Such a struggle for one so young....A mere babe in their cradle should not know the disdain of any kind, let alone from the faces of their birth parents.

Changeling....Came their frightened whispers. Murky things they were, distorted and warped from the years of void one faces from infancy to their early childhood.

Dark shapes haunt about the babe as she cries, passing by like so many wraiths left hungry in a world full of empty graves. The feeling of suspension comes before gravity takes hold and the cold wet of a ceaseless rain drops to stain the wailing infant's howling face.

Where has my warmth gone" Where have the familiar scents and sounds gone"....One can almost hear the words through the babe's strangled, gurgling cries as tiny fists flail and try to beat their way through a half swaddled cloth. Light and warmth, unfortunately, are things that could come hours later for the tiny one with her misshapen features and inhuman manner. Memories would fade with the coming of a fever and the reaching hands of Reverends for her orphaned basket.

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Awake from your dreams, little book keep. Wake and rise to greet the sun who boasts his shine through your window, stare him in the face and find your purpose between the spots his glory inspires your too long stare. Wash the sleep from your tired body, brush those pillow tossed curls to reveal the kept and keep of their wheaten bounty. Wipe the corners of your sapphire eyes free of their crust, marvel with anguish at their ever torrid depths as they fall behind the line of your spectacles. A new day has begun, and you've a long list of duties to tackle before you can clamber back into the safety and sanctuary of your crooked little home.

Dressed and ready, the one a few have come to know as Elle Gianna gathers her cloak to ward off the winter's coming chill from its lonely rack beside the front door of her apartment; An apartment who's space didn't much sprawl past the width of air she'd paused inside. Elle liked it that way. Everything was much tighter and safer when so close together. Like a squirrel in her hovel, each wall was lined with odds and ends that mattered, and would continue to matter, throughout the small creature's life.

In the place of nuts, Elle's sustenance consisted of food for the mind rather than the body; books. Rows upon rows and dozens upon dozens were all stacked in some methodic sense of order, neat and prim as she tended herself. Titles varied from the mundane to the extraordinary, meaning contents could either take the mind for a pleasant ride through fact and reality or thrust their consciousness through a rift in time and space, demanding understanding where one might not normally hold grounds on.

Elle held expertise in each and all, and given a correct quote, she could pick the very page it lies upon. Her memory is a record like no other.

"What shall I do first?" Came the woman's quiet voice. Thoughts began to reel and unfold behind the light of her eyes with such a vividness one might expect to see the plans screen along the inside of her glasses. Though the tone of her voice suggested their might be another present, any fly upon the wall would tell you there was none; Elle lived alone without even a cat or pup to break her solitude. Yet there she stood, paused before the door as if her words were a rueful farewell to some sentient left standing in her small home.

Out the door she went with nary more a whisper of the cloth from her cloak and the click of her door's locks sliding in place. Keys tucked safe and sound in a pocket along the lining of her skirt, Elle began the long, narrow journey down her building's stair until she emerged, breath fogging, in Rhydin's early morning autumn air. Her steps were quick and Library bound, predictable and sweet as a clock one could set their own time to despite what her earlier musing my have eluded to.

Just like every storm has its calm eye, so too, do people. For a time the sweet child's oddities were reactionary and unpredictable, most often in the years between infancy and youth. But as a child grows, so does their awareness and sense of self.

Little Estelle had come to know she was different, and not just because she was an orphan, all the children she grew with were the same as she, but because her body could....do things. Things that should only live in the pages of storybooks or in the words of wandering poets and gypsies. Such oddness in an already socially misfitted child was not becoming, for it often scared or repulsed some folks. The little blonde cherub learned to suppress this disconcerting otherness, but word traveled with her always of the girl with her sundry of faces and shapes.

Changeling... They'd whisper as Home and Home again received the dapper angel with her seemingly sweet and normal packaging.

Words stung such impressionable ears, dragging back foggy, familiar feelings of the cold and the wet.

Devious little pretender... Would come their disapproval and saddening looks to the queer child and her uncontrollably fae habits. Patterns of control formed, making this all so for years further in the sweet child's life; for controlling one's emotions so young is to bring about the onset of adulthood far too early. Though her body stayed it's course, the cherub's mind spun faster and farther, finding facts and fiction alike fascinating enough to draw her demeanor quieter.

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The old clock upon the far wall of Elle's apartment was a mocking creature with all its endless tick-tocks and click-clacks between the hours.

Time and time again the quiet woman attempted to break her daily pattern's hard shell, finding each more awkward and failed then the last. On her own, Elle could not manage a sentence without breaking her tone and succumbing to the debilitating distraction of a squeak or a stutter. While on business, however, the prim book keep could spin a schpeel like no other, sifting facts through the easy going flow of her quiet voice. Outings turned downright disastrous, in fact, when an undiluted wash of folk shared spaces with her, making the very breath in her chest feel heavy and thick.

Slender knuckles bled white from tension, feet shifted, her voice cleared and cracked dry between words half muttered. From kindly shop keep to valiant noble, to smiling tendress or passing nod; Elle crumpled beneath them all like so much tissue paper under the strain of a weighty wind. Some things could no be helped, so backwards the little hermit crab crept each night to the tight nook of her home.

Purpose kept her feet steady, though, however the path may try to wind her aim. Elle could not loose sight of her duties, both inside nor outside of work, to do so would be simply unthinkable. Curled against the bulk of a beaten couch, the librarian hummed quietly to herself, musing aloud.

"Mm....There's a chill tonight, perhaps an owl." Sapphire stars began their streak out through the nouveau oval of a window, drinking in the dark twinkle of Rhydin's quiet marketplace.

Mercurial, ever-shifting and fluctuant; this was the darling girl's world. Amongst her excess of books and time was where little Estelle found her reasoning and rhyme. Seasons stretched further, each passing sleeve of time seeming an eon rather than a month, each moment like an hour. The sun touched orphan moved in a life of slow motion despite her best efforts to stay otherwise. When literature did not soothe the aches and the pains of constant self repression, physical labors began to work themselves in her daily patterns.

The matronly keeper had a helper; the wispy charge turned gangly adolescent turned young, willowy, womanly reed. Slight in stature but steadfast in heart.

Such a good girl... The matron would say behind her back. Little did the age graced woman know the distant echos her sentiment sparked. Such a sweet thing. But she's not one for a home. Not for a home indeed; the quiet changeling had since held it in her head to wait out what time she'd been bade to stay for. Sixteen years gone, two more to go. Tick and tock mocked the ever twinkling eye of father time.

Two years and the world would begin to breathe for her again. Two years and rose could stop stunting her own growth. Two years and the Home would no longer seem daunting cell forcing her to seek solitude.

Two years does not pass without incident, however. Two years is a increment just long enough to sabotage even the most sturdy and strong of tree roots. For ever flock there is a black sheep, and for every flock, wolf in sheep's clothing; this is nature's way. And though it is the flutter and play of the healthy, bulky flock that draws the predator; it is the sick and the stray, the slow and the lame, that draws the beast in that eternal dance, like the moth and its flame.

A young miscreant amongst the thick sought the curly haired girl, and she, with innocent eyes, did not flinch or blink. His stalk was slow, her smile equally so. Shy to a fault, but the boy's insistence was dogged, craving the release her flesh could give, yet not the flesh or the girl herself.

The boy's patient success was a hurtful zenith to the changeling like no injury that'd come before.

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As suddenly as the winter had set in its icy grip, it seemed to release. Had it not been only a month or so past that she'd been purchasing new finger-backed mittens from the marketplace" Weren't the hours dark long before she even had a chance to pull her nose up from the deep, crisp pages of her ledger at the library' When had it become so bearable and mild outside" The snow was a memory just as vivid as the autumn dead leaves before it had been...

Perhaps now, so many years away, with her life outside the cold walls of houses never quite feeling like homes, Elle's days were moving in fast forward instead of slow motion. Stranger answers came from such metaphysical musings, surely, thought the faraway librarian.

Flat-heeled feet clicked distractedly as they moved up the Public Library's great, sprawling stair. Elle looked a ghost from the outside looking in, a specter with bird frail limbs still wrapped about the memoir of their too-short life. Those golden wheat coils haloed, untamed and tussled from the early spring winds, furthering the ethereal picture the frail woman made outside her choice of work. Inside moved the creaky Mr. Tibbelt, his beady, bespectacled eyes and balding, white head a comfort as near and dear as the endless trove of words that lined the building's stacks. With a heave and a hoe, spinster fine fingers spilt their delicacy to a windowed door.

Elle was instantly transported from any lingering phantasms and thrust into the warm, dry, mustily inviting air of the majestic building. Instantly soothed, the not so savage beast proudly prowled across that marble floor towards the great semicircle of the elder librarian's desk. There was a small, familiar paper box behind the rise; the scent of black tea trickled out from some distant room as well.

"Seems you're not as on in years as I thought, Mr. Tibbelts." A soft joke, a gentle inflection; it brought a further creak of sun to Elle's face as she set her books down and moved about the berth of the desk to join her superior. Not to be offended or outdone, the spry elder wheezed a quiet chuckle in the dry of his throat.

"Not on enough, yet, m'daft girl that I would forget Mrs. Wellsworth's gooseberry turnovers on fridays." Up moved a withered knuckle, cool and strong, shaking itself in a motion of playful upbraid.

"Now..." The old man continued, his throat clearing as he limped an arm off in the direction that could boast the source of that tea aroma. "....go an' get us that tea, Ms. Gianna. Work to be done today, an upcoming acquisition, to be precise. Our old friend from Teas and Tomes has just happened across a new selection he feels should not be so easily sold and lost." Elle's attention was rapt and still despite her trip back and forth and her hands full of tea. All business, all strength.

She settled to the task with Mr. Tibbelt's with little more prompting; the prospect of new volumes....nothing excited the notary more!

Changeling... Came their frightened whispers. Murky things they were, distorted and warped from the sudden, inexplicable onset of that fierce fever. The changeling girl held a semi circle of faces about her crooked little bed, each a mask of pity, of confusion, and most hurtful of all, contempt. Contempt for the creature they'd had in their midst, contempt for the wretched state she'd been put into, contempt for the pity she inspired.

No one person likes to be upset or made to feel sad, even if it's deserved. It is human nature, such selfishness, what can one expect"

Such a brave, heart swollen little misfit... Some would say. Those words left the lips of hands baring towels and medicine. Damp curly Q sun rays curls now poured limply across the ashen hue of the victim so terror stricken and fevered. Elle kept nothing down, for the evil outweighed the good.

Devioius little pretender, look how the delilah reaps what she sews... Others would grumble. Those words left the lips of hands that bore nothing but wrought fingers and uneasy gestures. The boy, the source of all the chaos, stood a sullen and boxed thing in the hallway; his voice was the loudest and cruelest of them all. As the poor cherub writhed, and those few hands that cared much put in their work, images set in. Faces, harsh expressions, muddled phantoms come to torment and remind the girl of her oddities and how the world rejected them time and time again.

Night came and went, then the day took it's place; the pattern was eternal and constant, reliable and predictable; it was a calm in the violent storm for the kindly Matron whom tended most often to the poor child with her raging hot skin and her deathly pale pallor. Near a fortnight later the mysterious, febrile illness finally began to lift.

Color was slow to come back, and meat on the bones slower still. Broth came with a heavy price to the poor girl's belly, her curls were lank and lack'aluster, each limb painfully thin and aching from the slightest exercise; she bore through it with little a complaint.

The fever has left it's mark, child... Crooned the Matron day after patient day, but something had finally broke.

It is a painful thing when the wings of a cherub turn to lead. But every soul has it's limits, every pneuma it's boundaries of battery. Shells must be crafted, walls must be erected, dreams must be shattered....We hide and learn to bide deep on the inside.

What a pity such things can be learned so young.

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Her shoulders were slumped, each inch of her body lax and breathless with exhaustion. Somehow the two appendages she learned to long ago call her feet managed to keep her body's repetitive locomotion. It had been a long day at work, and Elle had a precious span of four hours before the morning's busiest hours began back at the library. She was homebound, bone weary and proud with it. With a fresh paper cut on her pinky, and a bit of ink staining beneath the half-moons of her left finger set, the frumped librarian could call her impending snatch of sleep well beyond well-deserved.

Such a queer, quiet little woman; would any be at all surprised to know her living space was very much the same"

It was a rickety little place, winding and crawling once one found the steps behind a tall, nouveau-styled door. Up, up, up one had to climb, and the further they climbed, the narrower the steps. A romantic mind might feel Elle lived like a forgotten princess lost and locked away in some stingy, book-dusted tower. But this princess was far from lost, and the locks were several and self-placed; she checked them in triple every night.

Touches of her personality, things rarely seen in public other than through the arrangement of her clothes, showed much more noticeably within the small sanctuary of her little apartment. Books lined the wall shelves; that was an earlier note and a much given thing. But certain things showed the librarian had a taste to her, one that spoke of a beloved artistic period from faraway places. Everything was antiquated, and to compliment the curled, carved feet of her beaten couch, book ends, lamps, photo frames, and even the petite sprawl of her bed; they all matched the organic, rounded portal of the downstairs door that faced the market square.

Art nouveau and antiques with a few oriental rugs; there were worst tastes to have, and her trappings were meager. All little comforts she'd collected, sparkling and pretty like a magpie's treasures, over the many years she lived in the city.

The queerest and grandest of all things in the librarian's home, however, was a tall book podium left in a free stand in the farthest corner in the hollow of her bedroom. On the podium was of course, a book. But this book was unlike the many neat and predictable things that lined her walls. This book was a work of art, a sad, beautiful, grand, meticulous work of art.

Slowly but surely, as Elle sat her things down in their proper places, a bit of paper was unfolded from the overly large space of her jumper pocket. On the paper, once unfolded, was a fairly well drawn portrait. A name lay beneath the portrait. Upon opening that large, queer, bookish work of art, Elle began to paste the piece onto a new page already showing the evidence of another masterful composition.

It was a grandiose compilation of every face in Rhydin; or at least it would be, given time and patience and dedication. Many a hand would like to find themselves rifling through that book, for Elle was tireless and very, very attentive to detail. Names from the prominent to the barely known stared up at the changeling from her book; and each had a small corner smile, as if caught in a candid moment, unaware and natural. Slowly, fondly, she stroked the bird frail edge of her fingers along the latest entry.

"So many to collect..." Came her quiet murmur. With one last, lingering look and the careful flick of a marker ribbon in place, she turned, jotting a last minute note down to lay at the edge of her dresser.

Lemon cream turnovers and a 1/2 lb of earl grey.