Emotions Are Our Own Hell; Exist

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

It is not unusual for Exist to be off on her own – maybe unusual for her to be without her twin, Leliana, but this new magic had a way of making her drift, of filling her chest with longing. It felt like there were five hooks in her heart, five tethers pulling her in five different directions. Well, fewer now, only three tethers after she had poured some of the magic into first Leliana and then Canaan. But it was still an odd, aching pressure in her chest, a desperate urge that lessened only when she did share the magic.

Keep giving.
An echo in the thrumming of her heart, in the flutter of her pulse.
Keep giving.

She is pulled once more from the shores of Tephra, but instead of plunging into the roiling seas, she unfurls that pair of gleaming russet wings and leaps into the sky. The birds and the clouds welcome her, the wind weaving under and between each satin feather, and the ground falls away at her heels in a way Canaan had tried to explain but she had never understood. She had tried, but it different to finally live something that it is to have it explained to you.

When the meadow appears beneath her, she finds that she is reluctant to land again, but these wings are still painfully new and her shoulders ache where they connect to the new bone, ache where the muscle is still young and soft and new. So she lands at a run, pitching forward with the momentum to catch herself, and throws her delicate coppery face to the sun to catch the streaks of red and gold that darken in dapples across her skin.

She runs until she feels that tether snag, until something in her chest beckons her to slow and turn. She does, and when she does there is girl looking back at her with a gentleness that she reflects easily, flashing this stranger a smile that tugs at the corner of those quiet green eyes. “Hello,” it is a simple greeting, the usual one, spoken in a voice like a bell, high and sweet and peaceful, “my name is Exist.”

She approaches the girl quietly, closing the distance between them with long, graceful strides, pausing only after she was close enough to touch her nose to a warm neck the color of crushed sunshine. “Your wings are beautiful,” she says with a fond smile, and her own unfurl wide and soft and russet at her withers, and then, “I think I’ve been looking for you.”

As if in response, the magic inside her hums and thrums and thrashes within the confines of her heaving chest.

Exist