beware the silence {Aurelia!}

[style=text-align:center;width:450px; padding: 20px;][style=width:425px;height:90px;overflow:auto;text-align:justify;font-family:arial;font-size:10px;color:#f1f1f1; padding:10px; line-height: 10px;]Aura still remembered the first time she had a seizure.

Of course, she didn't like to think about it. The little tyke didn't like to think about anything that was even remotely sad. It ruined her happiness, made her worry Enn because of the fear and the sudden sadness. So she distracted herself with things like the way the trees felt beneath her fingertips. Even though she was blind, she was a still a child who could find beauty in everything. They say when one sense is lost, the others are boosted - and perhaps this was true. Perhaps that was Aurelia was so fascinated with the way the ground crunched underneath her feet and the ice cold that she could feel when she bent down and touched it. She was an explorer, even if she couldn't necessarily see what was around her.

After her blindness, she had soon learned to rely on other things to keep her aware, to help her navigate a world of milky white without hurting herself. Some were scared of the nothingness around her, but because the tot was a fairly optimistic child, and easily pleased, she created the world around her into an image that wavered behind her eyelids when she closed them, like an artist who draws on a piece of paper.

Even for her age, and the added blindness on top, Aura was fairly good at figuring out the seriousness of a problem. She was the one who would stave off George's upset thoughts when he would get into one fo those melancholy moods that she didn't really understand but could feel anyway. Empathetic in nature, and having already developed a sort of sixth sense towards the way that people felt, she knew that the situation at hand was fairly grim. She'd followed George a ways as he had gone looking for water before branching off on her own, and there was something about him that made her think Georgie is upset.

She was scared, in a way that was both familiar and unfamiliar. Grand-mammy had always provided for them and kept them safe and warm in their house, and now they were suddenly in the cold with a worried George and a sick mama. The tot barely knew what to do with herself, even though she'd been the one insisting to go with them in the first place, clinging to Enn and crying until she'd made herself sick and had to spend the next day sleeping. It wasn't as if it was any secret that Enn was about as sick as her child. Which was a likely reason for why the toddler clung so tightly to her. Like saw like.

She hadn't wandered far from camp - at least, she didn't think she had, but being blind, sometimes it was hard to tell. She could still occasionally hear Enn's movements, if she listened hard enough, and she figured that was a good enough marker for how close she was.

They were in a dangerous position. Halfway between Camp Mortalis, but it also meant that they were vulnerable to the other beasties - not only vampires, which Aurelia was terrified of because of some of the stories she had heard, but hungry wolves and other animals, too. The air was cold and frigid, and she was bundled up tightly in a jacket. It wasn't a toddler's jacket, it had been an old ratty one of Enn's, but the sleeves had been rolled back several times, although they still occasionally fell over her hands. The wide blue eyes, which were set in a face of pure, angelic innocence, gazed unseeingly straight forward, a certain glassiness to them that marks those that are blind.

She reached out and found a tree, steadied herself. Everything gave off a sort of presence, and the toddler had learned to pick up on that. She knew when people were near by, could tell them all apart from George and Enn and Grand-mammy. It didn't stop at people, however. If she got too close to a wall or a tree or some sort of object, there was an instinctual, intuitional... something in the back of her mind that said STOP!

The toddler could almost be considered independent, which, for a five year old in itself was fairly impressive, but for a blind child, was quite a feat. But the fact of the matter was, once people finally met Aura, they figured out fast that she wasn't independent. Couldn't be, and likely never would. Her blindness, coupled with a natural weakness that comes from having a weak form, and her seizures, which were violent and unexpected and came at inopportune times, made it impossible to navigate the blankness of the world as seen through her eyes. Perhaps she could through touch, if it hadn't been that they struck so randomly and so harshly, and left her unable to do anything other than call out for Enn.

She didn't hear Enn the first time she called out. She was too busy marvelling at how cold the tree was, at how frosty the air and how rigid the bark as her fingers slid down it. There was a light sprinkling, little dots that she could only guess were snowflakes as they fell on to her upturned face. A smile curved her lips in wonder, and she lifted her hands and could feel the sprinkling there, too.

But the sudden bubble that had surrounded her up until them popped abruptly. Aurelia? Where are you? Panicked, searching. All the sounds around her suddenly came back and the toddler dropped her hands, blinking as it took a moment for the words to process. She did that sometimes - merely faded off into her own little world where no one could reach her, at least not for a moment. Using the trees to guide her towards Enn's voice, she took steady steps forward, moving fairly quickly until she made it safely back to camp. "I'm here mama. Sorry."