Wingless Story: Part 1

A figure stood leaning heavily on an ornate staff watching silently from the woods, every instinct within her screamed to take flight, underdeveloped muscles at her back and shoulders ached to flap wings that, by all means, should have arched majestically over her head.  Instead she closed bright, spring-green eyes beneath golden hued lids and breathed deeply of air that all but froze in her fiery lungs.  She wasn’t all right, hadn’t been for a long while, but she made due, and so she lived.  
   Opening her eyes again she sank warily to the frozen ground beneath her.  An odd combination of movements, sliding, leaning, and hopping, made it possible, though the back of her mind wondered if she’d ever get up again.  
   Her hand slipped into her pocket and withdrew a book rather too large to be comfortably residing there, and upon the age-worn, yellowed page of parchment, spread her own handwriting, the neat, precise letters of one trained to the profession of a scribe.  Blue ink had faded ‘til nearly incomprehensible, yet she squinted slightly in the dim light and forced herself onward with the task of reading by the dimmed forest light of dusk.  Her voice sounding as clear in her head, in her native tongue, as it would have from her mouth 20 years prior.
   “I am Lusaren…” intoned the honey-sweet voice in her head, “And this is my story…”