Writing Prompts: February #2
Feb. 8th, 2018 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drehnifusbahiNexus Writing Prompts: February 2018, #5 - Heritage
In some ways, it's easy for him to say the past doesn't matter - doesn't know much about his, when you get down to it. Not really. At least, not his own past.
He's heard the story from his mother more times than he can count: how just before Heart's Day in 4E 174, a train of refugees arrived in Anvil, and her sister-priestesses had opened the Chapel to them for healing and for shelter. How among the refugees young Thalia Greyjoy had personally seen to were an old woman and a boy about a year old.
The old woman had denied any relation to the boy, and lamented her inability to keep up with such a young child at her age. Thalia had been loathe to see the boy left in the already overcrowded orphanage, or worse yet, abandoned on the streets, and so she'd adopted Vanyel - and given him his name into the bargain, because if the old woman knew his birth-name, she hadn't told it.
So Vanyel Greyjoy he became, and whoever and whatever he'd been before, he'd never learned. His mother had been more than happy to share her own, to teach him the family history of the Greyjoys and the history of Camlann alongside his other lessons. He loved her for it, and he wore the name with pride, but the older he grew the more he came to realize that wasn't really where he came from, himself.
But he had no means to go searching for answers, and wouldn't have known where to start even if he did. So he tried to put his questions of where he'd come from out of his mind, and filled the void with the tenets of worship he was taught, the protocol of the Order of the Lily, the stories and traditions his mother and aunties shared with him.
And little by little, his questions about his birth family stopped mattering quite so much. He'd probably always be a little bit curious, but he had a family and heritage, however unconventional they might be.
In some ways, it's easy for him to say the past doesn't matter - doesn't know much about his, when you get down to it. Not really. At least, not his own past.
He's heard the story from his mother more times than he can count: how just before Heart's Day in 4E 174, a train of refugees arrived in Anvil, and her sister-priestesses had opened the Chapel to them for healing and for shelter. How among the refugees young Thalia Greyjoy had personally seen to were an old woman and a boy about a year old.
The old woman had denied any relation to the boy, and lamented her inability to keep up with such a young child at her age. Thalia had been loathe to see the boy left in the already overcrowded orphanage, or worse yet, abandoned on the streets, and so she'd adopted Vanyel - and given him his name into the bargain, because if the old woman knew his birth-name, she hadn't told it.
So Vanyel Greyjoy he became, and whoever and whatever he'd been before, he'd never learned. His mother had been more than happy to share her own, to teach him the family history of the Greyjoys and the history of Camlann alongside his other lessons. He loved her for it, and he wore the name with pride, but the older he grew the more he came to realize that wasn't really where he came from, himself.
But he had no means to go searching for answers, and wouldn't have known where to start even if he did. So he tried to put his questions of where he'd come from out of his mind, and filled the void with the tenets of worship he was taught, the protocol of the Order of the Lily, the stories and traditions his mother and aunties shared with him.
And little by little, his questions about his birth family stopped mattering quite so much. He'd probably always be a little bit curious, but he had a family and heritage, however unconventional they might be.
