[open] oh, this my weapon, this my loam; any

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

She has not been tested, and it is thus unknown to her what she is made of. Her mother was weak. Irisa does not know this – she mostly knew her mother in a dreamland – but she is. She broke under what was given to her (and it was a fair breaking, the adversity heavy enough). Irisa had not been so unfortunate, she has been able to skate through her life without knowing much in the way of pain – a skinned knee there, a thorn-cut here.
There is no telling what lies beneath her, or if indeed, there is anything – perhaps she would simply crumble to dust and be gone.

She watches with curiosity and fascination as his wings change, from feather to stick to bone, and there is a lick of envy in her throat. Perhaps she could have done something similar, in the dreamworld – she remembers mother tweaking her, shifting her color, until she nodding to herself, murmuring that’s right. But not now, where magic is a scarcer thing (at least to her grasp). Now, she is stuck as she is, which she doesn’t entirely mind – but ah, wouldn’t it be interesting to shift and warp at will?
He asks a question, a common one that she has an entirely uncommon answer for.
“From here,” she says, “but also not. Mother mostly kept me in a different place. A more magical one. She liked it, there, and kept me with her.”
But that hadn’t lasted, as Irisa grew, as she became more herself and less such a malleable thing.
“But that place is gone. So now I’m just from here.”
She misses it, and she doesn’t – she liked the world, it suited her (of course it did – she was made from ad for it!). But it was not hers, it was mothers, and there, she was ultimately a pawn – a decoration.
Here, she is herself, wholly.
(Whatever that may be.)
“What about you?”

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm