let your fists come undone; leliana

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

 All at once, the world was changed – except it wasn’t the world that changed at all. Everything around her remained as it always had with unbroken green buried beneath a sky of blue and fluttering wings, trees tall enough to catch the stars and with branches that spent their days waving and bowing. She could feel the sun where it pooled in the hollows of her apricot face, and the wind where it pushed aside the copper tangles of a decidedly unruly mane. Everything, everything, was the same.

Except-

She felt the change at her core, in the innermost pit of who she was and who she could be. It was magic and it was hers, it  always had been hers even for as long as it had been missing. It flooded through her skin and in her bones, it filled her veins and her heart sang with it in her chest. These were the things she had dreamed about since that first day on the mountain, these things that had become more fairytale than truth the more often she thought on it beneath the stars and in the dark of night. It didn’t matter that none of it made sense, that when she blinked the blue mare with the kind smile was gone and in her wake was only a spattering of glitter like stars thrown carelessly across the dawn.

It didn’t matter because she felt whole again, because she knew the magic that settled deep inside her, knew the wings that burst from her shoulders in an array of dark gossamer feather several shades deeper than her skin. All those hollow spaces, the peculiar cracks in her heart she had sometimes wondered about, they were filled now. Whole, and it didn’t matter that could barely make sense of it.

With a fleeting glance at the heavily pregnant mare who seemed to pay her no attention at all, Exist turned and disappeared into the brush nearby, reappearing on the other side to stand in the shadow of her sister. “Leliana,” she breathed, all eyes and awe and heaving chest, “something happened-“

But something woke in her chest then, something strange and unfamiliar, though not entirely unwelcome. It was a wildness, a yearning, a magic that wasn’t hers and oh, how it reached for Leliana. It was reflexive when she released it, instinctive when she pushed her nose against her sister’s darker neck and let the magic pool between their skin. This magic was strange magic, it was dissonance and discord until it buried itself in Leliana’s chest and Exist understood exactly what it was and what it meant.

When a pair of wings unfurled from her sisters shoulders, she could feel her own lift and open in response, widening to their full russet length across her apricot back. “Leliana,” she says again, this time even softer than before, with shadowed green eyes that seemed to be edged with quiet certainty, “if I exist, then you exist.” The phrase was a promise between them, a vow, and by some incredible impossibility it had not been broken. “We’re whole again.” She closed the distance between them easily, close enough for brown and apricot to be blended by shadow, close enough for their wings to tangle and touch.

Exist