A New Trick

Writers: Avery
Date Posted: 25th March 2016

Characters: Zelah
Description: Xeladrie teaches her flit a new trick, and finds possibilities open up.
Location: Sunstone Seahold
Date: month 4, day 26 of Turn 8
Notes: Mentioned: Bryvin, Rhosyn, Yriadha

Zelah

Xeladrie was sitting in the room shared between her quarters and Bryvin's. She should probably be doing needlework, but instead she was trying an idea she'd had in her head for some time. Her green fire-lizard, Glimmer, was curled on top of the table in the patch of late afternoon sunlight that streamed in. She had grown bigger than she was when hatched, but she still wasn't particularly sizable. Xeladrie had known that the flit would never get particularly large as greens were the smallest of the colors, but she had still been somewhat surprised. At least she was easy to carry around in one of the special slings she'd seen rigged up by others lucky enough to impress to one of the creatures. Some bronzes and golds were large enough that the slings to hold them could also hold a baby. While she would have appreciated the prestige of a gold fire-lizard, she wasn't
sure she wanted to put that much work into carrying around a pet.

Firelizards had turned out to be more work than she'd expected. Her husband's Treek was well-behaved and she'd assumed they were all like that, which had turned out to be a naive thought. She had been working with some other flit owners to make sure that Glimmer was disciplined and properly behaved. She didn't want to deal with an uncontrollable, intemperate flit causing trouble in her rooms and damaging anything delicate, and she was sure that even if she had found it to be acceptable behavior, that her husband would have found it problematic and possibly punished her for it. So she'd made sure that Glimmer was banded for identification, and tried to reinforce that she knew she wasn't supposed to steal bright shiny things and that she was absolutely not permitted in the kitchens. The flit didn't always obey the commands, and Xeladrie was never sure if it was that the flit wasn't old enough to understand, if it
was youthful willfulness, or simply color stupidity.

Rhosyn's gift had given her the possibility of reaching out to places outside of the Hold, and she intended to use it to its fullest. Glimmer could /between/ in and out like her larger draconic cousins, and she used the ability to go entertain herself and then come back to her mistress. Within the last month she'd found she was able to summon her pet back by sharply concentrating and thinking about rewarding Glimmer. But so far Xeladrie hadn't been able to get the flit to go somewhere that she pictured. Especially when the green was so easily distracted by interesting things in the environment. But now there was nothing else in the room.

Xeladrie knew she'd want to send Glimmer to somewhere she could picture easily. And if she was able to succeed, where would she want the flit to go? She didn't have enough of an image of the Weyr yet to figure out how to send Glimmer there. So she decided to picture her mother. As much as their relationship was distant and cool, she knew her mother's face well, and she knew her mother's sitting room. So she closed her eyes and imagined her mother sitting in the room, working patiently at her needlework. She filled in all of the details she could think of - the color of the walls, the way the light came in the window at this time of day, the carefully-sorted baskets of yarn and thread, the long worktable along the wall made of varnished wood. **Go there,** she mentally encouraged the green.

Under her fingers, Glimmer stiffened. She looked up at her mistress. ~~There?~~ with the picture of the place floated back to her.

**Yes, there,** she thought, concentrating even harder on the picture and providing encouragement.

Glimmer stretched and then leapt up into the air, hovering briefly with beats of her wings before snapping /between/. Xeladrie felt nothing for a few moments. Just when she thought that Glimmer had given up and gone somewhere else, where she wouldn't be asked to do anything, she felt a moment of brief dislocation and the world seemed to distort around her,
wavering slightly and distorting the image of her own sitting room. She closed her eyes and thought of Glimmer and the image of her mother's room at Turquoise Bay, and it became a bit more focused. She saw figures below, one pointing up, felt startlement and suddenly nothing!

A few moments later, Glimmer popped back into the room, cheeping with fright and darting around the room high up. Xeladrie laughed at the green's nervously whirling eyes and her darting motions. "Come here, it's alright," she encouraged. When the green came within reach, she started scratching her and saying reassuring words in a high pitched voice just like she'd done to her son when he was crying, fussing, and restless.

"You did wonderful! Marvelous! Oh you must have given my mother such a fright. They scared you, huh, girl? Well you did well. You can go places now. Maybe next time you can take a letter home with you. Wouldn't that be nice?"

To have a chance to send mail back to her family via fire-lizard, rather than by runner or trader train, sounded appealing. It would be something less likely to be intercepted or viewed by anyone at either Hold who wanted to screen her correspondence. She had no expectation of privacy here at Sunstone - she was sure her father had taken the time to bribe at least one drudge to report back on her. She suspected her Lord husband would do the same. In fact, she wouldn't put it past the Headwoman to keep an eye on her - Xeladrie was afraid of the older woman and how she seemed so controlling and manipulative, and she was sure that Yriadha might not have liked this young upstart Lady coming in and challenging her primacy as the most important woman in the Hold. So she expected to be observed from all sides.

Well, she had her own ways of observing people, her own drudges who reported back to her. And if Glimmer could take messages, then she'd have her own ways of communicating. Back to her home Hold, of course. And maybe back to the Weyr, if she ever needed to reach Rhosyn in a way that was faster than letter and less susceptible to being noticed. Yes, a private method of reaching back to the Weyr could do very nicely for her and her future plans…

Last updated on the April 4th 2016

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