Happy Birthday Miy!!!!

Prologue: Majele’s POV

Majele combed her hair, a swift stroke downwards, another, another, until all the loose strands had separated. Then, she looked for a ribbon and with a swift movement had her hair tied up near the top of her head. She looked in the mirror. Loose strands still flew around her head, and her glasses were crooked, barely hanging on to the tip of her nose. The ribbon became untied and lay on the floor. More combing her chestnut hair, using some transparent tape on the legs of the glasses, some skin-colored makeup to smudge her freckles, and she had reached something most people would consider acceptable.

Winter had come early. Though it was still November, the wind was picking up dead leaves and dust, whirling them around furiously and throwing them at people’s faces while howling madly. Snow had gathered on the edges of streets, ice had coated everything so that the entire town seemed to be made out of multicolored glass, and windows had complicated fingers of ice on them, creating a spider-web like landscape of cold. For a country mostly used to falls that required nothing more than a moderately thick jacket, the season had come in, beautiful and cruel; destroying crops early and capturing people’s breaths to turn them into clouds coming from their mouths.

After walking for a while, Majele found Thona standing outside her house. She was wearing pants, and a T-shirt underneath a woolen jacket. Her hair was blond and short, spiking up at the ends with a fringe that hid her eyes unless she brushed them to the side. Like most of the people from the Eastern edge of the country, her eyes were narrow and with a slight squint, her speech accented.

“Hi, Majle!” Her mouth spread into a grin, and they began walking to school together.

“You should wear something better for winter,” Majele frowned. Thona’s loose jacket billowed out behind her, and the too-short sleeves showed sunburned arms. It was obvious from the reddened nose and prominent goose bumps that she was cold.

“Meh, I’ve seen worse weather in my underwear,” Thona shrugged, but afterwards a shiver ran through her body, and her paced quickened.

“Well, couldn’t your pants at least match your jacket?”

“Majle, you can be such a prep sometimes,” Thona said.

“Only preps use the word prep,” Although Thona’s voice and expression indicated complete seriousness, Majele couldn’t help but laugh.

“That doesn’t make any freaking sense,”

“I’m not sure about freaking sense, but it makes perfect ordinary sense,” Although Thona’s sigh was framed in the air by winter, Majele smiled again, prompting a trickle of blood to fall into her mouth. She rummaged through her pockets for chapstick immediately afterwards. “It’s cold…” She felt the blood rushing towards her hands, felt the warmth it provided, the aura coating her mittens, the atoms exciting, air providing plentiful oxygen for a wild, red and orange dance upon them to begin. Suddenly, there was a cracking sound and her mittens were on fire.

“Keep those things away from me, I dunna have that fire-proofing stuff you westerners do,” Thona eyed her mittens angrily, eyebrows coming together at the center of her forehead.

“You can do auric magic too, Thona, that way you won’t fail this year,” Majele responded as delicately as she knew how. She could see Thona pursing her lips and looking away, already formulating an angry response. “I mean, I know you like to show love for your country, but Shajin has been the eastern region of Malbja for a few years now, and…” her line of thought drifted off when she saw Thona was no longer paying attention. Obviously she had been lectured like that several times throughout her life, by school counselors, education coaches, perhaps even concerned parents.

But Majele had seen Thona’s pictures of her childhood. Children orphaned and traumatized by war, the ones pitied by privileged westerners. Their faces were tired, dirtied, and sad. Some of them were even rather gruesome, people limbless or missing eyes. Thona could name all of them, and the events too. A seventh birthday party, a funeral, a camping trip. And Thona could detail the crimes against every one of them by the Malbjan army. Although Thona herself was unharmed, and no one in her family was dead, she raged against them, anger flowing out of her mouth in a stream of swears and political opinions. She was never forgiving the country to which she now had citizenship, except for a few select people.

Soon, they saw another girl. Although her hair was also short and blond like Thona’s, it was perfectly straight and seemed to be cut with the help of a ruler. Her woven hat was in the perfect center of her head, both sides of her dangling scarf were the same length, and even her boots seemed to have worn down at the same rate. She presented an image of neatness that was almost elitist in its perfection; her dress subtly suggesting that her tidiness made her better than the average layman in jeans and dirty shirt. Her name was Maje, and Thona often laughed about the similarity between her name and the name of the girl walking beside her.

“Hello, Majele,” she said formally. “Hello, Thona,”

“Hello, Stickler,” Thona said, attempting to warm herself.

“I told you to stop calling me that,” Maje replied, rolling her eyes. “It’s hurtful and rude,”

“Well, if you keep talking like that, what do you want me to call you? Super rad slang gal?”

Majele bit her bottom lip. “Thona, stop teasing Maje,”

“How can you two be friends?” Maje asked, one eyebrow higher than the other. “I mean, you have nothing in common…” Just as Thona was about to reply, the school came into sight.