The Reasons Why

When you are blind, your world becomes very small.

Molly picked her way down the stony shore of the lake, her bare feet questing for each step.

They think you cannot do the same things they can. You are either overly helped, or utterly ignored.

She winced as a sharp rock pierced the bottom of her foot, faltering for a moment. No one called out to her. No hands reached for her elbow. Molly smiled to herself despite the pain, and continued down to the water.

Eventually your room becomes as much a cage as a haven. When you are not being useful you are unnecessary. An accessory at best, to be trotted out and admired, and placed back on its shelf to be kept safe.

The water was cool on her toes and she eagerly waded in despite the chill. The darkness was married to the water, and her world expanded to match. Little fish fled from her steps. A frog leapt out of the lake twenty meters away, along the shore. Molly lifted her feet and swam through the glittering substance that surrounded her, her minds eye open to the lapping waves and everything underneath them.

She turned slowly to her back and floated, a cork in the middle of the water with her face toward the warm sun. The light did not pierce the darkness she had been born with, but she could see the fish swimming deep below her, sense the roots drinking in the lake, spreading upward into the trees at the shoreline. Compared to her basin, the lake was almost unimaginably huge.

One cannot blame the bird for flying away.

This was freedom.

Molly floated, moving only enough to keep her nose above the water, considering her next move. Dalriada, the kingdom of the freemen, was teetering on a precipice. After King Porticio's death the Council of Seven had formed, the seven lords of the lands nearest to the capitol city of Bai-Ulgan. For a time this arrangement had worked, but it would soon come to an end.

With no heir from the Mergovas line the Council could either rule indefinitely... or split the kingdom apart. From what she had seen, Molly knew a schism of some kind was coming. She couldn't be certain which of the lords would begin it, and so she trusted none of them.

She had been taken from her family as a child by the late king and brought to live in the palace. Her sight taken by a childhood fever, she was a burgeoning water mage with great potential. The former palace Seer had handpicked her as his replacement, and he trained her until his death when she was thirteen. Now a Seer in her own right, Molly could sometimes trace the strands of time through her water basin, viewing past and future events. These visions did not always make sense, but she had gotten better at interpreting them with experience.

There was one place where the heirs of Elias Mergovas, the first king of Dalriada, still lived. The waters had pointed her south, and so there she would go. How she'd find an entrance to Verbannen, the city of the Trow, she did not know, but these things had a way of working out.

She swam toward the shore, dipping beneath the water. The river flowed in the direction she wanted to go, so that was where her journey would begin.