She sat with that for a long time. Her eyes were watery as she lowered her head

Before she understood it completely, and then she sat with it for longer after that.

There were eighteen survivors, out of a village of over two hundred who were taken to the nearest city large enough to receive them. Lina sat in the back of a cart next to an old woman who had not said anything since the cart started moving.

She lowered her head the entire journey.

***

The orphanage in the city was run by a woman named Ossa, she provided what was needed and expected a reasonable level of compliance in return and this arrangement worked for most of the children in her care.

It worked adequately for Lina.

She was quiet. She did her tasks. She ate what was provided. She slept in the room assigned to her and kept her things in the space allocated for them. She did not cause problems and she did not make close friends, not because she was unfriendly but because the part of her that had known how to do that had been in a village that no longer existed.

She grew.

Seven years passed the way years passed in places like that marked less by events than by the gradual accumulation of ordinary days, each one similar.

She was seventeen when it started.

It began as light.

Not the light of lamps she saw. This was a glow at the edges of things, faint and irregular in shape.

She noticed it first at the corner of the dormitory ceiling. A small gathering of light, roughly spherical. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked away. When she looked back it was gone.

She said nothing to anyone.

Two days later there were three of them. Different sizes. Moving in different directions. One of them drifted toward her slowly enough that she had time to raise her hand and let it rest against her palm.

It was warm.

The warmth of something alive.

She sat very still and let it rest there.

It rested there and after a while it drifted away.

She still said nothing to anyone, this was not something Ossa’s orphanage had a category for.

Over the following weeks the lights multiplied. They appeared in the dormitory, in the courtyard, along the stone wall at the back of the property. Other children did not seem to see them. She watched carefully.

She started talking to them quietly, in the time after the dormitory lights went out and before sleep came.

They did not respond in words. But they responded by brightness shifting, movements that seemed directed toward her rather than random.

She would not have been able to explain to anyone who had not experienced it.

She had always had the sense that something was paying attention to her.

Now she could see what it was.

The forest at the edge of the city was not large. It was a remnant of older growth that the city’s expansion had not yet reached, preserved by distance from the main roads and the lack of any obvious use for it. Lina had seen it from the orphanage walls and had thought about it periodically for years.

Three months after the lights began appearing she walked into it alone.

She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She took nothing except the clothes she was wearing and the small amount of money she had saved from occasional work in the city market. She left before the morning tasks began and did not look back at the orphanage wall.

She walked into the trees.

The difference was immediate.

In the city the lights appeared occasionally, in small numbers, usually alone. In the forest they were everywhere. Dozens of them, moving between the trees, gathering near water, clustering around the older growth in a density she had not seen anywhere else. The forest was full of them. She simply had not been in the forest before.

She walked deeper in and they moved around.

She stopped at a clearing where the tree cover broke enough to let the sky through, sat down on the ground, and looked at them.

There were hundreds.

All sizes. All intensities. Some of them moved toward her and some moved away, the way certain ones seemed to be communicating with each other in a register she could almost but not quite read.

A small laugh escaped.

She hadn’t been happy after the incident.

"So cute!"

One drifted toward her and stopped near her face.

She looked at it.

"Hello," Her voice sounded strange to her in the quiet of the clearing. She had not used it much in the last seven years except when required.

The light brightened slightly.

"I can see you, I have been able to see you for a while. I do not know why."

The light moved to her left, paused, moved back.

"I do not know what you are, I thought I should say that. I do not want to assume." 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

The light pulsed once a single stronger brightness she interpreted as acknowledgment rather than response.

She sat in the clearing for the rest of the day.

By evening she had not eaten and had nowhere to sleep and had less certainty about what her life was going to look like than she had had that morning when she walked through the orphanage gate.

She was the most settled she had felt since she was ten years old sitting at a dinner table watching the light come through the window.

She stayed in the forest.

She found shelter in a section of the older growth where the roots had grown together into something with a roof. She foraged what she knew was safe to eat from the herb knowledge her mother had given her before the village. She slept when it was dark and moved when it was light and the fairies she had started calling them that in her own mind.

She was not alone.

She had not realized how completely alone she had been for the last seven years.

The one who came closest to her most often was smaller than the others, quick-moving, with a particular quality to its light that she had started to recognize the way she recognized a familiar voice. It circled her while she slept and was always the first thing she saw when she woke up.

She called it Sylph. Because it moved the way the wind moved.

It responded to the name.