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.

She is quiet long after Leliana stops speaking, long after the low melodious voice has returned to its home within that dark and delicate chest. Exist is busy unraveling memories that are not hers, imagining worlds where horses wore literal constellations instead of spots across their skin, bright and cold and silver like the ones strewn across a black and bruised sky – worlds where fire burned molten in the marrow of eager bones, where flames licked at the flesh they were tethered to but did not blister or maim.  She wondered if the horses in these words were different – if the power born to them was as dark and corrosive as it had been here, as ruinous as the stories of now had declared them to be.

And yet –

“Do you think they were happier then?” The question feels blasphemous when it leaves her lips, like cursing the Gods, or fairies as it may be, who had left them here. But all she can think about are the ones she loved so dearly, so wholly, the ones who had been changed by the absence of some crucial part of their souls. Like Giver, so soft and solemn and buried beneath the weight of so many things, so many secrets, perhaps. But he had changed when the magic found him again, when it poured in and filled those dark places and crevices with cool silver starlight.

She thinks of mother, too. Wonders – and she knows that she should not if only for the way the thought is barbed and dangerous, the way it leaves her mind aching and her heart raw – if in the old world, the world that came before, would mother have stayed with them? So when Leliana, in her soft and steady way, says, this world is not so bad. Exist just smiles, a quiet kind of smile, and then turns to bury it in the red of Leliana’s mane before she can see it and realize the truth behind it. It is a smile that says, I think we just traded one kind of dark for another.

It is only when Leliana’s voice drops and Exist can feel a ripple in that otherworldly calm, that she pulls away from the dark neck so she can more easily watch that quiet red and brown face. I met someone, and Exist pauses, the smoothness of her brow knotted and furrowed with uncertainty. Her own wings notice before she does, fluttering impatiently when Leliana’s shift from iridescence to dark leather, a gesture that feels almost jittery when it is coming from her sister.

Exist shifts and steps back, reaching over to draw her lips along the sinew of the wings, to trace the delicate architecture and the hollows in-between. And then, softly, “was that where you were the night you didn’t come home?” Home, home to me. She eases forward again and the water spills around the copper of strong, powerful legs. “I was worried.” She admits next, heavy-eyed, so that it doesn’t seem like an accusation. Then, curious, soft as the sun in the copper of her skin, and with a smile that etches itself in indigo across her mouth, “What do you want to do about it?”

Exist