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Her name's Isabella, and she prefers Bella, and she's called Stormy.
She has never slept through a stormy night since she was a baby. Till she was seven her mother thought she was scared; her mother reassured her that the thunder couldn't get her, her mother told her over and over that it was just a sound and she should try to sleep. Bella told her she was wrong, but Ranae thought she was just putting on a brave face, denying fear so she wouldn't look babyish.
When she is seven she drags her mattress out the back door in the middle of a stormy night, flops onto it in the rain, and sleeps like a log in the pouring storm, and after that her mother realizes what is really going on in her head when she tells them storms don't scare her.
The mattress is ruined. Ranae replaces it. That one is destroyed the next time Bella is left unsupervised during rough nighttime weather.
Ranae gets her a hammock.
When Bella is eight she learns to really touch the weather, not just with her skin but with her self. It's delicious. She can't do it all day, so she still plays and goes to school and sleeps and eats and writes and reads books - but she does it a lot. Stolen moments, here and there, where she can feel the raindrops and the air - she can reach farther and touch the clouds - she can skim the tops of the clouds and the dry rarefied winds above them - she can reach farther and farther, grab shards of sunlight -
Sometimes it is a little hard to come back, but she gets tired if she stays out too long.
She can change stuff she touches. She can "breathe", and the wind will swirl this way or that. She feels like she is the sky, sometimes, when she's in deep, and the sky-self is even clumsier and harder to control than her regular body, but she can move it if she tries. (This is also tiring, but she gets better and better with practice.)
By the time she is nine, weather happens around her all the time. It's mostly humidity, and temperature - the air is dry when she's happy, wet when she's sad, hot when she's angry, cold when she's calm. But sometimes rain comes to comfort her - even indoors - sometimes winds kick up and break Ranae's good china, sometimes there are tiny playful bolts of lightning, and they seem to like Bella, but just as though they were badly trained puppies that doesn't mean they won't bite other people.
Of course Ranae takes her to a magic-checker. But the magic-checker insists on doing his tests indoors, in a nasty stuffy room, and no weather to touch at all (there's barely oxygen), and Bella is unhappy and nothing happens because the air is behaving in a very unskylike way. The tests all turn up negative. Bella goes home. Ranae writes it off as "just one of those things", though when prompted for a list of those things, she cannot produce one.
Bella plays with the sky. Work small, be big. Feel small, think big. She makes tiny little breaths, because they're easier to control; but she inhabits the biggest storms that she can, stretching miles across and miles high, a billion drops of rain. She sinks deep into the tiniest snowflake crystals and puffs of air and beams of sun to feel how they work; but she imagines being the whole sky, over the whole world, and dancing.
By the time Bella is ten, she no longer makes indoor weather unless she chooses to. (It is always very dry where she keeps her notebooks.) It rains in the vicinity of Firebird City exactly twice weekly, as more would harm local flora, but when it does rain it's usually a doozy, intense thunder that shakes the windows, lightning that crackles between the clouds. Sometimes she calls down just a little bit of lightning, when Ranae's not looking, and it touches her outstretched hand, and she feels all aglow and invigorated, like instead of being the sky the sky is being her.
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cumulonimbus
nonbird
"It's commonly easier, more with some kinds of magic than others, to do magic to a large area when you are in the middle of it. And the middles of round things are more middley than the middles of, say, squares. In a square, parts of the edge are closer to the middle than the corners are. Winding Circle is very conveniently round, so the Hub is an excellent place to do things that benefit from middleness. Like earthquake protections, which is what Sedge was just renewing."
cumulonimbus
Stormy nods. "I'm usually round parts of sky. Sometimes I sort of lean if I'm following something, but mostly it's just a ways in all directions from wherever I am."
nonbird
"That also makes sense! Even people who aren't the sky can usually go a ways in any direction from wherever they are, looking at things that are their magic."
whipstitch
This seems to cue a general dispersal from the table. Mercy starts cleaning things.
ignorable
Sedge goes to help him with that, perhaps with an ulterior motive involving leftovers.
cumulonimbus
Stormy watches everyone go, then follows Elyth. "Can I ask you a thing?"
cumulonimbus
"I'm the only person sleeping outside all the time; what's everybody else doing here?"
neverbeatme
"Mercy got in fights in the boys' dormitory. I'm not sure what about or who started them, but I know he injured some other boys. Serahila needs her own room to sleep in or she doesn't sleep. Niva came with Serahila because they're twins. And when I was in the girls' dormitory some of the noble and merchant girls started being nasty to me because I don't know who my father was, and I told Dedicate Honey it would be much easier to move me away from them than them away from me even though I know I didn't do anything wrong, so she sent me here."
cumulonimbus
"Thanks. ...I don't have to worry about Mercy being dangerous, do I?"
neverbeatme
"I don't think so. He doesn't get in fights here, and Rook and Sedge aren't worried about that and they're the kind of people who'd worry about it if it seemed like a problem. I think Mercy is dangerous to some people some of the time but not to all people all of the time, and not to us."
cumulonimbus
"Okay, good. Do you know what-all I'm going to be doing all day while I'm here?"
neverbeatme
"We have chores, and there's supposed to be a rotation, but Mercy always takes cooking and Serahila always takes cleaning so me and Niva don't usually have much to do except help Rook pull weeds and water his trees. Sedge teaches us meditation some afternoons, and other afternoons we study with our teachers. Rook is mine because there are no other paper mages at Winding Circle. Mercy has Dedicate Maple, the cook-mage in charge of the kitchens, and Dedicate Finch, the thread-mage in charge of the Air temple. Serahila doesn't have a teacher because nobody knows what her magic is, but she sometimes does extra meditation with Sedge when everyone else is with theirs. Niva studies with Spruce; she's a Fire temple smith."
cumulonimbus
"I'm going to make tiny weather for the tiny trees. Or try, anyway. Is Mathilde going to be my teacher or somebody else?"
neverbeatme
"Mathilde's going to be your teacher if she can't find anyone else, and there aren't any other weather mages at Winding Circle either, so probably she can't."
cumulonimbus
"How do people who don't have the same kind of magic as their students teach it, anyway?"
neverbeatme
"I don't know how people do it generally. Rook and I just sit and talk about magic and he suggests things and I try them. And he's teaching me how to make ink and paper. Or we're both learning it; I don't think he knew before. He says paper mages are very rare, and he says that's good because I don't have to be limited by tradition."