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[Just a little history...  Winter, a year previous:]
 
     "As you enter, do not miss your light!"
 
     She was dancing in costume, filling in the details of the blocking
her Master Orlin had put her through earlier.  She was counting to the
music provided by a single stringed instrument.  From it, the musician
pulled something slow and hollow into the large, empty auditorium.  The
music floated up out of the pit somewhere just off centre to the left. 
It called to Lialena like the lover it was; though it was a first love. 
It was old, now, and nearly worn out.  Her forms were perfect and
graceful, but Orlin called her off the stage before the first movement
was completed.  She had no passion for it, today.
 
     "You dance like a dead girl.  You dance like a puppet - I say step
here, and you step - but only because I told you 'step here!'  What is
wrong with you today?"  The anonymous musician in the pit stopped playing
as the dance master's words broke through Lialena's dancing.  She froze
on stage for a moment, and then completed the last forms without the
music.  The last of the movements were defiantly slow.
 
     "My stomach is not well today, Master," she said, bending low from
the waist in graceful apology, like a sapling bending to the wind.  She
kept the rest of her reply to herself.  *How can there be passion in me,
without food in me as well?*
 
*    *    *  [the following Spring, planting time:]    *    *    *
 
     "Ai.. love, how can you work?  You're not eating," Emia Staranson
said gently, looking down at her youngest daughter.  "Please eat your
porridge."  That was said not so gently; 'Lena picked up her spoon again
and nudged at the brownish glop in front of her.  Far too much heavy
cream was swimming on top; it looked like a frothy white ocean of liquid
fat... she grimaced at it, then dug around until she found the porridge
and tried her hardest to not eat the cream.  Her mother would just give
it to the cats, anyway.
 
     "What's Dad assigned me today?" 'Lena asked absently.  It wouldn't
be much, she knew; last week, he had asked her to help throw down the
last of the straw from the high loft.  The bales weighed eight to ten
stone each, and she had been barely able to lift one, let alone heave it
down.  It had cleared out a secluded place with a wooden floor where she
could practise, though.  She was grateful for that.
 
     At first, it had felt like she was escaping from home by leaving for
the city and the dancing academy.  Then, going home to the farm had
become an escape from the academy.  Now, they were both simply burdens of
conflict.  She spent the early spring planting and lambing on the farming
community her family belonged to, and the rest of the year in the city
dancing at a performing arts and classical dance academy and studio. 
Since the age of six, the academy had been her life.  She danced her days
in and out until she turned eleven; that was when her parents began
calling her home during the busy seasons to help on the farm.
 
     For five years now she had been trying to compromise the physical
requirements of dance and farm, and it was taking a heavy toll on her
body.  She was constantly tired now, usually just slightly hungry, but
too afraid or too busy to eat.  Her parents were constantly worrying
about her, and the work she was assigned never felt important or
meaningful.
 
     She realized now that she would miss the light in an entirely
different way.  It would no longer be an amateur mistake, to stand in the
wrong spot when the stage lights came up, or to miss her cue.  She would
miss auditions, rehearsals, and performances.  She would miss getting
that most coveted role, the limbering dancing games and 'character'
practises.  She would miss the thick, intense rapport of being backstage
with the rest of the performers.  She would miss the audience, and the
clapping of a thousand hands, faster than any drumbeat she could dance
to.  She would not miss the farm so much - she could visit home any time
she wanted, once her dragon - if she bonded to a dragon - knew the way
there.  She could visit the city, and her friends at the academy.. but
she remembered how little free time she had had there, and knew that
wouldn't change.
 
     It wasn't hard, she realized in retrospect.  It had simply been a
matter of approaching the ring master...  Now she was glad her parents
had bought all her costumes for her.  They had been rewards, in a way..
each time she had been given the lead part in a show, they would buy her
the costume.  The Firebird was her favourite. 
 
   Well, alright.. it hadn't really been that simple.  The year had
finished at the academy, and she was supposed to be on her way home. 
Instead, she was about to start her second performance of the day.  She
was just a sideshow right now, a small dancer on the midway at the
circus.  But they said she had potential.. if she stuck with it, she
could become a trapeze artist, or become part of the horses act.  The
lighting for her show was nonexistant, and the music was a simple
tambourine drum.  And her costume had a lot of gaudy scarves...
 
     It wasn't so bad, really.  Really.. she told herself that if it
didn't get better in a few days, she could easily head home and just tell
her parents she missed the caravan she usually joined to go home and had
to catch a later one.  And right now the circus was near a warren.. she
wondered if she'd see a dragon.
 
 
 
 
NRPG:  Hi everyone!  Here is Lialena, at the circus.. all ready to be
searched!  So.. tag to anybody who has the affinity to see her!  (And
looking at the dancing girls.. ;-)
 
Submitted by,
Keri Rodgers
 
Lialena and ???, Telnor
Descarin and Foxys, Daere
Cadewyn Redglove, Brokenlands