Golden Child [Rewriting]

*Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

They set off early the next morning on their voyage. Meri eagerly gathered up her things, while Nuri left the inn to purchase tickets for their journey across the frozen sea. As the town was relatively isolated, he could spot several golden auras in the crowd, seeing a couple of Oceania's children using their abilities in public, especially for travel across the sea. With their unique abilities, travelling by boat seemed almost ridiculous. They led Meri through the sea of coloured auras, out to the port, where their escort waited for them patiently, dressed in royal blue. He took Meri's hand, and joined them together, while Nuri held onto hers, and suddenly, they started dashing across the ice, with movement's light and graceful. The world blurred together like an impressionistic painting, colours mixing in with landscapes, people becoming small, insignificant dots in the distance. The mainland was in sight in less than fifteen minutes, and their journey altogether only lasted about half an hour, the dash nimble and elegant, and Meri's smile everlasting and bright. She had never done anything like that before, never experienced what her people were capable of, and now her eyes had been opened, like she could see the whole world for what it is. Every time Nuri showed her something new of this great and wonderful world, she felt more and more like all of this was actually true and not a dream. She'd partly agreed because she'd thought it was a dream and that if she agreed, it would only get better, which currently it did. They started walking along the landscape, Nuri leading the way, and as they progressed, it seemed the landscape was getting greener, being saturated with every step they took. Meri had never seen a place like this before, sometimes Aku described lush landscapes where the trees reach into the heavens, and the rains fall in layers onto the large leaves, but she had never imagined it to be so green. After growing up, covered with snow, she'd never seen blue summers, her summers were grey, and filled with slush, and never ending rain that blessed the river of the village, but bored her to death. She liked the green landscaped more than she liked the snow, and soon it was too hot to keep her jacket on, and she was walking simply with her royal blue scarf around her head, and a plain shirt hanging over her petite body. Nuri had taken off his maroon sweater, and rolled up the sleeves of his charcoal coloured dress shirt. She watched the bundle of hair on the back of his head bounce up and down with every step he took, and with every step they took, they neared the closest village. She wondered whether they were still in Oceania's territory, like Nuri had explained to her earlier, because they were following the ocean, to Lapid. The more she looked at Nuri, the more she noticed a confident, gold glow enveloping his being, and when she looked down at her hand, the same glow was hovering around it too, but instead of confident, and prominent, hers was pale and uncertain, but nonetheless there.

"Nuri," she tried, her voice timid and meek, but filled with curiousity. He acknowledged her with a low hum.

"Why are you glowing gold?" She asked him quickly, and he stopped, and turned around.

"I think we should take a break," he mentioned, and looked up to the sky, the sun was right in the middle. He threw one of his sleeping blankets onto the floor, and sat down, Meri followed suit. Then he took out a couple of fruits, dripping with ice-cold water, handed one to Meri, and one to Avani as well, "so, you've started to see auras then?" He asked, taking a bite of the bright red fruit in his hand.

"Auras?" She asked, confused, and hesitantly took a bite of hers. The sweet flavour exploded in her mouth, and her eyes widened in fascination. She took another bite, there had never been things like this in Verglas, and everything was as grey and bland-tasting as the snow and the sky.

"It's an ability all Children have," Nuri explained, "mostly it's used to identify one of your own, and to see who's an enemy. It developed into being able to see the auras of the humans, to have an advantage, I guess. I don't use it very often, just to identify one of our kind." He looked up to her, and her aura was pale gold, uncertain, insecure, and small.