Foster

Solitude and sacrifice

Celeste's tale starts as a very happy one, born to a French mother and an Irish father in the heart of Canada. Her parents heaped love upon the young girl and were very quick to forgive any silliness the girl would mention of strange things she had perhaps seen or heard that didn't seem to exist. Other children her age however quickly subjected the girl to social ostracization for the strange things she would mention and before long she had not a single friend. While that was deeply damaging, she found solace within the pages of books and the arms of her loving family.
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A month before Celeste had graduated from high school a tragedy struck the happy family. Her mother, whom she had relied on for emotional stability for so long contracted a strange illness that seemed to sap the very life from her. Day by day she would become weaker and weaker, at first unable to work then bedridden and finally under the perpetual care of the hospital. The doctors appeared baffled by the illness and clearly an outside opinion was absolutely necessary to have any hope of improving her condition. Deciding to forgo any additional schooling and enter the workforce, Celeste tried her best to earn money for her family. Celeste and her father worked all day and much of the night to afford the expensive foreign medicines and doctor's opinions yet nothing seemed to be working.
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With the constant work and lack of sleep Celeste started to entertain the strangest of fantasies that even her older and more reasonable mind should have shut down by logic alone. Ideas that the illness her mother suffered from had something to do with the strange things she occasionally saw. While her father simply sighed and shook his head he did listen to one of the things she mentioned. So it was that the family packed up everything they owned and left the sleepy town for the infamous city of light in the heart of France. While he may not have agreed with her strange fantasies, he did think bringing her mother back to the land where she was born might help her, and the newly revitalized city of light supposedly had excellent medical facilities.
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While the doctors in the new city proved just as helpless as those in the old, a strange creature offered her a deal. Her body and mind, so tired from all the work she had endured to pay for hopeless medical fees could not simply dismiss this fantastical hallucination. It was the first real glimmer of hope for her family she had seen in years, and so she agreed with the strange creatures offer. Magic achieved what science could not, and within the week her mother was back on her feet with a smile to match her new fortunes. The family celebrated her 'miraculous' recovery and Celeste found herself swearing to protect those happy smiles as long as she possibly could.
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