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your dreams are more solid than your bones.
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you are wobbly-limbed wisp of a girl, and perhaps that is what endears you to so many, the fragility that they begin to associate with the name emmaline, because it is infinitely easier to love those weaker and fear those stronger. the taste of potential is clear in the air that surrounds you, and people flock to you because of it. it doesn't bother you that you are put on display at such a young age, because love in any form is a thing that you have never learned to push away.
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love is what pulls strangers to your side, making them glance at your mother and then your father and then finally you, makes them compliment you with something strange in their gaze as you beam back openly, glowing under their praise.
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love is the name of the emotion that sings through your veins when your mother brushes a hand through your hair, when your father presses a kiss to your forehead. it's what you feel unmistakably making your heart beat when you listen to your aunt's heartbeat through her white sundress, curled up in her lap, ribbon in your hair brushing against her collarbones as an artist paints your portraits.
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love is the name of what motivates you to move, flourish, and grow. it is what drives your primal instinct to grow, teaching you to pull something from within yourself that turns into this all-encompassing desire to bloom. something bigger than reality resides within you, and your family spends your entire childhood coaxing it out of you, in between laughter and scolding, in between being loved and being hurt.
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because you are someone who could grasp anything material in the world if you so asked for it, you grow focused upon the things that are not able to be bought or sold. instead of asking for sweets, you learn to ask for your mother's stories, your father's smiles, more time spent with your family. those around you begin to call it humility, a lack of attachment to money, but you define it as wanting something more.
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you want the legend you were promised.
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you want to become someone special, and continue to be surrounded by that love that you hold so dear.
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power is something that you should have been born with.
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you have been surrounded by power constantly, trained to let it flow within you, and yet you are not striking in the way that you should be. you grapple with it, this sense of wanting to be something more than you are, and then not able to grasp what you want. for a girl who has so easily learned all that she should have, being unable to progress at a faster rate is -
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(honestly, it's humiliating.)
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give it time, your father advises. your mother smiles in the background - always the background, for some reason, never in the front. you're still young, emmaline. why are you in such a rush? you're growing steadily.
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you cannot wait. there is something greedy inside of you, so different from what your parents have tried to teach you. it wants to be recognized, wants to be praised, and while you are approaching your goals at a speed that is no means slow, you cannot deny that it's not immediate. (little is.)
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as you grow up, your mind is increasingly occupied with insecurities and doubt. for every virtue you see within yourself that the praises from those around you echo, you see ten more flaws. in your impossible search for perfection and ascension of the human mind and spirit that you have pursued for your entire childhood underneath your clan's guidance, you have become a being that can never hope to live up to your family name as the same person you are now.
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the thought of connections is something that you shirk from, hardly knowing where to begin, but your parents guide you.
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i should introduce you to a close friend of mine, your father mentions, drops a hint in. he introduces you to who he thinks is important. mother gives you contacts, drops comments about who to avoid. you listen to them, because your parents always know best. you think a boy is cute, but your parents don't approve, so you push him and his pretty eyes aside. you want to listen to a girl sing, but mother thinks singers are frivolous, so you don't approach her at all.
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it only occurs to you at the age of eighteen that perhaps you might want to approach people out of your own interest, surrounded by media buzz in the city of sundial, surrounded by four other people that you find yourself (hopelessly, secretly, obviously) enamored with. that maybe - having friends, with no strings attached, is something that you can do.
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the circle of heirs, the media whispers, and you think secretly in your heart: (my first real friends?)
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your name is emmaline. you are nineteen years old. you have been promised (no, you have been chosen).
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you are waiting, you think, for something to begin.