Daydreams

Kaolindra

I walk away from the birthday party that my parents have thrown for me and head for my room. Everyone is busy socializing; it will probably be midnight before they realize I'm gone. That's precisely why I've chosen today to leave.

When I reach my room, there's a note on the door in scribbly handwriting. It's written on tanned parchment with black ink spots everywhere.

Don't forget to bring the stone! it reads.

My anger flares as I tear the note off my door and crumple it. I shove it into my pocket and fling open my door with great force, slamming it with much less.

Is he stupid? Is he trying to get us caught? I think to myself.

I violently yank my suitcase from under my bed. It's already packed with everything I need. All that's left is for me to meet Flynn at the port in Lodra, the neighboring city.

I realize that it may be a long time before I see my family again - if I even come back after I've found what I'm looking for, that is. I pick up a picture of my parents from my bedside table. My father's curly blonde hair in the picture has since been replaced by a receding gray hairline. A pokey gray mustache now occupies his upper lip, but his blue eyes glisten just the same.

My mother, on the other hand, looks exactly as she did in the picture. Her silver hair reaches low, and accentuates her medium tan skin and big red eyes. Atop her head are two short, pointed ears and two long, crooked horns. Her body is long and leonine, and she only has three toes on each foot. A long, thin heel-like hoof holds my mother's delicate foot arches off the ground. My father calls them built-in stilettos.

I have my father's blonde hair, big blue eyes, horns and ears like my mother's - though my horns are shorter - and human feet. My birth shocked our whole city more than the marriage of a human and a mevra, or even the notion that mevra are real.

My mother has told me so many stories about her old life with the other mevra, in a hidden village south of Madaste, the capital. Peace and order within a gentle wood, and the ability to communicate telepathically within the wood. What I wouldn't give to live among my own kind.

I toss the picture into my suitcase and slide down the flagpole just outside my window. I bolt to the road and hop on the back of the milk truck that drives by my house every day at this time to go to Lodra. I hop off at the port and see Flynn pacing. He sees me too.

"Nova! You made it!" he exclaims.

"Of course," I say.

"The boat will arrive soon and then we can go find that Kaolindra village with the help of the stone!"

I punch him in the arm. "It's a mevcryste."