Nahid

A student of Middle Eastern Starsand arts, around sixteen, a foreseer—one of the few in the Middle Eastern lineage who can glimpse the branching of the future in dreams. Dark brown hair, a headscarf draped loosely around her neck.

She is enigmatic and solitary, her Chinese still not fluent, relying on an Indian classmate to translate for her; yet the way she looks at people seems to see not only how you are now, but something else as well.

The tools of the Starsand arts are simple: a handful of sand and a flat surface. How the sand falls, what shape it heaps into, where it leaves a gap—that is the answer it gives. She always carries a small pouch of sand in her pocket and works the mouth of it between her fingertips out of habit.

When she is called on in class, she pauses a few seconds first, arranging the sentence in her head, then says it one word at a time. The room is usually quiet for those few seconds while everyone waits.

Being a foreseer is not a good thing at the Middle Eastern branch. To see the branchings means every choice carries the several roads not taken with it; over time, a person becomes less willing to speak at all.

Dark brown hair, a headscarf draped loosely around her neck—draped the way someone drapes it who may need to pull it up at any moment, not for how it looks.

When class ended, she didn't leave. She poured the sand from her pocket onto the desk, and the sand piled itself into a circle with a gap in it, and from within that circle a smaller circle rose up—exactly the one Lan Yingchen had seen that morning within the 'Void.'

In her limited Chinese, word by word, she said to him: I dreamed of you—3 years ago.

At the Middle East branch, through an Indian classmate's translation, she spoke of the dream that had weighed on her for three years: a place wholly black, a fourteen-year-old boy crying, a glowing circle within his body, and within the circle two shadows. The boy turned to look at her and said something very faint, as if spoken through a layer of water.

She had written down that pronunciation in Arabic letters—read aloud, it was the three sounds 'Lan Yingchen.' She said she had kept it for 3 years, because that boy cried too truly.

The tools of Starsand are simple: a handful of sand and a flat surface. How the sand falls, what shape it gathers into, where it leaves a gap—that is the answer it gives.

She always carries a small pouch, its mouth drawn with a fine cord. Walking, she rubs the cord with the pad of her thumb until she reaches the knot, then works back. She is unaware she does it.

The sand is not from anywhere. This pouch came from home and cannot be replaced, so she pours very rarely. Before pouring she stops for a long time.

Poured sand is not returned to the pouch. Sand that has been poured cannot be used again. That is the rule.

Her Chinese is not yet fluent. Called on in class, she pauses a few seconds to arrange the sentence in her head, then delivers it one word at a time.

Those seconds make her seem slow to her classmates. In fact she understands far more than she can produce—while they assume she has fallen behind, she has usually gone on ahead.

For anything complicated she asks a classmate from the India branch to interpret. While he does, she watches his face, checking whether the meaning has been made smaller.

She looks at people differently from others. Nobody can say what the difference is, only that being looked at by her feels as though more than your present self has been seen.