The King's Hall and College of Brasenose. When Cel thought of England, she thought of... what did she think of? She thought of a foreign world, grey-filled and littered with the ridges of buildings. To be fair, she hadn't seen much of England apart from her bird's-eye view over the sprawling land, and yet, kneeling in the Brasenose Quad, she knew she'd been wrong.

March 16th, 2011, that was the date. Two months since her memory blanked out, one since she arrived at Oxford. There was so much to do-- Parker had taken her to see the Oxford Castle. She'd learned, learned, learned so much, from science to languages to English to music... and the books, so many books everywhere! The college library, the buildings, the ancient arches and the carved elegance-- it was like stepping into a fairy tale, a story of old, until she returned to the quaint little apartment that was hers and hers alone, Parker right next door in a linked room.



But she stood out in the cold of the Old Brasenose Quad, sheltered from the unforgiving winds of cold only by the shadow of the arch behind her, wrapped in her blankets and coat. In her hand, she held her mother's dagger. Who her mother was, where she had gone, she did not know-- but as she walked, it simply hit her: she had a mother, and this was her dagger. And so the girl had unsheathed the blade, run a finger over its side, read the words etched into its hilt: Natalia Cesselia Selwyn. Sure enough, her mind cried out, Mother, that is my mother, yet their surnames were not like-- or perhaps that was her maiden name. Notwithstanding, she knelt now, fiddling with the hilt.

She'd never noticed-- never noticed the panel attached to the back quillon, never realized the fact that it could swing open if pried apart by her long nails that she should cut, never guessed that from it would drop a necklace. Carefully she grasped its thin silver chain in three fingers and lifted it to eye level, examining its pendant. On one side was the cameo of a woman's face, the strands of her hair delicately sculpted into the design, narrow but exotic eyes drawn out in perfect, soft lines. Some element of familiarity called out to her here, but she could not... could not quite remember.

The other side of the round pendant flaunted a decal of ink, ink transferred to glass. Décalcomanie, it was called, and there they were-- the Northern Lights she'd never seen save for in her dreams. Some people called them the ripples of light on the surface of water. Cel thought it looked like blue fire.

Words, words of her favorite language that she had studied even before coming to the University were etched onto the glass. She frowned as she noted the less than perfect grammar, but the notice she made was dismissed as her rosebud lips pursed into a surprised, strangely touched O shape, registering the meaning of each word.



Beautiful, they were. A tale of magic in a library of logic. The little girl of seven years did not know that she would live on to remember and thrive by them. She did not know what was to come, how true to her heart they would become. But she did know, quite clearly, what she was going to do with the little pendant.

Parker had given her a pot of succulents, beautiful little plants in a ceramic container, back when she'd first arrived and her room was bare and lonely. Barely two days had passed before she'd accidentally knocked it off the windowsill on which it stood, and it fell to the ground, shattering into five pieces. Cel had apologized profusely, but the philosophy professor only smiled, amused at her distress, and taught her to make something anew from that which was broken. The pot turned into an enchanting mis-en-scene, porcelain pebble steps leading up to a forest of succulents, in which rested a quaint little fairy's house, whittled and painted by her own hands, its roof removable to show an earthen, packed floor, and above that her keepsakes-- everything that she had from home... wherever home was.

Usually her dagger, sheathed in its decorated slip of leather, had its home there. The page that had torn out of the library book she'd stolen was there. Parker's pocket watch, the ivory time-telling device that he had gifted to her, was there, as was the quarter she had on her from California, the man's Polaroid picture, a man whom she did not know. But she knew that this necklace would join her keepsakes and that although she would not wear it, she would look at it every day.

"Celynne," a man's voice that had grown familiar to her called from inside the arch. "What are you doing out here in the cold? Come; I'll read to you." The young girl stood and turned back, dagger and necklace in hand, as he spoke. With her free hand, she took his helping one to pull herself up the steep steps, eyes wide and ready at the notion of reading.
"Let us read now," he told her with a smile, a genuine one-- she did not remember any fatherly emotion in anyone's face, ever. Even if she remembered those blank spots in her memory, Cel was not certain that she would know it.