Still on the Quest

(n.b. Anne McCaffrey has asked nicely for fans not to play with her characters, so this drabble is more a fannish response from me than the usual sort of fanfic.)

Refuge

There was one long year, when college was balanced against family and the Air National Guard; when I spent two weeks living in tents halfway across the world, and learned what it meant to be illiterate as I stared as Turkish signs, and then came home to find out that my grandmother was dying of cancer; one long summer and fall when I failed calculus and slept listening for my grandmother's call; when I fled again and again to the Harper Hall with sore feet and a sore heart and found nine singing firelizards to go soaring through my dreams.