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epilogue, second star to the right.
KAELYN CARROWAY grew up hating magic. She had been raised to see it as dangerous, something to fear and avoid, as if it were a common occurrence. In all her eighteen years of life, she had never once seen someone display magic of any kind, or certainly not the way her father spoke of it. There were the people who claimed clairvoyance, who begged for money in exchange for fortunes in the street, or the street performers that did things that were harmless but impressive. Kaelyn would tell herself it couldn't be magic because magic wasn't beautiful, not like the elegant fireworks they breathed or the fortunes they painted of the most simple things.
Some would argue that magic had been the reason she was alive at all. It had been the worst storm in living memory when Kaelyn had been found at the farmers' doorstep, bundled in indigo blankets without any note or memoir left behind. They had been kind and taken her in, out of the wind and the rain, and after little thought, had decided to take her in and raise her as their own. They had had a daughter of their own, Cielle, who always shunned her as false family, but as they grew older she had mellowed out and accepted her as best she could.
Kaelyn had accepted that she would never know where she came from. She had been delivered during the worst storm in living memory, and in that had accepted that any hope of finding out who had left her behind was washed away with the rain. The Carroways gave her a home, they gave her a place to stay and food to eat. Mrs Carroway homeschooled the girls as best she could, as they helped on the farm, and Kaelyn grew to love reading.
The day she had been old enough to accompany her father with the stall into town to extend their sales had truly opened her eyes. She loved people, the fact that everyone who passed through and bought from them, anyone that passed her by in the street or she briefly waved at in childish innocence held their own story to them. They were their own book in a living library. Cielle had called her stupid when she had tried to explain that the next day, but as Kaelyn had come to find, the two sisters were very different.
Cielle was loud and proud, she made her opinion known, she demanded attention and what she wanted. She was stubborn, and for the first few years of Kaelyn's life had actually made her miserable. Kaelyn wasn't quite sure when she had stopped treating her like a parasite and as family, but one day the blonde girl suddenly became her older sister and had never looked back. It was nice, feeling like there was someone to back her up, and especially someone with the attitude of Cielle.
Kaelyn was never quite sure why her family hated magic so much. On the occasions she had encountered someone who bore it, her father had spat about them afterwards, how they were good money but nothing else, something to be avoided, an anomaly in the human condition. The sort of spiteful stuff that could have only come from a past experience, Kaelyn decided. She had read stories of men like her father, forgetting that real life and fiction were different. Magic had always been something dark to her, something forbidden and dangerous.
