break these bones until they're better; leliana

[linnea]

She does not remember being born. Not that first gasp of air or the way her lungs had felt when they first expanded, when life flooded her veins and her eyes fluttered open to find Mother for the very first time. Se does not remember the sun on her skin or the way she had cooled when the clouds rolled out to watch her first steps, or how strangely exhilarating it had been when her legs wobbled forward and her delicate body stayed aloft.

She knows they happened, all those beautiful moments that Leliana can probably still picture against her eyelids when she finds time to close her eyes and rest. But they are not memories for Linnea, not things she can look back on and feel emotion stir in her chest as it must have all those years ago. Instead they are factual, bits of knowledge, things she knows must have happened because they happen to everyone.

But years from now, when she looks back on this moment, this rebirth, there will not be a single moment she cannot replay against the black of her eyes each time she tries to close them.

She wakes, but it is not violent. There is no gasp of suddenness, no thrumming beat in her chest as she searches her mind for the memories she held last. There is no beat at all, she realizes, and while once this thought might have been echoed by the frenzy of a pulse throbbing like the whoosh of waves in her ears, there is only silence now. She wonders at the silence, because as her head lifts from where she lays and her eyes trace the shapes and colors of a world so familiar, she knows she is not dead. Surely if an afterlife exists, it would not look like Tephra?

With a soft groan she tries to stand, but it is at that point that she realizes she no longer understands her body. She feels awkward and heavy, unsteady like a newborn foal, and when she slides back down to settle into the grass she catches a glimpse in her lower periphery that does not make sense.

Where her legs should be, long and slender and as dark as a charcoal sky, there are limbs like thick branches, dark gray and gnarled with flecks of pale tawny in shallow notches throughout. She reaches down to explore them, surprised when she can feel it - not the branch beneath her nose, but rather her nose as it sweeps across skin she cannot see.

Maybe it is just the strangeness of it all, or the haze of not-sleep that still clings like mist in the dark quiet of her thoughts, but understanding is slow to come. She remembers dying as though it is a dream, remembers beautiful Nikolaus and the clash of unwanted war - remembers the fire and how, in a dream, it had come to welcome her into the painful dark.

She does not remember burning yet.
Not the fear as it consumed her body or the pain of blistered flesh drawing so tight over muscles that melted and snapped until she could not even struggle anymore.
With luck, she never will.

Her delicate head lifts and pale pink flowers the size of apples sway heavily across her neck and over her brow in a waterfall of color that makes it almost hard to see past. She does not understand why they are in the way, or why there are bits of waxy emerald green leaves poking out around the edges - but when she reaches for logic to soothe her curiosity, it whispers that she must be like her mother now, with those beautiful blossoms in her hair.

linnea

these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

[leliana]

Much of Leliana’s attention goes toward the growth of her daughter. It is a strange thing to feel it—the way that her daughter’s body recovers outside of the womb—and she feels a constant stress when she considers how little she is able to protect her child. She had not been able to protect her from the war, or the magma, or the death that had claimed her; no more than she had been able to protect her home.

But she now has the ability to do this and she pours herself into the work.

In her efforts to regrow her home, she makes a section just for her and her family. It is a grove that can only be reached by knowing where you are going and it’s easiest when you can simply teleport through the branches and the bramble. That is what she does today when she first feels her daughter taking her first breaths. Her pulse immediately begins to skyrocket and she lifts her head to the sky, feeling the breeze winding through her home reminding her that her daughter is alive—that she’s alive.

Without hesitation, she sends a message to Vulgaris, letting him know, and then she teleports herself into the grove. The leaves hang around them and the perfume of the flowers is thick. She smiles when she sees her daughter beginning to stir and although there is a piece of her that breaks knowing that she could not bring her daughter back in her own body, it is overwhelmed with joy knowing that she is at least safe.

“Linnea,” she breathes her name out and walks forward, pressing a kiss into the flowers and bark.

Even with her new body, she looks in her eyes and her mother’s heart swells with knowing.

“My sweet, darling girl. You’re awake.”

it's only you and me there until the darkness calls
let's face the dawn together; we'll brave whatever comes

@[vulgaris] - if you wanna join! <3

[linnea]

There is no way for Linnea to know the gravity of this moment as her mother comes to press a kiss to her brow, no way to understand the weight Leliana must still carry upon her shoulders at the sight of a daughter returned from the afterlife. She is too content to feel anything but the smile on her dark lips as she lifts her face to catch moms kisses, too busy being loved to understand yet what she has lost.

“Hi mom.” She says, and she tries again to stand, but there are roots and vines and things all around her that hold her so safe against the ground. She cannot see those things though, can only feel the resistance of a body that seems like it does not want to listen. “I feel,” but she pauses because she cannot name what this feeling is, because there is no word big enough to encompass all these things. Tired, heavy, lost, hazy. Like she is wearing something over her skin and she still needs to learn the weight of it. “I feel different.” She says instead, picking the word because it will be enough to convey the growing unease in her chest.

“I feel,” then she frowns, and there is new worry in those pink tourmaline eyes, a fear that tries to clutch at a heart that no longer exists, at lungs that are buried in a body lost to war. She gasps, and somehow fear finds its way inside her chest to bury like sick and rot in the dark grey bark. “Mom, where is Nikolaus?” His name is a key that unlocks a flood within her, and suddenly there are tears rolling down cheeks that he would never be able to recognize. But she can seem him, see everyone in those last moments as denial withers beneath his weight in her chest and she is suddenly free from the way it had blinded her.

War and screaming and so much fire. Nikolaus and the portals and the absolute peace she had felt in her heart when she saw that he would be safe. It is the only memory she has of death, that quiet acceptance. That belief that it would be okay because he would be okay. It is a memory that protects her from the more graphic truth of what had come next and how unprepared she had been for what death by fire would feel like. Even now, even in memory, he keeps her safe.

linnea

these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

[leliana]

There are no words to explain the relief washing through Leliana.

There are no words that adequately explain what it means to have seen a daughter dead and then to have been able to give her the gift of life again—to have planted seeds of it in her heart and watched as she took root and flourished. For so long she has worried over her daughter, concerned that she would not be able to find her way back to this world. That her magic wasn’t enough. That even though she had been able to craft her a new body of bark and leaf and flower that her soul would never settle into it again.

So to see her eyes open and to know that she lives again.

There are no words.

But she knows that the first breath is only the first step and there is so much more that they need to navigate together. One day, she will need to help her daughter learn what it means to have died. She will need to pull back the veil that she has dropped on the day to soften the blow. She will need to help her daughter learn to stand and be both young and old, both ancient of the earth and born anew.

What she does not expect is this fear that grabs at her daughter so fiercely.

She sees it before she is able to explain it and her mind begins to whirl, trying to place it. “Nikolaus?” she echoes, the name completely lost on her tongue. “Who is—“ but she cuts herself off because she can feel the waves of her daughters memory crashing through her. Perhaps she is just sensitive to it now or perhaps in the molding of Linnea, she wove them tighter than before. All she knows is that she can feel her daughter’s love for this boy and the further that she begins to root through the threads that now spin out further and further, the more complicated it gets. Because this is not just any boy.

This is a boy who nearly sacrificed himself to save her daughter.

This is a boy her daughter had died to save in return.

This is a boy who is the son of Castile.

And this is a boy who is lost.

Her heart nearly stops in her chest as she focuses again on her daughter. Using whatever gifts she can, she begins to weave a picture of him—just an illusion, faded on the edges—in front of her daughter.

“Is this him?”

Then, without waiting, she feels her magic return to her with an answer and she quickly spins open a portal in front of them in a flurry of leaves. Through it comes the biting wind of the northern land and with it, a boy of black and blue with a badly healed leg and a jarring limp as he stumbles through.

it's only you and me there until the darkness calls
let's face the dawn together; we'll brave whatever comes

[linnea]

Mom is a whirlwind, and Linnea cannot help but to be forever so endlessly impressed by her. She does not even have enough time to question who belongs to the name on her daughter's lips before her magic is filling in the blanks - or at least Linnea thinks it must be because for a moment mom is a statue in her focus. She stirs, speaks, and suddenly the boy from her memories is woven before her in pieces of starlight and shadow. Even in illusion he is beautiful enough to remind her of how it feels to blush. But these cheeks are bloodless, and the only color that stirs there is the flat, dirty grey of bark.

“Yes.” She says, oblivious to the changes that might break her heart until she can understand them, until she can learn to accept that being changed is not bad. That the fear comes only from the bottomless dark of not knowing. “Yes, that’s Nikolaus.” My Nikolaus, she had almost said, but shyness keeps her quiet. She reaches her nose out to him and the illusion wavers like the ripples of water across a puddle, distorting as though she had breathed across it.

She did not, of course.

But there is no time to linger because Leliana is not yet finished, and with a flourish of magic that will never not seem grand to Linnea, a portal opens before them. Out pours cold and snow and air with teeth that hurt her more than she remembers it doing before. She is so busy flinching away from it, blinking those pink tourmaline eyes, that it takes one, two, three whole seconds for her to recognize the dark shape coalescing out of the swirling flurries. But his shape and those silver eyes and that particular shade of blue are as familiar to her heart as anything she has ever loved.

“Nikolaus,” she breathes, an impossibly soft smile over wooden lips, “you look like a bruise.” It is a thing she has said a million times, a thing she has only ever said in jest, and she reaches for it now for the familiarity it brings her. Black and blue. But as those pale eyes take in his battered body, she wonders if maybe it will never again be a joke that makes them laugh, wishes she could take it back. She watches him, suddenly somber and bashful and with pink eyes that do not quite meet his anymore, so unsure. But he is broken, she can see it in his stride, and she can fix him, so she musters up another effort to stand.

Roots unearth and vines fall away from her, but she manages to stay on her feet, though it is not unlike the splayed stance of a newborn. Her body is like her face, like her legs, like the small ears that stick out of the mess of mane that is now twigs and leaves and enormous pink and white flowers shaped like heavy, upturned bells. She is flat gray everywhere, a shade made murky by a hint of brown and by the lighter notches that cover her skin at random. She is too strange now to be beautiful to anyone but her parents, but at no point does it occur to her to look down, so it is with no more bashfulness than usual that she reaches out to touch noses with her best friend.

linnea

these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

[nikolaus]

how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

His time on the isle has not been kind.

He has withdrawn from whatever company he could have sought—whatever help could have been there for him—and instead took to the shadows. To the places where he could mourn in peace. His leg, broken and shattered, had not healed quickly or easily—and, in the end, healed correctly at all. It left him with a limp and a shooting pain whenever he bore weight on it; something that made him all the more bitter.

His family was out there, he knew, but they had no idea he was alive, and he had no idea how to possibly swim back to the mainland with his body in the condition that it was in. And, if he was being honest with himself, he was not sure that he wanted to go back home. He wasn’t certain that he could go back to just being a boy with a secret friend from Tephra. He wasn’t certain he wanted to live if she—

His thoughts always ended there.

Abruptly.

It was too difficult to try and finish them. Too difficult to let his splintered mind wrapped around the very possibility that he lived in a world where she didn’t. That she had died so that he didn’t have to.

Sometimes, he cursed her for taking his place when he should have been the one on the other side of that portal. Sometimes, he cursed her for making him be there and watching the magma overtake her.

Leaving him with this shattered leg and a heart of stone.

But all of this leaves him when another portal opens and through it, he sees the glossy, vivid green of the Tephra he had known before the war. Curious, painfully curious, he picks himself up and begins to walk toward it, surrounded by the flurries of snow and the whipping wind. When he reaches it and stumbles through, his leg nearly giving out in front of him, he finds that he is standing in the middle of what he could only possibly describe as some kind of garden and the woman standing there is Linnea’s mother.

He frowns, blinking into the Tephran sunlight, before the portal closes and the cold wind at his back goes away. He blinks again, swinging his head back toward the red-winged woman and then to what he had previously thought was a tree. But the tree is moving and although his heart trips lightly in his chest, overwhelmed by the changes and the surprises, there is something almost familiar about the tree.

It has her voice.

And it has the same shape of her eyes.

“Linnea?” his voice cracks, the edges of it hoarse with winter and disuse. It doesn’t matter that her skin has melted away to be replaced with bark and that her mane has become leaves and flowers or that her eyes are now pink as petals. It doesn’t matter because it’s her and when she touches her nose to him, his heart pounds in his chest. He takes a limping step forward, tears in the corner of his silver eyes.

“It’s you. It’s really you.”

nikolaus

if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )

[linnea]

She has not had the same stretch of time to wonder and worry and feel the thorny petals of regret bloom within her chest as he has. The weight she carries on her shoulders is so much different than the weight on his - lighter, perhaps, because though she had been lost to everything, her mother had never let her feel alone. Adrift but not isolated, lost but not gone. Even in death she had never left home, and now in life again she had opened her eyes to the same world she left behind.

But she can understand as she looks out at Nikolaus’ face that it was not the same for him. He has grown some, filled out - no longer a boy soft and round with the complacency of knowing only safety and love. His body is long and lean, those muscles wiry along his neck and his shoulder from living in a place of sparse grazing. She wonders if he has even seen himself to know these changes, if he has looked down at his reflection and wondered at the man that stares back at him.

It is his eyes that seem the most different, though. Still bright and beautiful like shining ore, but somehow ancient and out of place on such a young, beautiful face. But it is still him, still undoubtedly her Nikolaus, and she is so softly greedy as she drinks in these differences with eyes like shadowed pink crystal.

He speaks, and she can hear the gravel that grinds in the gears of his throat as he reclaims words that seem slow to wake from such deep slumber. He picks her name to say first, holds it out like a flower and she is helpless to stop that crooked half grin from slipping across lips that are no longer soft and beautiful. He steps closer and she tries to do the same, but it is like moving limbs deadened with sleep and she only succeeds in falling forward before she catches herself again, a feeling of uneasy worry blossoming in the pit of her belly.

At her hooves there are still roots that hold her close and keep her bound, wooden vines that anchor her in place as though she is not entirely ready to be free of them. She understands this in some part of her mind, that she need be still and patient until the sun climbs higher and warms her with life. But it is so hard with Nikolaus so close, with this war of wings in her chest as she looks back at the boy she thought she would never see again. He is here and so close, reaching for her with her name on his lips -

But she is already so tired, she realizes.

Feeling wooden and heavy, clumsy when she blinks and turns to look up at Leliana and those flowers swing across her face to settle in tangles of green and brown and petal-pale pink against her cheeks. “Mom?” She asks, and her voice is the rustle of wind through green leaves, the swish of grass in the richest meadows. The fear in her chest is louder now as she reaches for things she had always taken for granted and only noticed now that they were gone.

Her inability to take the steps that would bring her safely into the crook of his shoulder.
That nagging, patient memory of peering down at branches carved where legs should be.
The absolute quiet inside her skin when she reaches for fire to heal Nikolaus’ broken body.

She trembles, and the forest of her mane rustles against her neck. “I think something is wrong?” It is a question on her lips only, because in her heart she already knows it is truth.

linnea

these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

[nikolaus]

how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

Nikolaus barely notices her mother in the background—barely notices the way that her mouth grows taut with worry, her healer’s heart tightening as she lets her magic root through him to find the knots of muscle and the places where bone regrew but regrew wrong. All he sees is the little girl of branches and bramble in front of him, the way she is still impossibly lovely in this form—just more delicate, more natural.

He realizes that moving is difficult for her—for reasons he cannot guess—so he limps forward further to fill in the distance. He closes the space with an exhale until his chest of flesh and bone is pressed against hers of crooked, tangled bark. It scratches but he doesn’t mind and although there is still worry that blossoms in him, a confusion he won’t ever be able to dispel, it is not because it is not her any longer.

For a second, he stands like that, his black chest pressed against her own, his cheek to her roughened back before she speaks again and he takes a stumbling step back. It wasn’t until she called for her that he remembered that her mother was here at all. Frowning, he twists his head back to where Leliana continues to stand, her wings now matching the tree that has overgrown her daughter, a question on his face.

“It’s okay, darling,” Leliana says quietly, and her hazel eyes are calm again. “Remember when I asked you to trust me? I could bring you back—but I needed help. The earth had to help.” There is only a hint of regret on her mouth now and Nikolaus thinks he understands but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t so he continues to be still, to be quiet.

“You’re now of the earth—and you are beautiful, my Linnea, but it will be different.”

He nods and his mercurial gaze slips back to the daughter of the trees. “You are beautiful, Linnea,” he affirms, his voice still raspy and quiet. “You’re not wrong,” he says and Leliana just nods. “The earth could bring you back—but not your fire, little dove. Not your healing.” There is a pause, and this time she directs the question to her daughter’s friend. “I can help, but it won’t be painless, and I am not sure that I can unwind all of the damage completely. There may still be…reminders.”

Nikolaus lifts his leg slightly, wincing, and then puts it down.

His breathing grows quicker as he looks back to Linnea. There he finds everything he needs to grow courage in his breast and he just sets his jaw, nodding as he looks back to Leliana. The magician’s smile is sad as she begins to let threads of golden light work their way toward him, letting it sink into his leg.

“Linnea, try to distract him—if you can.”

nikolaus

if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )

[linnea]

She is struck by how different it feels to hold him now, to be held by flesh and blood and the warmth of a body when she is something else entirely. It feels similar to how she remembers the sun warming her skin, similar to that kiss of sunshine on lazy days lounging in meadows. She misses that warmth, she realizes, just as she realizes she is no longer warm like that. Like him. Must it be so strange for him to hold her and feel not soft fur but instead the bite of bark on body that had always warmed him. She would blush if she could, soft shame the color of pale flower petals. But there is no blood in her to rise to those delicate cheeks, so she merely blinks and looks past him to the trees at the edge of the garden.

It is moms voice that recaptures her attention, draws her back safely from the edge of quiet terror she peers over so uncertainly. She is quiet as she watches, though there is a part of her mind busy wondering at why Nikolaus pulled away, wondering how long it would take for him to decide she was too strange now. Maybe he already had, maybe holding her had been too much. “Of the earth.” She repeats slowly, blinking crystalline eyes in and out of existence.

Leliana makes it sound like something lovely, like it does not make her too different to love. But Linnea doesn’t want to be different. It makes gentle panic rise in her belly and the only thing that keeps it at bay is when Nikolaus promises she is not wrong, like he can hear the worry swirling to life in her thoughts.

His words make her heart break.

She is so ready to unravel, so ready to fall apart that she is startled when the conversation veers back to Nikolaus. ‘Linnea, try to distract him—if you can.’ She looks from the solemn face of her mother to a boy made man by a war not meant for either of them. She can see his expression change as he braces for pain, for the unknown, and something in it wakes the gentleness in her again. With a nod she reaches for him, and when he is not close enough to draw closer, she wrestles her foreign body until three unsteady steps carry her back into the crook of his shoulder.

She feels like a child again, shy and unsteady, not completely in control as she tries not to lean into him too hard lest he be knocked off balance. They are close enough now that she can whisper, leave words in shy kisses over his smooth, dark skin. “Hi,” she says, and she feels like that girl again, feels a smile slung crooked across her mouth as she relaxes beside him, “it’s probably a really good thing you don’t have any pollen allergies.” That smile deepens, touches her eyes as she touches her mouth to his shoulder, to the warmth of his skin.

She feels shy to love him like this in front of her mother, but it the best way she knows how to keep his focus on something besides the way Leliana will have to unmake his brokenness to heal it right again. Her mouth moves across his shoulder, following ridges of bone and lean muscle that she does not remember being so prominent before. “Nikolaus?” She asks, and her voice is a whisper she buries against him. “I need to know,” a weighted pause as she drops her mouth to his elbow to grasp soft skin between impossibly gentle wooden teeth, “is my bark worse than my bite?”

A smile, a light in her chest that she can only find in his company.
Maybe this will be okay.

linnea

these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

[nikolaus]

how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

Nikolaus has always been a solemn boy. There was something of his mother’s wildness buried in him, his father’s fierceness, but it had solidified in his chest into something sturdy—something strong. It left him more thoughtful than vicious, more prone to observing than attacking. Perhaps that why he was drawn to the poetry of Linnea; he had always loved the joy that shone in her eyes, that sweetness of her smile.

It is a relief to know that it still lives in her now, even after everything they’ve been through.

It is a relief to look in shadowed pink eyes and see the joy still shining back.

He clenches his jaw tight as she steps into his embrace again, as he braces himself against her, feeling the scrape of her bark and the sweet fragrance of blossom bloomed in her mane. He can feel her lean against him too and there is something reassuring in knowing that she needs him as much as he needs her in this moment; that he is not completely weak, she is not completely fragile, and they are more whole together.

It nearly hurts when she surprises the first laugh out of him as he feels Leliana’s magic begin to sink into him. “I’ve always been allergic to you,” he manages through his nervousness as the golden light roots through him a little further, and he nips out—teeth gentle as he bites onto a piece of bark and releases, unsure of how much would hurt her. But she is quick to return it, his flesh caught between her teeth, and her jerks the leg up in mock protest. “Hey,” his voice shakes, “you’re supposed to be helping me, not hurting me.” But there is enough laughter behind the words to soften any potential misinterpretation.

It is almost enough for him to ignore the first pangs of hurt that he rides through with just a heavy breath, his silvery eyes closing as he crests with it. Her presence is almost enough for him to ignore the way that his skin has gotten hot, the muscle within unroping. He looks up and sees sweat on Leliana’s brow, darkening the mahogany of her skin, and he knows that she’s trying to dull the pain, trying to help—

He screams.

He doesn’t see how Leliana’s hazel eyes grow round as Nikolaus falls away from Linnea and then falls to the floor. His own eyes roll back in his head and Leliana has to fight to hold onto her concentration so that she can finish this quickly. Nikolaus’ panting comes out quick and fast. Through the haze of his pain, he can feel his bone beginning to tie itself back together, can barely hear them around him, and then it is done. Leliana turns her efforts from healing to soothing, letting her healing magic sink back into him to take the edge off of the pain that erupts through him like a wildfire, roaring through his unbroken leg.

For a second, Nikolaus remains stretched out on the ground, eyes closed, but he eventually opens his eyes to look for Linnea, his mouth twisting into a wry smile. “Have I mentioned I love visiting your mom?”

nikolaus

if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )