The Truth Is Told.

After my initial shock, I accepted a cup of tea from my grandmother and sat down with the kaleidoscope of strange people I had just met. Never had I thought that I would be sitting next to a gnome, that was stuff of fairy tales, child's play, imaginations that couldn't possibly be real. And the women, who watched me calmly, with such interest, a witch, a witch without moles or a cackle for a laugh, a witch who brought a calm and a protective aura over me. Her name was Ashlin, and she was a local in the next town over, someone I had never heard of or seen. It was though she had appeared out of nowhere.
I sat sipping my tea hands still shaking waiting to hear what they had to say, what they wanted me to know, what I had to know. Something I wasn't sure if I wanted to know. I looked over at my grandmother, she was wringing her hands, shadows under her eyes, something I had never seen before. My grandfather was sitting cross legged in his chair, something my grandmother usually hated, but she didn't even seem to take notice. And he stared into space, as though he was lost in a thought so deep he might not come back.
Her voice brought me out of my trance.
"Child we need to tell you the truth." Ashlin said with a calm smile.
"But I do not think that I should be the one to tell you. Your dear grandparents must."
My grandmother looked at me, suddenly alert with the look I had grown up to recognize, the matter of fact look.
"Emily Jane, you have to make a choice soon, and a very hard choice, a choice that has been passed down through the generations, through all these long years."
" We are not of this world exactly, you are not of this world exactly, we've never been, you've never been."
And at the uttering of this, she broke into a soft sob held hung down.
"My darling girl," my grandfather said looking at me from his seat. We are creatures of the earth, it was mixed in with our blood when we were born. It is a blessing and it is a curse. You will be faced with things so evil and dark that you will be forced to fight, yet you will be blessed with a light so bright, at times it will be blinding."
I put my tea cup down, well more like slammed it down.
" Grandma and Grandpa, now what in the Sam hell are you talking about?" I was screaming now.
"I see a creature on the front porch, I beg for an explanation, and grandma you scream and throw a fit, and grandpa you talk to me like a poet who's hallucinated way to much!"
"And now you want to tell me, you mean to tell me, that I'm not of this world? I'm going to have to make a choice, that I was always going to have to make? Now you tell me after years of thinking you two were just eccentric hippies that never left the sixties!"
"ENOUGH!" Ashlin said with a volume in her voice that I couldn't imagine she'd have.
"You are ready, you must make a choice. It isn't any one's fault. This is in your blood. It is who you are, what you are, who you'll become."
"Well what am I choosing?" I said meekly.
"You are choosing which path you will take. Will you go with your grandfather and choose to bear wings as he does, take care of all the magical creatures, and face those that are unimaginable? Or will you choose your grandmothers path. A sight that is not only from her eyes, the ability to grow and understand the workings of things unseen. Yet also the ability to help those that are lost, that haven't passed over, and the ones that are dark and refuse to pass. Which one will you choose?"
"What if I don't choose either?" I said quietly.
"Then you will become one of the children, the children of the rain. Lost and searching forever, stuck in time, stuck in what was, without being able to touch it. Stuck in self exile, stuck in a sort of purgatory." Ashlin said as she looked at me with wise eyes.
"Your purpose is to help, that is what you are here for, that is what everyone is here for. You are just a tad bit different." She spoke again, calmly and quietly.
I looked around at my grandmother, my grandfather, Sir. Stuart, and Ashlin. I looked around at everyone, knowing that my life would never be the same again. I knew what I would choose. I'd always felt the presence with me. I looked at Ashlin with a sudden shock of confidence and said,
"how do I choose?"