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.

They are the same and they are different, night and day but forever bound in that one does not exist without the other. Where Leliana is grace and quiet, unwavering calm, Exist is like fire that consumes, wild and impatient and unpredictable. Though Leliana barely reacts when the magic seeps beneath her skin, Exist cannot help but weave around her sister, touching her lips to a cheek, a shoulder, the point of a dappled hip.

She is a slave to the magic that burns inside her chest.
A slave to the heart that pounds a rhythm her feet are ever eager to match.

Exist quiets only when Leliana tests her wings, stepping back so that her sister can let them unfurl to their full length. First soft, then fearsome, strange, and soft again to which Exist steps forward, thrusting her nose against the curve of a dark and dappled neck. When her sisters words find her ears, something erupts in her chest, a thousand flashes of a single memory thrust inside her mind. But it wasn’t just any memory, it was that first one, the most important one.

“No, Leliana, it was you who restored me.” Her voice is just a whisper, dark and urgent and full of the wild she feels trapped within the confines of her chest. When Leliana shifts to push her face against the apricot of a waiting neck, Exist turns reflexively to cradle her, reaching over to trace dark dapples with the soft of delicate, whiskered lips. There is a sudden pang in her chest, a rare pang, and though it passes after just a moment, she cannot help but regret that mother was not with them. But Victra had surrendered to the dark in her soul, had given herself to the wilds and the deep forest so that she could not taint the children she loved.

With a sigh that is oddly tremulous against the curve of a delicate copper mouth, Exist says, “I love you, sister.”

Exist