and when i breathed
my breath was lightning
Kora doesn’t need to say I love you, Rhy hears the words anyway. Inside the spoken I trust you, but even more so as Kora closes the distance between them. She pauses, her muzzle so close to Rhy’s, both golden but one electric and one made of ice. Even when you can’t see it, those things flow through their veins. The words practically scream into the air with them hovering so near. They have never been this close. Rhy has never even dreamed that they will ever be this close. She’s only ever dreamed they could stand together and talk.
And then Kora closes the distance completely, and the feeling is so impossibly wonderful. It’s not like Kratos (the only other horse Rhy has ever really touched). Even in their one quiet embrace, there was something fiery and alive and wanting. But with Kora? It’s just love. Love that pulls them together, love that overcomes the fear, and Rhy presses back just slightly.
There’s no flash, no electric. Just joy, that they have gotten to this place, tinged with sorrow at the realization of what had finally, finally, pulled them together. But at least, they are together.
Eventually, she murmurs “It’s okay Kora. Really, it is.” And though she’s sad, though she will always be sad, over the childhood and the family she never really had, it is finally okay. She’s has Lagertha, and Scorch, and Kratos, and the Jungle. Now she has Kora. And maybe they could find their brother, and then Rhy would have a brother too.
“Let’s go see them,” she breathes the words out slowly, reluctant to break this very tentative and beautiful moment, but she does finally pull away. They leave the snow covered meadow behind for the beach, because Rhy thinks she needs to be among the dead to get there. When they arrive, she shifts, visible but ethereal. And then she just concentrates. She remembers the rip between the realms. The one that she flew through to return home once. The one that she could now traverse with ease.
And it really is that easy. They cross to the other side without hassle, and the ghosts of Beqanna’s dead mill around them now. Rhy doesn’t feel the cold here, and for her, the colors of this world are alive. But she is dead. For Kora, this place will be muted and slightly farther away, the way it was when Rhy first visited. The way it is for all the living.
“We can’t stay that long, or this place will kill you too. So let me know as soon as you need to go.” She remembers that feeling. Kora has no power here, no ice in her veins, and Rhy knows how awful that feeling is. She’d had no electric, no claws, when she had come. And it’s only made worse as the afterlife slowly sucks away the souls of the living as well. There are gray patches on her coat in this ghostly form as proof of her near death.
She begins walking forward, though she knows they won’t have to look long. Their parents will find them, because they will have been watching.
rhy
the electric lioness of riagan and rayelle
@[Kora]