And after a day off, the story continues…
Day 40: Anna felt a source of pride.
Anna felt a source of pride. She knew Marcus was an expert tracker. She also knew that because her signature changed he was tracking someone that no longer existed. That was another thing Anna rolled through her thoughts. On the days where rain rolled in and her progress was slow, it seemed something her mind especially wanted to turn over.
She was fairly certain that her change in magic, her change in tools and ingredients was partially to blame for her change in signature. The rest of it, she suspected was a change in herself. She simply wasn’t the person she was when she left. Leaving, surviving, changed her. While part of her research did deal with her own changes in signature, it was more thoughts of who she actually was now that filled her thoughts.
She used to know who she was. She was a member of one of the most powerful families. They were strong and they held both mystical and political power. They were wealthy and respected. She worked hard and trained so that she would bring respect and honor to her family. Self-reflection merely meant understanding how her actions reflected on the family. Then that reality fell apart.
She became an outcast, a fugitive.
Anna had no time for self-reflection. She did what was needed to survive simply because she didn’t want to die. She evaded the hunters and gradually earned herself some breathing room. Then she was watchful, still doing what needed to be done to survive.
Her studies changed. At first the archives held no meaning. She needed simply to eat, to hide, to exist. With time she was able to use the archives and their knowledge to create more breathing room for herself, find more and better ways to survive and even thrive as she hid from the hunters.
There was still no time for self-reflection.
It took her a while to even realize that her studies changed. She was no longer looking at the immediate. She was not simply trying to find new ways of surviving on her own. She was looking at finding ways to stop running, stop hiding. In between the betterment of her own magic, she wove snippets of conversations together. Over heard comments from conversations she was deemed to young to participate in. Worrisome discussions over current events. She blended them all in with the events that finally sent her running.
Much of her research was not done in the sections of magical lore. It was towards the regular sections she was drawn. She tried to remember when she first heard the threads of worry and flipped back through the news archives, trying to follow the threads and see what actually happened. Along the way, Anna found herself dipping into sections of the library that were only of minor importance compared to her magical studies.
They proved more valuable than she planned and she found ways of increasing her magic through connections she found in books and articles that had nothing to do with magic. It was her education in magic and it’s practice that let her see those connections. And staying away from the magical archives seemed safer at first.
Ten til Midnight 