[open] who says love should break us, any

[kensley]

KENSLEY

He does not wear the brand as the rest of them wear the brand.
(The red ‘V’ carved into the flesh like some kind of badge of honor.
There is no honor in it for Kensley, there never was.

Strange, though, isn’t it? That both the woman he loved and their son had marched onto that battlefield and came away victors? And what had he been trying to prove by going? That he was worthy of something? Or had he thought it some kind of penance?

Perhaps it’d had nothing at all to do with the woman or the son, but with family of an entirely different sort. The sister who’d bled to death some years before, who’d bled her life into him when he’d reached out to touch her.

The battle could not have been his punishment because he’d lived his punishment every day after. His punishment had simply been that he’d gone on living when she had not. His punishment had been that he’d buckled at the knees when he’d told their mother, when he’d gone to the Mountain and died there and then somehow gone on living afterward.

So, what was it, then?)

He does not wear the brand because it had been an embarrassment, the Alliance. Further proof that his was a life wasted. And there is some bitter anger that roils just beneath the surface. An anger that spills out of him in the form of thunderheads on the horizon. Because, once again, he has become some different version of himself, this one no better than the last.

(Funny, though, isn’t it? How fiercely he’d ached for air when he’d roamed the earth a dead thing and now, when he breathes, he does not exhale a simple breath but a wind. He does not consider it a power. No, if anything, it is a curse just as everything else has been a curse.)

Somewhere in the distance there is a roll of thunder and he turns his gaze (stark black, depthless) toward the horizon. It would be easy (almost effortless now, as he’s had years to learn how to command the weather since the darkness had lifted and he’d been reborn a storm himself) to call off those dark clouds. He could command those clouds to dissolve, he could call upon the sun, but he does not. Instead, he leans into it. He beckons those stormclouds closer, watching breathless as they move swiftly across the sky. 

The rain comes first. It is torrential, unyielding, merciless as it pours across the meadow. He turns his face up to it, though it does not soak him through to the bone the same way it would have were he still made of flesh and sinew and marrow. It pelts and it stings but it does not seep. 

And then, a flash of lightning and his heart sets to racing. (This is the best part, he thinks, how close the strikes come without touching.) He sets his jaw, face still turned to the sky, at war with the storm and, as a result, himself. 

( i swore my days were over of courting empty dreams )
( i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )

[Rae]

my soul is in the sky

She is not sure what brings her back. Rae has spent her life living like the wind, being blown from place to place. The worlds are infinite, and she is certain she has not seen them all. Still, she has seen much. She had lived a thousand snippets of life, staying in one place long enough to get to know it, but never long enough to set down roots. Rae is not a creature who was made for roots, she thinks. Though maybe that is not true, for something always brings her back here.

It’s hard to say what that might be. It was certainly not some legacy left behind by her parents. They had made their mark here in their time, but their names were not remembered. It was not the Jungle that her mother had called home for that was long gone. Besides, how could a girl of the sky find a home in a dense jungle? No, that would never have been the life Rae would have chosen.

Still, Rae drifts back in to Beqanna with a storm. The rain pours down around her and she sails through the sky, using the air current to move herself rather than her wings. While she will always prefer flying with wings, they are useless in such weather, and Rae does not travel on foot if she can help it. Not even in storms, when it is anything but safe to stay among the rain pregnant clouds and the anger of the gods. Though she is her own sort of god in the air, and there is nothing that will harm her here.

And then she sees him, a stallion that looks like a storm himself. His face is turned upward, and when lightning strikes nearby he does not flinch. It is a rare day indeed when Rae finds anyone remotely like her, and she finds she cannot help herself. She swoops down toward him, coming close enough to be hear though she still has to yell. ”Have you ever experienced a storm from inside it?” she asks, her eyes sparkling at the question. There is something wild and alive in that look, something as untamed as the wind and storm that rages around them.

rae

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@kensley  sorry not sorry, Imma just horde all the threads with you