AVAEL 008: Nearsighted
Avaelle Easton was indeed born somewhere around 1820. The town wasn’t a town at all, it was a group of shanties managed by the evil Vampire Trelaine and his gang of thugs.
I was born there and lied to that my father was my father and my mother had died. No, neither was true, though it took me nearly two centuries to figure out the truth.
I was a created being, a psuedoclone, made of Queen Elixabet, the last known natural born sorceress.
Except unlike her, I couldn’t see but six fucking inches in front of my nose. Twelve if i squinted but ‘fuck that noise’.
But I didn’t know how broken I was yet. I met Straud in a random chance meeting – he was unaware that his old nemesis Trelaine was yet operating on his planet Earth. He was looking for sorceresses while masquerading as bride shopping. Through some uncertainty he never knew what – or who – I was; he guessed I was a fake.
I angered through my teenage years. Stupidly, determined to regain a kingdom I didn’t yet know I’d lost. But somewhere I maintained a kernel of anger, convinced ‘there was something wrong’: but maybe it was me.
Trelaine found me, or pretended he found me, and promised me a kingdom he never intended to deliver. And I believed him. In time I’ve tried to forgive myself for this egregious error of judgement – because apart from a stitched together memory of twenty minutes in the presence of a foreign prince – there was nothing about myself I could assert with one-hundred percent accuracy except that I was I, and I was separate from the World I could see.
Dare I remind you the terrible eyesight I was born with, and that the World only existed inside the six inches of sight I had – and anything else was an illusion, a translation, created by the Lens. I was the anti-Prism, the point on which all Light, the only Life on which I could be certain, converged at my Soul Point. All light that did not converge on myself I could only conjecture at, and guessing at nothing seemed like a terrible waste of time to my young Self.
But I digress.
Trelaine and I danced through the wild West, I learned a great deal about the Joys of the World and I learned how to smile, something I’d not done much in my youth. Sadly Trelaine taught me how to fight and how to hurt. But the pain of others was classed as an UNKNOWN and so it was as easy to ignore as anything else I’d ignored in my quest to become a happy child.
I stayed with Trelaine for over a century, he used ancient Magicks to extend my life, and though I knew not at the time, he drew magical energy from me, a theft I’ve never recovered from. As I would find, he extracted a number of Wards and selfish Magicks from my person over the years.
In the nineteen-fifties I was masquerading as the doctor’s robotic pet, a girl trapped in an iron lung. I thought my health was failing at the time, but it was nothing compared to what I’d have to endure later in life. It is painful, as we age, to constantly correct our childish impressions. The Eternal Discipline.
I ran away, but I ran back to him, getting ensnared in his latest endeavor, the Disney Princess Project – which just seemed strangely familiar to me. And this time, I wasn’t wrong.
It was Straud who burned the house Trelaine was sheltering in, leaving both he and I with blackened skin. But my magicks had left us scarred rather than dead.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Special thanks to Kevin, for building this suit for me. I will no longer be the broken Eye supported by a faulty Lens, but to serve as the Ear for the (w)IntraNet.