The Legend of The Rushing Riptide

Chapter One: The Awakening

Kelda always wanted to see the world. Day in and day out, for years, she dreamed of what it would feel like to breathe fresh air, feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, the wind in her hair. She wanted to move and never stop. She wanted to at least see the rest of her house. Even the other side of her door would be something new to her.

Ever since Kelda was a little girl, she'd lived in a tiny hut she shared with her parents. 24 hours a day (except for supervised bathroom breaks), she sat in her bedroom with the door locked, waiting for her father to sneak her scraps of food, or a crayon and a piece of paper, or a book of legends, which she hid in a loose floorboard so her mother wouldn't find out. If she did, she would hurl knives in the form of insults, cutting deep in their skin. Kelda knew that her father was more afraid of her mother than she was because she was almost never the victim of her attacks. She knew what could happen if Kelda fought back, so she usually left the violence for her husband, away from the eyes of their daughter. But, just because she couldn't see it, doesn't mean she didn't know it was there. She saw the bruises and cuts her mother left behind. She felt his anxiety any time she was around.

Kelda felt her parents' emotions as strongly as if they were her own. Her father's fear and her mother's anger both radiated so strongly inside Kelda that she started to believe the emotions were hers. She frequently had outbursts of anger or crying spells and felt so emotionally unstable sometimes that she curled up into a ball and laid there for hours. She didn't feel that she had any emotions other than fury and anxiety. She didn't like to think about her parents' fights, but it was hard when she could see the fear in his eyes whenever he smuggled something in and sense the pure unadulterated rage her mother held inside her thin little body, always on the verge of boiling over. She had more strength in her than most men, and her father didn't have anything to defend himself against her, other than his towering height. Kelda did, however, and both her mother and her father knew it. However, Kelda was completely unaware that her parents had any idea she was different, though that wouldn't have changed anything anyway.

••••••

For as long as she could remember, Kelda had power. In her stash under the floorboard, among the everchanging smuggled treasures, laid a cup and a journal. At night, while her parents restlessly slept, she would pull out the cup and fill it with water, but not from the tap. The water came from the air. She changed the water vapor's molecules into a liquid. She didn't quite understand why she could do it, but she knew it made her special, and she also knew that if her mother found out, it would be over for the whole family. After every trial or experiment, she would write down what happened with it along with her thoughts of the day in general. It was a therapy for her, but she had to keep it hidden. If her mother found out she was practicing, Kelda was certain there would be a war in that house, which is why she never practiced (or wrote) while her parents were awake, for fear that they'd find out. Instead, every night for hours, she would make tiny waves in her little cup.

After years of practice due to boredom or stress, the water flowed easily from above the cup into it in a steady stream. It was a lot easier than it used to be. She no longer had to focus very hard to change the water vapor from a gas to a liquid to a solid and back. Some days her attention bounced from thought to thought to thought without any control of Kelda's, and when she realized she was still messing with the water, she would almost drop it.

As the sun was setting on yet another day, after yet another unimportant argument had gotten out of hand between her family causing them to retreat to different places in the house, Kelda was heated. She wanted to slam a door or break a window, but she couldn't do either. The window had iron bars and a heavy curtain over it, and the door was locked and barricaded shut from the outside. She did what she had to do when she needed a release of excess energy. She practiced her power. She held a sphere of water in the air in front of her. Her small cup was underneath it. The ball was twice the size of anything she had ever conjured. She swelled with pride but stopped short. She saw something in the rolling sphere. She looked closer. It looked like a person.