Heliconia

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Heliconia Fireheart was born with a passion too big for her small body, as limitless as the world that she yearned for. Every boundary was a challenge, every restriction was to be argued with and fought. Why should she sit down and listen? Why should she eat meat when she felt like eating fruit? Why did almost everyone just want to stay in their boring forest and do the same things day after day when out beyond the trees there had to be so...much? And her father was the worst of them all. He never wanted to hear anything she had to say.

If you really feel like that, said her nephew’s daughter/not-daughter Marrakesh one day when they were alone, grinning a sharp-edged smile, then you’d better get out of here now. Because he’ll never change.

So she did. In the dawn, with the rising sun, slipping away to the west and south where the river flowed, her hatchling hide still soft but her small claws sharp. She took with her a basket of fruit and flowers from the jungle and one of her father’s sunspot clouddancer’s cubs, a head full of stories and a heart of flame. And all the world lay out before her.

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