Power Without Strength {Discontinued/Rewritten}

3

            I collapsed onto my bed, exhausted to the bare bone. I took an hour nap after finishing my classes before it was time for dinner, but I was good to go after less than thirty minutes today. I was too excited about getting the gifts ready for my teachers and friends.

Dawning was coming up, and soon everyone would be going on vacation for a full month. Dawning was a holiday to celebrate the existence of the anumanu species and show appreciation to the Gods for giving it to us. It was the most popular holiday in existence, and was extremely well known all throughout the inhabited planets. There would be festivals, sales, gift-giving events, concerts, and more going on in almost every village or city. It was mostly a day where family members would get together and stayed close, being grateful for their lives and loving families.

Most apprentices and agents would go out and visit friends and family members they knew for the full vacation time, others would stay behind to help defend the sanctuary and relax if they had no-where else to go. I intended to gather gifts for all my teachers and close friends before they headed off to see their loved ones.

Doctor Kulea was the top healer of the Sanctuary and partner to Aren. She was beautiful; tall and curvy, generous and kind, careful and caring. She was the absolute definition of a mother figure, it was no doubt that she and Aren were made for each other. She was the one elder female I could always talk to about anything. She was always checking up on me when I'm not on my best, sending me small gifts, almost as if treating me like her own child.

I know I shouldn't get my hopes up to think of adoption through her, she probably treats all the kids in the sanctuary this way. Nobody wants a runt for a daughter; especially one with a depressing and troublesome past like mine.

Vacation starts in a couple days, and I plan on starting to give the gifts out today. On the down side, I still don't have a present to give to Founder Aren; I just couldn't think of one. I made hand-made profile statues of my teachers' heads created from clear crystal and encased in a cubed, glass box with a burgundy cushion for them to sit on. For Kulea, I took a giant rock, carved it flat and engraved her name out of it. Then I painted in the name to highlight the letters, and decorated it in enchanted white and red flowers to stay alive a lot longer.

For Desta I had the cliché two charm, half-circle friendship bracelets made of string. As common as it was, it had the words Best Friends on a gold pendant that was carved to look like it was broken in two. The difference with these bracelets though, is that I enchanted them both with a permanent protection spell when we were in trouble. Of course, the skill that was required to do this was quite high and took a big toll on my magic and mind for a good week. But it was worth it for Desta; she made the impossible, possible for me. And my definition of 'impossible' was me becoming remotely close to someone and them not completely drowning themselves in shameless pity for me.

Now, Yanju was the second hardest to think of a present for. To be completely honest, I was temping to not give him anything at all for the way he's treated me. But then I started to guiltily think of the small-extremely small-kind gestures he did give to me in the time he's known me. Buying me drinks when I didn't have the cash for the vending machine, being my sparring partner in Training Class, blasting me with a shockwave full of ice, leaving me to unthaw for the rest of the day and getting sick the next...

Well, that last one wasn't very kind, but it was still a funny thought. Not funny to me at the time obviously, I hated the cold with a passion, but it was still a memory to look back on. Anyways, I just decided on a small decorative sign with an old fox rhyme I found online I thought he'd like.