Brina knew how fast it could go from yellow evening to nighttime, but the light was still gone faster than she expected. The winds chilled in the fading daylight, until it burned her cheeks when it blew through the trees.

She couldn't remember the moon right now, but the difference between full and new was, ha, night and day…

Should she gather her magic? Make some light? She had a little firelight she could make, it might help get back to her shelter? 

Brina tried to stoke it without meditating and was met with the same lump as this morning. She growled at it and shivered, even with the magical protection.

It was really dark. The moon might have been new after all. Or hopefully just low?

A wolf howled in the distance and Brina swallowed the panic. They weren't close–the howl was a long way off.

Brina picked up her pace and kept her head down while she followed her tracks, desperate to find her way back to the shelter before she lost the light.

She was never gonna take her forest for granted ever again. It had so much food, it was on the side that didn't flood, and her home was in it.

Here!

Or if this wasn't it, it was still a whole tree that fell down, which was what she was looking for….  

Except the big tree only had one hole that she could see, the half-circle opening at the bottom.

Poking at it, she found a dent but not a hole big enough to climb in. 

This wasn't the right place, the shelter Brina made wasn't here and the holes she could find weren't big enough.

Only now it was too dark to see her tracks.

Brina held in the sob and tried to make her eyes see in the dark anyway.

No such luck.

In her mindscape, Brina dug up one of the sparks and dragged it by itself to her hand, getting a full flash of light that more blinded her than let her see, but she could see the direction of her tracks in that single flash.

She followed that as far as she dared, then dug up and summoned forth another spark to fire off, this time raising her hand and turning her palm forward before she cast the light. 

This worked much better, but it was still weaker than anything she'd ever done. It felt horrible.

She remembered that it was actually probably more power than a good half of natural mages would ever use. She could hardly believe it the first time they told her.

Brina didn't want to use up all the magic in her room… 

She had three sparks left, so she determined she would try to grow one. She caught it in closed cupped hands like Daemon said.

She knew how to press on it, it was a weird head trick where you imagined your hands getting smaller and feeling the magic's response.

She pushed on it and it pushed back. She clamped down, but it fought and squirmed and pressed. Her real arms started aching. 

She let it push and push and then she pulled her hands out like she was supposed to, and the spark bounced away.

Dammit.

Brina shivered in real life, then gave up and grabbed another to burst into light. She'd do it later.

Her tracks were easy to follow, she was grateful to herself for that. Dragging her feet helped so much.

The wolves' howls were much closer this time. Brina covered her mouth to swallow the gasp, and she forced herself to keep walking on shaky knees.

I'm Brinarini and I'm magic and I'm loved and I'm fast and I'm strong and I'm tough and I'm good.

I'm Brinarini, and I'm magic and I'm loved and I'm so so scared.

That's fine, kiddo. You're supposed to be. Use the fear to eff with the magic, warm yourself up, something, come on. You're wasting good energy.

Brina tried to force her legs to stop shaking, but they wouldn't. Her knees felt funny, not even weak, just funny, but they would not stop shaking.

Brina grabbed her spark and tried again just to have it bounce off. She swore it was the same one, too. It skittered off into the rafters, leaving Brina discouraged where she sat on the floor.

She was down to that one and one other.

The other was hiding under her bed.

Brina returned to herself where she stood frozen in the middle of the cold, dark, strange forest. She looked skyward for the moon and found it almost-half full coming over the canopy and spilling light through tiny spaces. It was so dark that it made a difference, as her eyes adapted.

The clearing would be brighter than everywhere during the night, too, Brina hoped, and she pressed on. Or she was going to press on, but she lost her tracks. The darkness swallowed the shadows of the piled leaves. 

Being down to two sparks and not knowing how to fix that, Brina hesitated, weighing out the chances of getting completely lost versus finding her tracks again with the moonlight, she was just about to make the decision she knew was bad when the wolves howled again.

They weren't close, but they were behind her and they weren't before. They were moving fast.

Brina flashed the spark, not wanting to waste any more time, and she saw her tracks laid out maybe fifty steps and up a slope.

She tried to run and found her body aching with the cold. It hurt just to move, her feet hurt again, but she had to keep going.

When she got to the top of that hill, she was going to have to pick between her last spark for light or guessing, and she already knew what she was going to do.

The clearing wasn't visible from here, either.

Brina tried not to cry, and she caught her last spark.

She squeezed it hard and tried to get it to blow up, but she was afraid to let it go and lose it again… 

Dammit!

Tears stung as she gripped what felt like the last of her magic, and she put her real life hand over her head and opened it to release a flash of light.

Another fifty paces around a curve.

Brina dared not hope the clearing would be visible to her.

Except as she continued onward, she realized that it was the clearing. She was on the wrong side to get the light beams, and the fifty paces were her own walking around to collect leaves. She could have cussed.

But she found her hidey hole.

She threw some new leaves in, kicked the bottom, then threw more in, then put more up front, raking them all in with a fan of branch with leaves still on, and she burrowed deep until she could barely see out and was almost certain no one could see in. Her second exit was at her feet, muddy leaves and dry leaves together, blocked with a few piled up sticks, she was okay. This was just the test for all the other times she made these shelters.

Brina's breath steamed yellow into curls over her head, and the space filled with curls of yellow amongst the shrinking white. Daemon had to guess about when she could see the temperatures, about why and when she could and couldn't. His was a guess about 'relative' and didn't make much sense to her.

Her magic always changed while she was asleep. They joked about how it would get bored. She hoped she got the hot-cold again tomorrow. Aunt Eupa called them flavors, but Daemon called them attunements and said Aunt Eupa was being "informal". It didn't change what happened, which was specific kinds of accidental use and what she could see for the time. Daemon said she could use all of them all the time, and she could, but the attuned were easiest to manipulate, and were most likely to get into her hands when she touched stuff. 

Would she notice if it was cold enough to freeze her before it was too late? Would her magic get bored and change its mind about what kind of attunement to have? She would feel it again, and it could hurt her or made her sick. Would Ro-Ro find her in this hiding spot? (That was a silly question, of course she would.)

If it was anything that wasn't useful, Brina wasn't sure what she'd do instead. Maybe stay here and hide. After finding some water. She should have thought of that sooner. 

Brina had never been this tired in her entire life. Now that she was lying down, she was achy, and her arms and legs felt heavier than floorstones. Her head hurt, too, but she wasn't sure why. Even her belly ached. Her mouth stuck painfully to itself. Her hands and feet itched--she already scratched one of the spots on her hands to blood. Exhausted, hurt, itching, frightened, alone, and lost, hiding in a narrow space in the middle of nowhere, she was overcome with it all, and she wept. 

Crying didn't make Brina feel better this time. This time, it just made her feel more tired. She couldn't sleep. She was too scared and too itchy, tired or not.

Thinking about school was helping, but she kept thinking about her magic, too. It just– it never did this before! She never had so much trouble doing anything with it! She controlled it better than this!

Sort of.

Actually, not really. Not in the beginning for sure. 

The first sign of the magic was a teleport when they were playing hide and seek. She was dashing through the trees, trying to escape Aunt Eupa, and she accidentally zapped herself ten feet ahead. It surprised her so much that, even though the teleport didn't throw off her stride, she fell down trying to stop.

After that, things got bigger and more frequent. Brina could track some of its patterns, but a lot of the time, it was inside her body and would only come out when it had something to affect. When that stopped, it would just fly and jump whenever. This was when they learned that she was hard to hurt with her own magic, either because it was hers or just because she was tougher than it was strong, but either case made Aunt Eupa and Daddy breathe a sigh of relief.

She was scared. No one could explain anything, it kept happening completely beyond her control, sometimes it was big and loud or bright. It was awful. She knew that her guardians didn't mean to hurt her feelings or worry her, but them being afraid to talk about it made her feel bad, and it took a long time for her to feel like it wasn't something to hide.  

Ferrin helped. Ferrin thought it was great. He always wanted to see a sorcerer break through, and he said he smelled hers from the beginning. It was nice to have someone celebrate every time she messed something up. Him and his brothers were in her class when she started magicking in there, a case of hiccups that got immeasurably loud for five minutes. He didn't stop smiling all day, and he did it every time something like that would happen. It made her feel so much better. 

The school was nice the whole time Brina went. Daddy talked to them about when she would have to leave, and they were clear that they did send students away but that they could come back when they learned to stop on their own. Brina kept most of her outbursts down (Daemon suggested that this was because she unconsciously told it not to do big things) so that they were only little bits like leaving marks on her slate, fumes coming out of her mouth, turning things colors or leaving fingerprints when she touched things.

She still had to leave school when she sneezed holes into her writing desk. 

She remembered that really well. It wasn't even that long ago, maybe a year or two. It was a Bad Magic Day, where she was just kind of tingling and everything she did ran the risk of upsetting her magic and getting it started. Light motes circled her head and hands constantly, and she burned her schoolwork before she could hand it in, scorching it to black ash in her hand.  Her teacher was nice about it, saying it was a shame, and that she'd seen how hard Brina was working on that paragraph, so she got the credit anyway, but she still hated it. And then she sneezed.

It was just a sneeze, and Brina saw that her hair had turned purple when it fell past her shoulders, but no one was rude enough to say anything about it until Ferrin's brothers remarked on it. One said it was a really pretty purple, and the other one said it didn't match her dress. Ferrin did say the brown was better. She remembered that, too, and she remembered vowing to learn how to do that and pick out whatever colors she wanted. (Daemon did not know how to do that, so she would have to learn it from someone he called a Luminist, one who specialized in light, which was what changed colors.)

The desk came as a surprise after break, when she came back and saw the dents forming in specks and spots over the thing. Miss Ponhem must have been watching her, because it was barely a second more before the teacher swept in and took the desk away. 

"I'm gonna get sent away," Brina told Ferrin. "I broke the desk."

"I think it's more 'cos you broke the desk like an hour and a half ago and it's still not done being broken," Ferrin corrected her merrily. 

That was sort of true– the desk was supposed to be protected, and her outburst overriding the magic spell was a sign of huge power. But it was actually that she broke the desk and turned her hair purple at the same time. Using two kinds at once in what was supposed to be a little hiccup of magic was too much, they said. (Of course, that was before she was making whole spheres of four or five kinds as a way to get ready for the day.)

Her last day of school wasn't too horrible. Ro-Ro dropped her off and Brina got to show everyone that she wasn't lying. That was fun and funny, 'cos Ro-Ro didn't want to go, and Daddy made her get dressed, and she had to talk to the principal while everyone in class looked at her from the window. They never believed her when she talked about Ro-Ro and this was going to be one of the only chances Brina had to prove she was real.

The teacher sent her off with a farewell party where they took time off from lessons so everyone could mill about and talk. Brina wrote letters to her teacher and the principal and Ferrin and his family, and Peony, even though she wasn't in the school anymore, and Daddy promised they would be able to visit Ferrin and he could visit her as soon as she stopped exploding. 

Being home was boring except when it wasn't. The magic didn't like being bored, either, and it would get jumpy sometimes for no clear reasons. Daddy held her when it was being messy, and she couldn't hurt neither him nor Aunt Eupa, but it still made Brina feel bad when things went wrong around her. (Aunt Eupa started calling it sideways or upside-down instead of wrong. It made Brina feel a little better.) Aunt Eupa and Daddy would take turns staying with Brina at home while they went to town, but she could tell they were anxious. She knew it was her magic, but she didn't realize that it was because they wanted to help until later. She felt like they were scared of her. In part because she was scared of herself, or at least that's what Daemon and Ro-Ro said. She could only feel it getting ready to jump sometimes, and most of those were barely warnings and more like feeling it happen too early. Her family couldn't know even that much, though, so they just had to worry like her all the time. 

From spring to autumn, Brina was unschooled and untaught and her magic got stronger and less controlled, until she was casting every single day, sometimes more than a few times. She stayed outside as much as she could, and Ro-Ro picked her out a good grove of trees away from everyone so she could fling it out before it jumped on its own. Of course, the damage was so bad that they had to climb up the trees and cut down the tops and make walls so Brina wouldn't bring anything down on anyone's heads. 

Brina knew of her family's struggle to find a teacher, but she didn't find out about why it was so much trouble until later. It all made a lot more sense about her magic coming in, too, and why they were nervous to talk about it. The little mage heard about her strength a lot– every magician she met would act like they'd never met another one before, and Ferrin kept talking about how much she would emit when she had the accidents. She didn't get it, but according to everyone, she was the strongest magic user in town and out of town for miles. Even including the adventurers that visited. And this was at her very beginning, during her breakthrough– she hadn't even sort of got her magic all the way in, and still wouldn't for another few years. 

It was baffling to Brina when she found out that most mages don't have these kinds of breakthroughs. Most mages couldn't melt protected desks, and they couldn't freeze whole bathtubs of hot water, and they couldn't make light motes that lasted all day. It was a strange feeling to realize that she really was dangerously powerful, and one of extremely few to be this way. 

They didn't tell her that until they found Daemon. They told her she was real strong and would need a special teacher, but a real sense of where she was and where everyone else was didn't happen until Daemon showed up. Daddy reminded her to hug Daemon when she mentioned it to him. Daemon was very strong, but not as strong as her, and he was taking a risk that many others refused.

A snapping noise and rustling outside yanked Brina violently from her thoughts. She was still in the tree-tent-hovel in the forest in the dark. She didn't realize how close to sleep she had been, but she was wide awake now. She sucked a breath to hold so she could listen. Then she remembered Ro-Ro and Aunt Eupa telling her not to do that but to breathe slow and careful and steady on a ten count. It was too long to Brina but they said that was the point and do her best to spread it even.

The rustling got louder and her heart stopped when Brina heard wolves panting. Her mind went blank except for flashes of herself being torn apart, too scared to think of anything else.

She heard someone counting to ten then starting over. Or thought she did, but apparently the count was not real. Oh, it was Brina, counting breaths. Only she wasn't breathing. It went without her so she had to catch up. It took her longer than it should  to remember that she was still alright. She wasn't safe, but she was whole and healthy, and hiding, and the wolves hadn't found her. Yet. 

Brina found herself still lying silent, counting her breaths and watching the dark as if staring hard enough would let her see through the cover. (That wasn't even a thing she could do.) 

Something scratched the log. Brina yelped before she could stop herself.

Every sound in the clearing stopped, strangled by anticipation.

Brina jumped when one of them scratched again, and she gasped but forced herself to slowly count with her breathing, listening to her heart to keep time. 

Silence followed. Brina could swear even the wolves were holding their breath. 

Her heart jumped to catch up to itself, pounding so hard she could hear it, so loud she worried the wolves would hear. She couldn't decide if she should run, it sounded like both her exits were blocked, they were scratching at the one near her head but the footsteps came from her feet.

Maybe they'll smell human and leave. We taste bad. I'm the worst tasting human ever. I miss Ro-Ro.

A canine groan startled Brina, stuttering her breath and she bit back the sobs. They knew she was there, they were just trying to decide if she was worth digging out. Maybe her magic smelled funny, Ro-Ro said it did.

Rustling leaves and padded feet circled her hiding place. There had to be at least six pacing around. One of them sounded big, with heavy thumping steps that reminded her of Daddy's boots. 

One of the wolves huffed. Their footsteps moved around, circled the hiding place, then trotted off. Brina was left alone with a scream aching in her chest and tears in her eyes. 

But she was alive. And actually warm now. And sleepy.