my soul is in the sky
Perhaps that was the difference – Leliana was given a home and a life and Rae had been born into death and destruction. What had been there for Rae to tether herself to except her twin, who’d roamed with her for much of their early lives? Their mother died birthing the storm twins; Rae had been the wind and the rain, her brother the thunder and lightning. They’d been adopted, cared for, but the home of their mother and their savior had been ripped away upon their birth. The Jungle was gone, there were no lands to call home yet, just a world being reborn.
And Rae? Well Rae, without her magic, was just a shell. Some are made greater by magic, but Rae was her magic and she did not exist without it. The twins left, and they did not look back for so, so long. But then again, what could they possibly expect to find?
The wind had brought her back. Kry had finally settled, somewhere detached from his sister but they were never the inseparable type of twins. Rae had kept going, had kept sleeping on clouds to see where she awoke the following morning. One day, the familiar beach of her birth floated below her, the bones of her mother somewhere in the debris or perhaps, long washed away by the ocean.
And she had stayed. Perhaps even then she knew the wind brought her back for a reason, that perhaps her heart longed for more than the life she had been leading for so long. She felt no grief, in those moments above the beach, for the mother she never knew. That was not her lot in life; Rae would never know either of her parents, and that was okay. She’d been shaped into herself by the experience of her life, and she didn’t long for things that would never be.
No, she only longed for the possibility of what might exist in the future. Longed for and feared it all at once.
The mare in front of her (whose name, she realizes, she still does not know) seems to, perhaps, come back to herself as she speaks of roots and home. “I should have been born in the Jungle,” she offers, her smile wistful. She knew the stories of it only, could only dream of the place her mother had served so loyally. “Instead, I was born on the beach as Beqanna shifted and changed. These lands are foreign to me. Even then, in my brief time here, they did not exist as they do now.”
Leliana speaks of coming back to her home, but Rae had no home to go back to. She has never known home, has never had anything or anyone worth fighting for; no family, no friends, just the winds and the birds that share her space.
rae
@[leliana]