my soul is in the sky

The land is just a land, the place just a place. The River holds no meaning for her, but neither does the Beach though it should. It was the place she was born, after all, the place where her mother died in the very next breath. It should matter, but the world has always been so much bigger than a place or a horse she never truly knew. The world was the sky to her; it was the wind and the birds and the rain; it was freedom.

Her mother was nothing more than a construct in her mind, a collection of stories told to her as a child. Those stories were, likely, far from the truth. They painted her mother into something perfect – too perfect – to be believable. Perhaps her mother had been good, but no one was perfect, and Rae knows she will never know the truth of her mother or her father. No one had even been able to tell her stories of her father except that he controlled lightning and her mother controlled electricity. Together they made Rae, who simply controlled the sky.

No, she did not control. Controlled was the wrong word. Rae was the sky. Her breath was the wind, her heartbeat was thunder, her tears were the rain.

Rae has never been made new, for she has always been the sky, but she can appreciate the simplicity of the world in a way. She can feel the sky as this mare must now feel the cosmos, though the concept of earth is still a foreign thing to Rae. Rae may not have magic, but she was born made of the sky, and so she knows the taste of it well enough.

Her birds catch sight of the mare who simply appears by the river tonight. Beautiful they tell her, though they give her nothing more than that. It’s all Rae needs though, because not everyone catches the attention of her birds. They are her eyes and ears now, her friends in Beqanna. She’s made few other friends, not that she has tried. She blames no one but herself, and cares even less, simply because she has not tried. Perhaps one day she would try, but today, she cared only to meet the mare that interested her birds.

Leaving her cloud behind, Rae takes to the sky again, following the direction of the birds that had first spotted her. Clouds had a tendency to drift, and Rae had gone farther than she realized, but still it does not take her long to find the other mare. Her sight may not be great at night, but she doesn’t need it up here to navigate.

Nor does she need night vision to spot the mare. Her birds were right, she is beautiful indeed, a sunset splashed into the darkness. Rae nickers, landing softly nearby, tucking her wings to her side and she closes the remaining distance on hoof. “Hello,” she says, warming the air around them slightly to remove the bitter chill. “What do you seek up there?” she asks, gesturing to the place the mare gazes. After all, the mare gazes into Rae’s domain, and in this, perhaps she can help.

rae

my soul is in the sky

Rae doubts she would want more knowledge of the world than she already has. She can feel the sky and the birds and the direction of the wind. She cannot imagine feeling the earth too and all the creatures that call it home. For one, she has no interest, but secondly, it seems simply like too much. To know it all, to feel it all, seems like a weight she does not want to bear. A weight that a girl made of wind and rain and storms cannot imagine wearing, a weight that feels too much like roots.

Then again, perhaps it is not roots at all. Perhaps it is like the wind and the sky in its vast, wide expanse to know so much. She will, likely, never know what it is like, though she does not lament this not knowing. What she does know is enough, and she wants nothing else.

The idea of roots sometimes sits with her though. Rae spends so much time watching them live that she has begun to wonder what it is like to live tethered to the ground and not to the sky. Some part of her longs for the companionship that comes with it, but she cannot fathom giving up the sky and has not yet begun to figure how one might be able to have both.

Is it strange that I have the answer before I have the question? comes the reply, and Rae finds that her lips curve into a a wicked little half grin. “No, not in this place.” This place meaning Beqanna. Rae has seen so many places. In some, magic is even more rampant than here, though in many there is little to no magic at all. Beqanna sits on the upper end of “magical” so to speak, and as such, Rae is not particularly surprised by this mare.

After all, Rae is the wind and the sky, and they are limitless. She has seen it all, and so, it is hard to surprise the sky-dipped mare.

The next question is more personal, though again, not shocking. Rae literally wears her heart on her coloring, on her obvious affinity for the sky down to the bird-like way she moves and flies. She is something just slightly other, but only slightly, and her heart seeks more. “Curiosity,” she answers simply. “The birds found you noteworthy. I find that they are usually right.”

More too, this curiosity of roots blooming in her heart, though she does not know the words to express them. Likely, she does not need to say them at all though for this mare to simply know. There is something to the idea of living, of family and friends, sometimes in all that that shapes you and keeps you grounded. There is something more than the kinship of birds and the wildness of the wind in all that that calls to her, but the sky calls even more, and she cannot settle, does not know how.

In this, she cannot help the mare keep her world from splintering. Rae’s world has always been this way, and she simply chooses one.

rae

my soul is in the sky

She has never know anything but the wild wind, has never lived except as a servant to herself, has communed only with the birds and the clouds. Rae knows her world, and she knows it well. What she doesn’t know is the world she stands on now, but oh, how she has watched it, wondered as it, envied it in a way. How could she be like them though, when she was so unlike them? Yet, was she truly so different? Here was this mare coming apart at the seams and yet she ruled a kingdom, found roots somewhere even in the midst of such impossible change. Rae did not understand the purpose of the war (she may not have been in it, but she certainly didn’t miss it), but she wondered about it constantly.

Simply put, she wondered what it would be like stay.

She laughs though as this mare called her birds kind. “Some of them are kind, yes,” she says, leaving the rest unsaid but obvious enough. Her birds were much like her, wild and improbable and they served only themselves (they served her as a favor and as a friend only when it suited them, and she never forced them). It is sometimes a kindness to be noteworthy, and other times not. In this case, Rae was not sure if it was either, but rather simply that this mare was something other and in need. The details were lost to Rae, but the edges of it were clear enough. You didn’t need to be magic to see truth, if you knew how to look.

The next question is innocent enough, but Rae is silent for a long moment, her eyes too drifting to the horizon she knows all too well. It’s a horizon she lives in, and she has circled the world so frequently she has begun to wonder what is left that she has not yet see. What is left, really, is the ground. “I don’t know. I have begun to wonder what it is like to have roots. How do you do it?”

Funny, that this mare envies what Rae considers giving up. Funny, that Rae has begun to long for what this mare considering shedding.

Everyone always wants what they do not have.

rae

my soul is in the sky

Perhaps that was the difference – Leliana was given a home and a life and Rae had been born into death and destruction. What had been there for Rae to tether herself to except her twin, who’d roamed with her for much of their early lives? Their mother died birthing the storm twins; Rae had been the wind and the rain, her brother the thunder and lightning. They’d been adopted, cared for, but the home of their mother and their savior had been ripped away upon their birth. The Jungle was gone, there were no lands to call home yet, just a world being reborn.

And Rae? Well Rae, without her magic, was just a shell. Some are made greater by magic, but Rae was her magic and she did not exist without it. The twins left, and they did not look back for so, so long. But then again, what could they possibly expect to find?

The wind had brought her back. Kry had finally settled, somewhere detached from his sister but they were never the inseparable type of twins. Rae had kept going, had kept sleeping on clouds to see where she awoke the following morning. One day, the familiar beach of her birth floated below her, the bones of her mother somewhere in the debris or perhaps, long washed away by the ocean.

And she had stayed. Perhaps even then she knew the wind brought her back for a reason, that perhaps her heart longed for more than the life she had been leading for so long. She felt no grief, in those moments above the beach, for the mother she never knew. That was not her lot in life; Rae would never know either of her parents, and that was okay. She’d been shaped into herself by the experience of her life, and she didn’t long for things that would never be.

No, she only longed for the possibility of what might exist in the future. Longed for and feared it all at once.

The mare in front of her (whose name, she realizes, she still does not know) seems to, perhaps, come back to herself as she speaks of roots and home. “I should have been born in the Jungle,” she offers, her smile wistful. She knew the stories of it only, could only dream of the place her mother had served so loyally. “Instead, I was born on the beach as Beqanna shifted and changed. These lands are foreign to me. Even then, in my brief time here, they did not exist as they do now.”

Leliana speaks of coming back to her home, but Rae had no home to go back to. She has never known home, has never had anything or anyone worth fighting for; no family, no friends, just the winds and the birds that share her space.

rae