etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
There are few places she would prefer to avoid more than the Deserts.
It is the home of her heart, but it is also the birthplace of all of her fears. It is the place where they came to rear their ugly heads—the truth of her own powers taking shape into something dark and cruel and destructive. She was not all-powerful, but she smothered out the flame of magic in a way that she would never understand and never appreciate. She would never experience the full-fledged beauty of her mother amongst the sand—and now she was finding she could not even enjoy small pleasures, such as an easy conversation with the mute girl whose only way of communication had been her own telepathy. A gift from the heavens that Etro had broken in their time together. Admittedly, the bay girl was learning how to rein in the effects of her negation, but it did not come without effort, not without cost. Nothing ever did.
But her mother’s voice had reached her, the message muffled but clear enough to decipher, and Etro knew she could not deny her father’s request. Not when she had abandoned her parents in what had become their time of need. So she made her way to the desert, doing her best to ignore the memories of sickness that replayed again and again in her mind with each new step that she took. Such illness had crept up on her slowly. With each passing day in her desert home, she had felt it more—the way her muscles would ache with more than just soreness when she rose. The way that her lungs constricted painfully in her chest. The way that her pulse became lethargic and sluggish in her chest, struggling to beat properly.
Finally, it had been too much. Finally, she had broken. Finally, she had fled.
Swallowing her fear, Etro came upon the border of the desert and felt a strange mixture of excitement and anxiety constrict her throat. The sand shifted beneath her hooves like a memory should, and she moved through it more gracefully than her large, plainly-built body would have suggested. It did not take her long to reach the gathering, but she purposefully hung back several feet from the thick of it. Several of her siblings had gifts of their own, and she did not desire for them to know of her own curse. She concentrated carefully on pulling back the edges of negation, hoping to ease the symptoms of it for the traited family members. When she was confident that she had a grip on it (tenuous as it may be), she lifted her muddy brown eyes to Vanquish and gave him a strained, already-fatigued smile. “Dad.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
