oh, you know I need your mystic mind -- rhy cont.

[Kora]

It’s hard to imagine the Jungle destroyed. Even in the day that I’d been there, the rainforest had seemed imposing and impervious to threat -- even to the threat of time itself. My glowing blue gaze does not stray from that of my sister’s as she speaks of the healer helping the kingdom to recover. “I’m glad,” I murmur, and then, “I’m glad you’re safe, too.” I blink a little, caught off guard at the emotion that courses through me when I think that Rhy might have been injured in the disaster -- or worse. It is then that Rhy’s sparks fade, drawn forcibly inward by the electric mare. Again, there is a jolt of emotion. I know what that feels like. Whenever I practiced stopping the snowfall around me, my efforts always seemed counterintuitive, unnatural somehow -- like I could feel the ice in my veins rebelling against the suppression. I don’t know what it’s like to be electric, but that is what Rhy is. She is electric. Yet from the start, she’d been told she had to be something else -- all because of me and my fear. Just as the snow begins to take on the stormy shape of the thoughts and emotions running through me, Rhy steps toward me, tells me to breathe. It sounds so much like them that I freeze, refocusing my eyes as I stare at her through cold and billowing sheets of white. In. Mom’s voice saying dad’s words. Out. Carefully, I slow my breathing -- my exhale turns to frost in the air between us. Again. Eyelashes tipped in ice squeeze shut while I do as she says. And in the long silence between us, I fear she must hear the pounding of my butterfly-heart as clear as day. When the rush of sound quiets in my ears, I open my eyes. The storm has subsided, though large flakes still flutter through a chilly wind about us. Rhy stands there, close -- though we are never as close as we should be. “You sound so much like them,” I whisper, shuffling my feet. Snow mixes with earth, becoming a muddied mess beneath my hooves. I look up and meet my twin sister’s gaze. She seems so calm -- so much like Riagan -- and the guilt I’ve always felt comes flooding to the surface in an instant, filling every syllable. “I wish I’d never been so afraid, Rhy. If I hadn't -- if it weren’t for me...” You could have had mom and dad. You could have been yourself. And all at once, overcome as I am with the regret that’s haunted me for years, I force the snow to die away. I concentrate on the chill in the air, willing it to dissipate. Natural beams of dawning sunlight begin to melt the small drifts that had been building around our ankles. After all, she must hate the snow. How could she not, when it had robbed her of everything she loved? When I’m done, all that remains is the thin and iridescent layer of ice gleaming upon my gold-and-silver skin. Clearing my throat, I avert my glowing gaze. “You shouldn’t have to be the only one,” I say, alluding to the snow’s disappearance, though in truth it’s because I don’t want her to hate me any more than she already did. k o r a winter manipulation, liquification, astraphobia

***

[Rhy]

and when I breathed, my breath was lightning

For so long she has been the only one. The only one left in her family, the only electric horse in Beqanna (until Kratos, and with him she is something else entirely). The sisters didn’t mind the electric, the sparks, but they weren’t like her. Not really. She loved her sisters anyway, because they accepted her, and that was such a new concept to Rhy. Riagan did was he could, and she knows this, but all he could do was teach her to be someone else.  It has taken her half a lifetime to finally figure out who she actually is, or at least begin to understand it. Maybe she will never entirely know. Maybe in this regard, she is not the only one.

Kora has changed too.

They aren’t so different anymore. Opposites, yes. Rhy can light the world on fire and Kora can freeze it. But not so very different. This is what it is like to be electric, to stop the sparks. It’s like cutting off a hoof or poking out an eye. The electric is her in her blood, and it thrums beneath her skin when it’s contained.

Kora doesn’t run when Rhy steps forward though. She listens and breathes and the storm does quiet down. The snow isn’t gone, not entirely, but Rhy doesn’t really expect that. It’s hard, so hard, to stop being yourself after all. But Kora’s words do throw her off guard. You sound like them. She’s always wondered if her memories are correct. She was so young that whatever memories she has are fickle, blurry creatures.

She barely remembers her mother at all. Rayelle had been off with Kora more often than not, and all she knows if that Rayelle was gold as well. She remembers that. But the details are gone, the sound of her voice, the smell of her. Her memories of Riagan she can trust slightly more, her gold and black and white father with a few scorch marks and all the patience in the world. The words, she knows, are his.

“Do I?” she asks though, because she doesn’t remember what Mom sounds like. Not really. And she only knows that she’s using Riagan’s word, but does she really sound like him? It feels like a lifetime ago that she had seen her parents – perhaps it was. Before the Jungle, before Kratos, before she could even begin to understand the mare she could be.

There is still a part of her that wants to be angry. And that part can’t bring itself to say it’s okay, to Kora’s next words. It’s not okay. At least, it wasn’t okay. But most of Rhy can’t blame her sister either. She didn’t choose to be afraid. She just was. Afraid of the thing that hurt. Just as Rhy can’t be blamed for the lightning in the womb. She couldn’t control it, she couldn’t possibly know better.

But what she can do is move past it. The snow has stopped completely, and Rhy is actually proud of her sister in that moment. Strong and brave and so very different than the girl that ran from Beqanna so many years ago.

“What good will if’s do us?” she asks. Not meanly, but as the only way of moving past it all. Because they couldn’t live in the ifs. Not any more. “Tell me, how have you been? When did this,” she nods to the whole of Kora, because that’s really what this is, “happen? What happened?”

rhy

the electric lioness of riagan and rayelle

character reference here  | character info here