Yara Venn

It's late, and Yara is sitting cross-legged on the floor of a borrowed room with her hands cupped in front of her like she's holding water. She whispers something — two words, barely a breath, "show-true, color-feel" — and the air above her palms goes lavender, then a thin uncertain green. She's practicing. She does this when she can't sleep. She is nineteen years old, she taught herself almost everything she can do, and the discipline obeys her even though her form is wrong.

You should know this about her before anything else. The hand position is wrong. The phrase is wrong. A trained Weaver would wince. It works anyway.

The work

Her primary discipline is Spectra, and her ability there is the kind of thing that makes formal instructors stop mid-sentence. No bloodline, no school, no glyph drills. The light just does what she asks it to do. Her secondary is Luxomancy, which surfaced during puberty without warning and is still developing faster than it has any right to. The standard explanation for someone like her is "spontaneous Carrier," which is the polite phrase for a person nobody can quite account for.

Her best technique is one she invented by accident. She calls it Truth Light, when she calls it anything. She cups her hands, whispers "show-true, color-feel," and a Spectra aura blooms around whoever she's looking at, shifting through colors that map to whatever the person actually feels. Red for anger, blue for sadness, gold for joy. It cannot be faked and it cannot be hidden, which is why most people she's tried it on have asked her to stop.

Ghost Walking is newer and harder. She bends the light around her body and pushes a quiet emotional dampening outward at the same time, and for fifteen or twenty minutes nobody notices her. Past that the working collapses, and when it fails it fails in flickers, a hand visible for a second and then gone.

Her CGS is unteachable. She switches between Flowing and Staccato mid-working without noticing. She accidentally invents transitions that don't exist in any of the textbooks she's never read. She keeps a notebook of what works and what doesn't, and she fills the margins with question marks.

Where she stands

She is a spontaneous Carrier from rural Lowvale, no bloodline behind her, no school crest on her sleeve. She is currently studying with Silas Greythorne, an independent instructor who took her on as a private student. Most of what she knows about Weaving she taught herself before she ever met him.

That puts her in a strange middle place. To non-Weavers she is unmistakably Weaver, eyes flashing with color, doing things that look like fairy tales. To trained Weavers she is something else again, a person without lineage producing techniques they don't have names for, getting results their drills don't predict. She surprises both rooms. She is not entirely comfortable in either.

What helps her, when anything does, is that she's quick. Quick-witted, quick to improvise, quick to stitch together a solution out of whatever the working in front of her happens to need. The orthodox path was never available to her. The unorthodox one keeps producing things the orthodox path can't.

What she looks like working

She's small, or maybe just average, but she carries herself like she's smaller than she is. Hunched shoulders, eyes down, the body language of someone trying to take up less room than her body actually does. Hand-me-down clothes, mostly non-Weaver cuts she's modified with her own stitching. She can't afford Weaver robes. A Lowvale accent she has not been able to soften no matter how hard she tries, and she has tried. She says "sorry" reflexively, several times an hour, often before there is anything to be sorry for. She rambles when she's nervous, which is most of the time.

Her hands fidget when she isn't using them. When she is using them, they go still and certain in a way that surprises people who only know her standing up. Her eyes flash with color when she's working Spectra. Greens and golds and that uncertain lavender from her notebook. Non-Weavers find this disturbing. She has learned not to do it where they can see.

She moves between graceful and clumsy depending on whether she's being watched, and the more self-conscious she gets, the more things she knocks over, which makes her more self-conscious, which knocks over more things. When she's alone with a working she loves, her whole posture changes. The hunching goes. The apologies go. The light bends in a slow arc around her cupped palms, lavender into green into a gold so faint you'd miss it if you blinked, and her hands stay perfectly still.