From her perch, Kana felt the chill in the morning air confess the truth of the season, even as she watched Ashora sunning herself on a rock, nearly taken in by the falsehood spoken by the sun, a promise of warmer days and the laze of summer.  Ashora looked impatient as she waited for Chenoa by the water’s edge, watching as Chenoa carefully picked her way down the pebbled slope.  There was an easier path to the water, one pounded flat from years of use by the girls of the clan, any of whom could be found all day every day with pots dipping into the water.  Ashora, Chenoa, and Kana preferred their secret place, upstream from the well-travelled edge where children’s toes sank in the soft mud as they dared one another to go deeper into the near freezing water that now ran high and turbulent with snow melt.  Kana was glad of their privacy, it made it easier for her to feel as if she belonged.

Three winters ago, Chenoa had gone to live with the sachem, both to serve him and to learn to become a sachem herself.  These stolen moments at the water’s edge were not the only time the girls shared, but this was the only guaranteed time the girls met and talked in private each day.

Loose pebbles shifted beneath Chenoa’s overly careful feet.  She caught herself before falling and looked up to see Ashora watching her.  On Chenoa’s dark forehead was painted a white circle with a line descending the bridge of her nose and ending at the bottom of her chin.  It marked her as an enlightened one – apprentice to the sachem.  As if Chenoa had needed any special marking that hadn’t already been given her by Iram.  Chenoa had been born with her left iris blown out, so that the iris itself was not round, but looked more like the brown of her eye had been flipped by the tip of one of the sachem’s paint brushes, rather than carefully painted within the lines.  Not all enlightened ones were known at birth, but some were, and Chenoa was one of them.

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Because you want to know…

Kana’s character was not the result of bricolage, but is a character derived from a dream I had one night about a girl who herded goats and was ostracized from the people she lived around. Ashora and Chenoa both derived their original characteristics from a mishmash of randomly selected items from obituaries. Yes, I love a good obituary. While their personalities are their own, both Chenoa and Ashora received their physical attributes from nieces of mine (not the broken iris, that came from a different interesting article related to coloboma). For a host of images showing many variations of coloboma, click the link.