Chimera was a sullen girl, growing up in the solitude of Pangea’s canyons, waiting on the brother that filled her entire heart with himself. She grew sullen and angry and destructive, her own magic scratching great grooves into the sandstone walls of her confines and littering the floor with the bodies of any lobster foolish enough to come her way. Neither she nor Dreamscar would eat the things so they rotted and their deaths did nothing to lift the oppression of her boredom when he was gone, but cruelty and madness and infection were the hippogryph’s first milk, the scent of rotting meat was as near home as anything to him. She could not have prepared their home in any way he would like much better, the sister that he captivated so strongly, that he poured his magic over as he had done their mother before. Chimera loved him dearly, a broken, wild, love that was senseless as a forest-fire. And he loved her the way an arsonist does, glorying in the power he could gain from so little effort. In truth, no effort at all yet he reaped all the benefit. Chimera blazed, and he knew every freedom and gratification for the obsession he pressed into her being.

It was domestic bliss for no one but himself. Chimera, raised to it, knew no different, too busy burning and freezing by turns, but it lasted only as long as the Eclipse did. When the sun broke through again, the beaked stallion grew increasingly agitated and anxious, when the glowing markings lit up her dark skin, and, at night, filled their lightless canyons with a softly pulsing glow.

Oh, how he hated those lights! He often wondered at how the girl dared this change, and Dreamscar, inflexible as he had ever been, found the betrayal galling. It did not matter that it was a small one, nor how she, with a voice that cracked beneath the weight of his Love, denied knowing how they came to be painted there. It would not be borne. He would teach her the lesson their mother had learnt, in her own faulty way – disloyalty had a price.

Already nearly fainting under the deep pink haze of his inducements, Chimera was no match for her brother’s anger. At first, it was no more than he had always done and if she took no enjoyment from it, it was not enough to overcome the sense of obligation and worship that always seemed so close at hand when her heart was full of love for him, but his movements grew more manic, more frenzied with every passing minute. He could not be calm until he’d raked the glow from her skin with his claws.

He filled the night with her cries, unconcerned with who might be attracted to them, or the scent of her blood. When the uncertain dawn rose over Pangea, he left her, glow-less once again, her skin – what was left of it – un-magicked and dull with gore, and the sun was well up and the shadows flown away to the deepest places of Pangea before she gathered enough strength to tread through the halls of memory. Waking came slowly, and confusedly, and waves of nausea were her reward. Her irises shone strange and rustily in her bloodshot eyes like silver coins dropped to an abattoir's floor, her skin a quilt of unfinished patchwork, her heart torn asunder by the thousand hooks ripped out from it all at once. Great swaths of her skin had been peeled away and scattered around like little patches of shadow defying the sun. Her brother’s curse clung to her in his absence; a thing desirous of torture, lured away from its home by the promise of fresh torment, bled out from him in his lust to kill her glow, to mold her flesh into furrows and rows and lap at the welling rubies of her blood.

Somewhere, Dreamscar tasted liberty he had not known in some years, the curse purged away, his skin whole and pure as snow. It had never bothered him but he would not mourn its loss.