On the Isle’s northernmost shore, Kora had watched as the child borne was made into a child no longer. She had looked on as the babe’s infancy had been traded in for something else – something womanly and iridescent – an alien beauty. She was sleek with scales, her hair silvery and adorned with blossoms. Kora remembers the way their satin petals shimmered in the light just before her daughter had walked into dark waters and disappeared.
Ironically, Kora had once done the same.
Yes, a daughter – though because of what Kora and Woolf had decided, she would live her life as the daughter of none. It had been for the best. Their tryst may have resulted in a child, but neither were fit for parenthood. The night they’d spent beneath spinning galaxies of snow had culminated in lustful curiosity and nothing more. Love and affection had played no part – and yet a child needed both to survive.
So instead, they gave her what they could. The mage of blood gave her knowledge and years, while the mage of winter gave her a name. Evia. Standing there upon the shore, Kora had watched the place where the last glistening scales had slipped below the surface – waiting until the ripples had faded and gone before turning to leave herself, the sound of the waves like a pulse in her ears.
It wasn’t long before she left the Isle in need of a distraction. The gold-and-silver mare knew her brother would come searching for her as soon as he was able after convalescing in the Pampas, and she didn’t particularly feel like being subjected to the look in Leander’s kind brown eyes when he discovered what she’d done – no, not just yet. So it was that Kora came to be in the neighbouring territory of Nerine.
As always, winter follows in her footsteps. A dusting of snow covers the lush summer grasses around her, though snow isn’t falling. It seeps instead from her breath as infinitesimal crystals exhaled from cold lips, like dandelion seeds. She stands upon a small hillock which overlooks a sweeping expanse of seaside cliffs – the amount of accumulated snow the only testament to how long she’s done so.
A sound behind causes her delicate head to turn. Blue eyes blink only once before a frosty breath of laughter causes snowflakes to swirl toward the approaching figure. The creature was small and oddly misplaced by her youth, yet nonetheless altogether familiar. Of course, the mage of winter recognizes the mage of spring – she who had been a friend in a lifetime long gone. “Why Noori, you haven’t aged a bit.”
kora
mage of winter
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