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let your fists come undone; leliana - exist - 01-19-2017 while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
It is Spring again on the mainland. The snow is melting and the ground is thawing, there are soft tawny buds on bare branches and patches of green peeking through even bigger patches of brown. Everything smells new, like warm and mud and rain waiting to fall, and it must be overwhelming to those who had grown used to the months of a world that was only ever frozen and snow. Exist likes those smells – the sharpness of cold and new snow, the sweetness of green and thaw and mud – but there is nothing that comes close to how the ocean smells, of salt and brine, where it laps at Tephras shores.I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not. Wordlessly she finds her sister, and, touching the indigo of her nose to the dark of innumerable brown dapples, pulls her towards the ocean. They wade together through the greenery, following faint trails carved out by larger hooves until there is only sand and shore and the endless blue of an ocean that melts into the sky. When the sun finds her wings, they unfurl and dissolve, shifting from soft tawny and white feather to the gleaming iridescence of dragon-fly wings. In the yellowy light they seem to sparkle, a million trapped colors and somehow no color at all, framed by veins and lines like delicate silver lace. Smiling, she glances back at her sister, just once, and then plunges forward into the waiting sand. She is greeted at once by the spray of ocean water against her face, by the stink of salt and brine and dry, hot sand. For a moment she is still, just a heartbeat in time, long enough to look out across the blue and wonder at its vastness. To her left she can see where the land turns and curves out into the ocean, but it grows hazy before she can see where it ends. To her right the beach just stretches on and on until the same blurry haze claims that, too. Ahead there is only endless blue and a skyline of periwinkle – no hint of green, of the mainland she knows is nestled somewhere along the horizon. When Leliana joins her, Exist turns and touches her smiling mouth to that soft mahogany shoulder. “Leliana,” she says, her voice quiet and colored with a shade of wonder, “this world is so beautiful.” She cannot help but pause again, gathering the questions to where they can sit impatiently at the tip of her tongue. This world is beautiful, but she has met so many who seem guarded against it, ruined by it. Their own mother included. When her pale green eyes drift back to find and settle against Leliana’s, her brow is furrowed and her eyes are uncertain. “What do you think the old world was like?” Exist RE: let your fists come undone; leliana - leliana - 01-22-2017 I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well I put everything I had into something that didn't grow RE: let your fists come undone; leliana - exist - 01-22-2017 while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
She is quiet long after Leliana stops speaking, long after the low melodious voice has returned to its home within that dark and delicate chest. Exist is busy unraveling memories that are not hers, imagining worlds where horses wore literal constellations instead of spots across their skin, bright and cold and silver like the ones strewn across a black and bruised sky – worlds where fire burned molten in the marrow of eager bones, where flames licked at the flesh they were tethered to but did not blister or maim. She wondered if the horses in these words were different – if the power born to them was as dark and corrosive as it had been here, as ruinous as the stories of now had declared them to be. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not. And yet – “Do you think they were happier then?” The question feels blasphemous when it leaves her lips, like cursing the Gods, or fairies as it may be, who had left them here. But all she can think about are the ones she loved so dearly, so wholly, the ones who had been changed by the absence of some crucial part of their souls. Like Giver, so soft and solemn and buried beneath the weight of so many things, so many secrets, perhaps. But he had changed when the magic found him again, when it poured in and filled those dark places and crevices with cool silver starlight. She thinks of mother, too. Wonders – and she knows that she should not if only for the way the thought is barbed and dangerous, the way it leaves her mind aching and her heart raw – if in the old world, the world that came before, would mother have stayed with them? So when Leliana, in her soft and steady way, says, this world is not so bad. Exist just smiles, a quiet kind of smile, and then turns to bury it in the red of Leliana’s mane before she can see it and realize the truth behind it. It is a smile that says, I think we just traded one kind of dark for another. It is only when Leliana’s voice drops and Exist can feel a ripple in that otherworldly calm, that she pulls away from the dark neck so she can more easily watch that quiet red and brown face. I met someone, and Exist pauses, the smoothness of her brow knotted and furrowed with uncertainty. Her own wings notice before she does, fluttering impatiently when Leliana’s shift from iridescence to dark leather, a gesture that feels almost jittery when it is coming from her sister. Exist shifts and steps back, reaching over to draw her lips along the sinew of the wings, to trace the delicate architecture and the hollows in-between. And then, softly, “was that where you were the night you didn’t come home?” Home, home to me. She eases forward again and the water spills around the copper of strong, powerful legs. “I was worried.” She admits next, heavy-eyed, so that it doesn’t seem like an accusation. Then, curious, soft as the sun in the copper of her skin, and with a smile that etches itself in indigo across her mouth, “What do you want to do about it?” Exist RE: let your fists come undone; leliana - leliana - 01-22-2017 I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well I put everything I had into something that didn't grow |