Earth

                                                      Earth
          They say that the first indication of an emerging gift is through a dream. That the first awakening of power is so deeply buried in one’s subconscious that the first inklings are only felt when the body and mind are quieted. It’s as if the push and pull of life is so strong that even the most powerful of gifts struggle to surface. These dreams indicate a slow awakening, something that can be easily controlled and kept safe against the torrents that some gifts can cause.
          At least this is how it was for me.
          Each night as I fell asleep, the ground would race up to meet me as I hung suspended in my mind. Fear would choke at my throat at the sight of the hard dusty soil flying towards me but moments before I would fling myself awake the earth would soften, turning into feathery grass as soft as wool. I would land softly and sink deep into the ground, the rich soil of fertile land sliding deliciously over my skin. I would swim through the earth as a fish swims through water and would wake in the morning feeling more peaceful than I had in years.
          Not all my dreams were such. Sometimes, indeed much more often than I liked, these earth dreams would turn to nightmares. As my dream self would swim through the soil, hard rock would close around my body, crushing and crushing until at last there was no breath left in my body to squeeze. Those were the worst dreams. I would wake screaming, my blankets caught round my neck and tears staining my cheeks.
          It is difficult to fear what you love and I had always loved the land. My mother used to tell me that when I was a child I would play in her garden amongst her fragile vegetables and flowers. At first she had worried that I would trample her lovely plants, and would wait for a moments notice to come snatch me from her flowerbeds, but I was as gentle with her plants as a mother is with her newborn. She began to wonder then, seeing me wondrously content in the garden, if an earth-gift would emerge in me. The gifted were rare, far rarer than they used to be. Once, there had been many more gifted people than non-gifted, but that was no longer.
I was fifteen when my earth-gift emerged. The dreams had started long before then, tormenting me in their sweetness as night after night I spent wrapped in the embrace of the ground. The awakening of my gift was not easy, as most gifts rarely are. I supposed that when compared to the other gifted I have known in my life, I had it easy. I did not think so at the time.
          There would be days when I could not leave the fields. To my mother’s annoyance, I would vanish at first light to the fields that were not owned by anyone in our village. These fields blossomed in chaotic abundance, shoots of grass and rows of flowers seemingly scattered at random throughout the clearing. I began running to the clearing in mid-autumn, when the grasses began to turn brown from lack of rain and the only flowers in bloom were hardy yellow things with deep black eyes between thin yellow petals.
          For a long time, far too long in my mother’s eyes, I would live in the fields. Being away from the wild fields would feel as though a limb were being severed from my body. The agony of separation was at times so great that it took every shred of strength I had to even make it into the grass. I would lie, chest heaving and blood pumping through my skull for what seemed hours until slowly my strength returned.
No one understood what was happening to me. My village was small enough that everyone knew everyone else’s business and for me to be disappearing was a subject of much conversation for our neighbors. Rumors circulated; I was shirking my chores, sneaking off to meet a foreign man, or even, and this was the worst of all, that I was air-gifted and falling deeper into that madness.
          My mother tried her best to keep these rumors from reaching me but it did little good. Connor would whisper them to me on the occasions he came to the fields with me. My worry was not for myself, I didn’t care a whit for my own reputation, but I worried for my mother. There was already such gossip about my mother’s appearance in the village. Showing up with nothing more than the clothes on her back and a baby growing in her belly without a father in sight set the village on it’s ear.
          It was not as though my village was full of suspicious people. They simply were so isolated that any person venturing in outside the normal merchant train was an anomaly. For a long time, I deeply resented the way they treated my mother, they were polite but there was never warmth in their exchanges. They merely did not know what to make of her and her strange wayward daughter.
          My mother was one of the village weavers. When she arrived alone she barely had enough money to pay for two nights worth in the inn. One of the weavers, an elderly, kindly woman named Marrta gave her a job as her apprentice. Marrta’s hands were permanently curling in on themselves and soon she would barely be able to lift a shuttle at all. In exchange for her apprenticeship, Marrta offered my mother the small room in the upstairs of her shop. My mother couldn’t stand with her arms spread without hitting the walls but it was my first home.
          As my mother excelled in weaving her hands became calloused and abused, the knuckles growing large after much use (my mother’s hands had one been perfectly smooth and white, Marrta told me once, evidence of a past my mother refused to speak of). She took over practically all of Marrta’s old business, even adding her own repertoire of patterns from her old life, which brought in much more business.
          My gift, having no outward outlet, began to drain me. I read somewhere once that those who cannot pull their gifts outward die from them. The gift consumes them from the inside. This is far more common in the fire-gifted, who generate their fire from within themselves, I would heartbreakingly learn much later in my life.
My mother worried endlessly for me, though she could do nothing.