home and work on chores, but even when they are in each other's presence, standing in the same room, sitting at the same table, his mind is distant, distracted by something unknown.

She misses her son, but she can sense he is miserable when he is kept indoors. She would take over his duties, relinquishing his daily shackles to the bakery and allowing him to run off to wherever it is he goes each day.