Character Write-Up

Xanthe Naftise is a twelve-year-old girl with short yellow hair, tanned skin, and hazel eyes. She isn’t very tall and she never wears skirts. They would be impractical, anyway, seeing as she lives on an airship, and the wind was always blowing up above the clouds. Her name is often shortened to Xan, especially by her parents. 

Xanthe loves the color yellow. She loves how the color looks against the blue of the sky and how it seems to be able to brighten up any room. She loves how bold and cheerful yellow is. She especially loves that her hair is yellow and that her name means yellow. Whenever someone comments on her name, she grins and informs them, “It means yellow! Like my hair. It’s my favorite color.” She tries to wear a bit of yellow all the time.

Xanthe has lived her whole life on her parent’s airship, and still is living there. Her mom, Janice, is the captain, and her dad, Flavian, is the first mate. They are mostly a ship-for-hire, meaning they do a great variety of freelance jobs for money. Mostly they seem to end up transporting goods from one place to another.

Sometimes they transport people, which is a job that Xanthe really loves- she likes hearing stories about people’s lives. One particularly memorable job was when they were hired to fly banners above a parade. The banners were enormous, with strange designs and words spelled with letters that were taller than two of her dad; and at the end of the parade the people involved set off fireworks that exploded in reds and greens and yellows across the nighttime sky, almost drowning out the stars.

Despite listening to story after story of people living most of their lives on the ground, Xanthe remembers very clearly the first time it really hit her that people really could and did live their whole lives Earth-bound. She had been playing with a friend of hers, a girl named Grace, who lived in one of the towns her parents made land in. They were climbing trees when suddenly Grace giggled nervously and said, “I think this is the highest I’ve ever been off the ground.”

Xanthe laughed. “We aren’t even at the lowest regulation airship flying height!” she said.

Grace, suddenly solemn, looked at her. “How do you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Fly so high up.” Xanthe could think of nothing to say to that; she had always lived high in the sky. The thought of being hesitant about heights had never even occurred to her. “I don’t think I could do it,” Grace continued. “I would always be afraid of falling.”

Xanthe looked at the ground that was so close beneath her, and at the rooftops that were closer still, then back to Grace. Grace’s face was slightly paler than it usually was, and she was looking down like the air beneath their feet would attack her if she took her eyes off it. Xanthe looked down again, at the houses underneath them that still seemed ridiculously close, and said, “I have never been afraid of falling.” She had never realized before that some people couldn’t live the way she did, that some- most- people were afraid of being up on a ship above the clouds. She had known that most people seemed to prefer having their feet anchored to the ground for whatever reason, but for the first time, she really understood that the way she lived was different, and that so many people would never delight in flying through the endless blue of the sky. The realization just made her happier that she lived her life the way she did, always flying.