Once upon a time, there were mountainous cliffs surrounding a valley. In this valley was a village. In the village, a girl was born with a curiosity so great that her eyes were opened and focused before she was even a full day old, so her parents named her Arin. By the time Arin was a year old, she determined that she wanted to know everything, and from then on she spent her every waking minute learning everything she could about the world around her.
With every new thing she learned, Arin would imagine it turning into a feather that would drift into the sky and follow her around, ready to be plucked from the air whenever she wanted to remember it, and study it more closely. She imagined this so vividly, that at times she almost thought that she could see the feathers swirling around her, silvery and fine, and she could have sworn she felt their fragile forms brushing against her skin.
Of course, as we all know, things like knowledge love to be given shape and identity, and as the girl thought about and treasured each small piece of information she found, they began taking the form she almost thought she saw. The ideas and stories and facts all began to love and cherish this girl who loved them so profoundly, and they took delight in their new, feathery forms that, as time went on, you could just begin to see swirling around the girl if you looked close enough, like a distortion of the air.
One day, as Arin was gazing intently at a patch of fungus in a small strand of trees, she heard something laughing up above her. Looking up, she saw a big, beautiful, black bird, and she was shocked to realize that he was unlike any bird she had ever seen before.
“Girl,” he said, “What are you doing down there in the dirt?”
“I’m looking at these mushrooms, to see what more I can learn from them,” she called back.
The bird chuckled again to himself and eyed the feathers of knowledge flitting around the girl. “Well, I can’t imagine that there’s much more to learn about them that you don’t already know.” With that, he spread his great wings, and with a rustling of ebony feathers, flew off.
Arin was as startled to see him go as she had been to see him to begin with. “Wait!” Arin shouted, running to try to keep up with him. She wasn’t nearly fast enough, and she watched as he laughed once more before flying over one of the great cliffs and far out of sight.
That night, Arin found herself unable to sleep for the tumult of questions tearing through her mind. Never before had she seen any bird so beautiful as him, and never had she seen anyone or anything go over the cliffs surrounding the valley that was her home. It had never occurred to Arin that the world could be larger than her village’s little valley, but she knew that if the bird had gone over the cliffs, he must have had somewhere to land. She reasoned that there must be something outside of the world she knew, and being unable to know what that something was ate at her mind and broke her heart.
The feathers of her knowledge swirled around her through the night, saddened to see the one who loved them so well in so much distress. Unsure what else to do, they swept across her eyelids until she fell into a fitful sleep.
Author Notes: I kinda just started writing this for fun, and now it's way longer than I intended. I'm not completely sure where I'm going with this.
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