let your fists come undone; leliana

[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 Spring again on the mainland. The snow is melting and the ground is thawing, there are soft tawny buds on bare branches and patches of green peeking through even bigger patches of brown. Everything smells new, like warm and mud and rain waiting to fall, and it must be overwhelming to those who had grown used to the months of a world that was only ever frozen and snow. Exist likes those smells – the sharpness of cold and new snow, the sweetness of green and thaw and mud – but there is nothing that comes close to how the ocean smells, of salt and brine, where it laps at Tephras shores.

Wordlessly she finds her sister, and, touching the indigo of her nose to the dark of innumerable brown dapples, pulls her towards the ocean. They wade together through the greenery, following faint trails carved out by larger hooves until there is only sand and shore and the endless blue of an ocean that melts into the sky. 

When the sun finds her wings, they unfurl and dissolve, shifting from soft tawny and white feather to the gleaming iridescence of dragon-fly wings. In the yellowy light they seem to sparkle, a million trapped colors and somehow no color at all, framed by veins and lines like delicate silver lace.  Smiling, she glances back at her sister, just once, and then plunges forward into the waiting sand.

She is greeted at once by the spray of ocean water against her face, by the stink of salt and brine and dry, hot sand. For a moment she is still, just a heartbeat in time, long enough to look out across the blue and wonder at its vastness. To her left she can see where the land turns and curves out into the ocean, but it grows hazy before she can see where it ends. To her right the beach just stretches on and on until the same blurry haze claims that, too. Ahead there is only endless blue and a skyline of periwinkle – no hint of green, of the mainland she knows is nestled somewhere along the horizon.

When Leliana joins her, Exist turns and touches her smiling mouth to that soft mahogany shoulder. “Leliana,” she says, her voice quiet and colored with a shade of wonder, “this world is so beautiful.” She cannot help but pause again, gathering the questions to where they can sit impatiently at the tip of her tongue. This world is beautiful, but she has met so many who seem guarded against it, ruined by it. Their own mother included. When her pale green eyes drift back to find and settle against Leliana’s, her brow is furrowed and her eyes are uncertain. “What do you think the old world was like?”

Exist