In some ways, she is robbed of a childhood.
Woolf’s gift of independence, of freedom, of self-sufficiency is in truth a ripping away of innocence. She is barely but a babe, finding her feet and learning how to drag the cold air into her limbs, when her father arrives. Whatever lives between him and her mother is a different thing than love, different than passion. Respect, maybe. Curiosity, more likely. Regardless, it becomes immediately clear between the mage and the woman of winter that they are not cut out to raise this child between them. They have no interest.
Still, Woolf is not entirely cruel. He does not desire to fling out a child out into the ether with no means of survival, with no ways in which to protect itself, and he does what he can. He drags the wicked edge of his magic down his shoulder, splitting his flesh and letting the rubies of his blood fall down the familiar path. When the blood fall is sufficient, he pulls upon his wisdom, upon Kora’s experiences. He drags and tears. He imbues his daughter with it, reaching into the clock of her life and winding the hours.
One year falls away and her limbs begin to lengthen beneath the snow.
Two years fall away and the roundness of her cheeks gives way to angles and planes.
Three years fall away and she is grown, flowers beginning to bloom in her silver hair.
Four years away and he pulls back his hand.
Evia, a babe for barely an hour, stands before them, blinking slowly, her mercurial gaze even upon these two who she now recognizes as her parents. Woolf nods and she does the same, moving her lips and working her tongue, finding the strange muscles and feeling a body that is foreign and yet her own.
She doesn’t wait long. Doesn’t cry goodbye in her mother’s hair. Doesn’t press delicate kisses to her father’s cheek. Instead, she moves to the sea, to the siren sound of the water that she can hear—a soft chime of bells that crooks its finger to her. She glides into her, graceful despite the awkwardness of limbs recently grown, and continues forward until the water rises up her chest and around her throat and then over her head. It glides over her scales, practically iridescent in the play of ocean, and it fills her mouth, as natural as the air she had breathed when she had first took her breath deep into her lungs.
Evia is not sure how long she swims. How long she moves.
Hours, perhaps, her scaled, slender form finding the tides and the currents and the pull of the ocean. Not as easily as those strange tailed creatures but elegant all the same, her legs churning beneath her. She doesn’t stop until the water narrows, as the salt begins to filter out, and she realizes that she is moving upstream. She doesn’t stop until she reaches a point where the bank begins to slope upward.
Her hooves sink into the mud and she emerges from the water, the river dripping down her sides, the flowers in her mane remaining unusually vibrant and fresh. Content, she stands in the middle of the river, the channel narrow and the water gliding past her as she looks down at her reflection.
So this is what it is to be alive.
