He does not wear the brand as the rest of them wear the brand.
(The red ‘V’ carved into the flesh like some kind of badge of honor.
There is no honor in it for Kensley, there never was.

Strange, though, isn’t it? That both the woman he loved and their son had marched onto that battlefield and came away victors? And what had he been trying to prove by going? That he was worthy of something? Or had he thought it some kind of penance?

Perhaps it’d had nothing at all to do with the woman or the son, but with family of an entirely different sort. The sister who’d bled to death some years before, who’d bled her life into him when he’d reached out to touch her.

The battle could not have been his punishment because he’d lived his punishment every day after. His punishment had simply been that he’d gone on living when she had not. His punishment had been that he’d buckled at the knees when he’d told their mother, when he’d gone to the Mountain and died there and then somehow gone on living afterward.

So, what was it, then?)

He does not wear the brand because it had been an embarrassment, the Alliance. Further proof that his was a life wasted. And there is some bitter anger that roils just beneath the surface. An anger that spills out of him in the form of thunderheads on the horizon. Because, once again, he has become some different version of himself, this one no better than the last.

(Funny, though, isn’t it? How fiercely he’d ached for air when he’d roamed the earth a dead thing and now, when he breathes, he does not exhale a simple breath but a wind. He does not consider it a power. No, if anything, it is a curse just as everything else has been a curse.)

Somewhere in the distance there is a roll of thunder and he turns his gaze (stark black, depthless) toward the horizon. It would be easy (almost effortless now, as he’s had years to learn how to command the weather since the darkness had lifted and he’d been reborn a storm himself) to call off those dark clouds. He could command those clouds to dissolve, he could call upon the sun, but he does not. Instead, he leans into it. He beckons those stormclouds closer, watching breathless as they move swiftly across the sky. 

The rain comes first. It is torrential, unyielding, merciless as it pours across the meadow. He turns his face up to it, though it does not soak him through to the bone the same way it would have were he still made of flesh and sinew and marrow. It pelts and it stings but it does not seep. 

And then, a flash of lightning and his heart sets to racing. (This is the best part, he thinks, how close the strikes come without touching.) He sets his jaw, face still turned to the sky, at war with the storm and, as a result, himself.