[open] show them the joy and the pain and the ending; Any

[Kora]

She has been with her brother in an abandoned cave at the Isle’s northernmost reaches. Though Leander had been subdued by the telling of Rhy’s long-ago death, he was still eager to know everything – about Rhy, about her. Too eager. Something about divulging old memories had been stirring a sense of discomfort that wells within, pressing against her ribs; and so, in the coolness of the morning while Leander still slept, she slipped away from the confines of the hollowed rock and began following the shoreline. As she moves, cold water laps at her slender legs. The rhythm of the tide soothes her, as a babe whose subconscious is reminded of the womb. She sighs. An odd thing, to be breathing again. While surely well-meaning, Leander’s dogged interest in her past and their shared history felt tiresome to her. Ever since her resurrection from the ocean, the ice-encased mare found that she was rather disinclined to dwell on who she’d once been. Weak, small, scared – she had been no one. In truth, her life before had been something of a waste. Too fearful to have known her own sister, too meek to have harnessed the ice in her veins, too naïve to have been of use to anyone. It was like a skin – one that she had shed upon melting into the sea all those years past. She had truly been nothing then; and it had changed her. Emerging from the waters again had been her rebirth. For better or for worse, her atoms had rearranged and reformed in a way that made her irrevocably different. She was remade. Idly, she sends fissures of frost among the rippling surf, watching as one wave after the next crystallizes mid-break. Frozen in time. There is satisfaction in knowing that she has the power to still the ocean’s unceasing movement, and she continues like that for indistinguishable miles. Only a flicker in her periphery makes her look up to see the oncoming roaned mare. Her delicate head tilts, eyes of glowing blue brushing over the stranger whose movements could be stilled, too, if she only felt like knowing what that might look like. Instead, there is a brief pause. “Hello,” she says absently, while the water at her heels begins icing over as though to make a hard, glittering, immovable wave of her next. kora vanished winterchild of riagan and rayelle