She’d come before, once, but she hadn’t stayed. Seeing Ramiel apparently well-adjusted to his new life as King hadn’t encouraged Kellyn into recovery herself, as her ghost-family had hoped, but merely made her bitterly more aware of her own failures, pushing her closer to the edge between present and past, between the real world and the ghost world. After a perfunctory conversation, the strawberry girl had fled back to the silent safety of the Tundra (ever still her home). Even ghosts seemed to avoid the Tundra, at least more so than the rest of Beqanna, so though she’d talked to many ghosts there they weren’t constantly bothering her.
And then time had caught up to her in a different way – she’d slowly grown larger and larger, pregnant though she didn’t remember ever doing anything that would lead to such a state. And indeed it had been an abnormal pregnancy – lasting longer than any natural pregnancy could (years). The only upside was that Kellyn was a master of hiding – she’d lived years secreted away from even her own family, after all – and no one else realized the unnaturalness of the thing.
When she finally gave birth, Kellyn knew almost instantly that the girl was a remnant of her time with her demi-god grandfather at the edges of time and space. First and foremost, the filly was a startling purple, a color drawn straight from his space-colored appearance during parts of the quest. Secondly, the baby seemed half ghost herself; not quite alive but not yet dead either. Her flesh was never whole, peeling and falling away under the purple roan, but yet she lived and breathed like any living thing. Finally, the girl was ghosty. And not the watered down ghosty that Kellyn could have given her, the muted ability to see and speak to the ghosts but the full-on half the time a ghost world jumping nonsense that had been the provenance of Ramiel and Rhy.
And she doesn’t know what to do. She can’t see herself raising a daughter in the Tundra. Cagney had no choice but to raise his daughter in the Tundra, in a time when her existence might have been a death sentence for Elite, or himself, or even for the filly Kellyn had been. But it had changed her, a childhood in isolation, and Kellyn didn’t want to do that to Cassady. And she’d already failed to live in the Deserts, her ghost spirit guides disapproved heartily of the Valley, and a part of her always felt vaguely ill at the thought of venturing to the Jungle, where her mother had caused more harm than anywhere. A remnant of times long past, she can’t quite grasp the concept that she is welcome anywhere now, not just the formerly mythical Kingdoms, and so in her mind the Dale is the last possible home.
It is merely a bonus that it is the home of one of the other ghost children, that he rules there, and that he is unlikely to turn them away because they are both broken. Though, to be fair, the strawberry girl is decidedly less broken than before. Turns out that incubating a ghosty fetus for a ridiculously long time had been preventing her from achieving control of her new powers, because as soon as Cassady was free of her womb, Kellyn had the same control of her mediumship that she had always enjoyed of time. It was a welcome relief, to only have to deal now with the still-recurring nightmares.
“Don’t dawdle,” she calls back to the girl trailing behind her, and then shakes her head at her own words. If she’s not careful, she’ll turn into her big brother (or worse! her father) instead of the parent she has always aspired to, a strange combination of Brennen and what she imagines her mother would have been like if she hadn’t been comatose during Kellyn’s childhood. But Cassady doesn’t have too much time to wander off, because suddenly Kellyn stops, gazing into the depths of the Dale, which is already dropping into brilliant autumn color. “Well we’re here.” she sighs, flicking her gaze from side to side. “Our new home, I guess.”
daughter of cagney and elite