"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
His flight from Icicle Isle was fraught with emotions that were fit to match the darkened sky through which he now hurtled. Leander’s brow was drawn, and there was true anger in his eyes – eyes that were ordinarily so kind and understanding. But he didn’t understand this. He couldn’t understand this. How could his sister abandon her daughter? It was clear now that Kora had been avoiding him all these months just to prolong his ignorance, which would have been enough to wound him rather deeply on its own – but this was something else entirely.
Having finally found her back on the Isle, Leander had wasted no time in asking after his niece or nephew. At first he’d felt confused when Kora’s cool gaze had regarded him with an almost vague curiosity. He had to hand it to her – she certainly acted the part of an ice queen perfectly. He’d had to press the matter most doggedly before she’d even deigned to relinquish the child’s name, let alone explain what she and the stallion named Woolf had done.
To learn that Evia was a child no longer had shocked him to his core, but that wasn’t all. Not only had his niece been robbed of a childhood, but she’d been robbed of a family, too. It maddened him beyond reason just to think of it. The girl hadn’t known the love of a mother or father for a single day before she’d been made to slip away into the sea. And who knew where she could be now? Certainly not Kora, the ice queen. Perhaps this Woolf character would, given his apparent propensity for witchery – but Leander didn’t like to think of what he might say or do were he to encounter the man.
His mind turned to their last exchange –
An ominous sky grew darker and darker around him as he flew.
‘How could you have done this?’ he demanded hotly.
Kora raised her chin and regarded him. ‘I gave Evia her freedom.’
Leander scoffed. ‘You mean you sentenced her to it, since she had no choice in the matter.’
This time there was a pause. When she next spoke, a coldness had seeped into her whisper-soft voice. ‘I don’t answer to you.’
His brown eyes levelled with hers. ‘Trust me, you’ve made that all too clear.’ If only he could break past the frost that armored her in more ways than one. Yet he was beginning to think he never would. ‘Still, I would have hoped you might answer to your own daughter.’
Suddenly she was shouting, ‘You don’t know me!’
At once he was nose to nose with her. ‘You’re right, Kora, I don’t! And you know why? Because you’ve hardly given me the chance!’ A bone-chilling wind had begun to pelt him with sleet and snow, but Leander hardly took notice. ‘I did know Mom and Dad, though. I bet they wouldn’t know who you are right now either.’
The laugh that escaped her was more chilling than any winter.
‘Except that they’re dead, Lee,’ she hissed, ‘So get over it already.’
At that, she looked away and would not meet his gaze again. Angry, deflated, and at a loss, he gave a sad shake of his head. ‘This was wrong, Kora,’ he murmured at last as he took a step back from her. ‘It was selfish and wrong, and you know it.’
And then he had turned and taken wing.
He could still feel the sting of her words – except when he realized with a start that it was actually the sting of rain. Rain that was coming down in sheets against him. All at once, Leander found himself thrashing wildly through the very eye of what would be the last summer storm. As he fought to keep himself airborne, the wind ripping at his feathers and the hammering downpour blinding him, he swore he could almost taste the static in the air. He had to land, but he couldn’t see anything – he didn’t know where he was, but he knew he was going down – down and down and down...
Crashing alongside the lightning –
Crashing upon the Mountain.
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
permission from Cassi for the OOC exchange of the 2-space trait of leopard-shifting for that of thunderbird mimicry in return for an IC interaction with the faeries which will take place in his dreams while he is passed out after crashing. I would love for the faeries to somehow tie in the fact that his dead sister Rhy was electrokinetic and that Kora is astraphobic - thus why he might already have "electric" in his blood that the faeries could pull to the surface to create even more sibling tension... >:] please note that I have not played him as having leopard-shifting at all, so there is no need to mention that trait IC. <333 thanks faeries!
”Your sister watches you, you know,” comes the voice, a familiar one that is known but heard less frequently in Beqanna than that of some of her other sisters. Wysteria has been busy, pouring magic into the plague to save Beqanna as best she can while her sister’s dealt with the ridiculous, petty needs of mortals. Yes, they were all mortal, even the ones blessed with immortality. They could die, and they did, eventually. Their lives were long and fraught with misery, but still, in the end, they all died. They died in a way that the faeries of Beqanna never would because they existed in a way that the faeries did not. The faeries simply were, in the way earth and air and sky were. They were magic embodied, they were corporeal only when the need called for it but they were not truly part of this world.
Finding him now, in this place between life and death, is easy for her. Easier than coming to him on the mountain in life ever would have been. It takes less magic, though that seems counterintuitive, and so she does not need to divert much energy away from keeping the plague at bay as best they can. Someday, perhaps, Carnage would stop wreaking havoc upon Beqanna, but then again, they would be terribly bored without him.
His emotions crash against her like a wave, the scene that he’d fled from playing in her mind easily. She doesn’t mean to pry, but it simply happens, his feelings like the cry of a child in the night. Wysteria is not kind, particularly not compared to many of her sisters, but there is a streak of kindness within her for those who truly deserve it. In moment’s like these, when they care so much – too much – for the right reasons, she finds herself drawn to them. “What do you know of your sisters? Little of the one you have met, it seems. What of the one you never had the chance to know?”
While his body lay upon the mountainside, Leander was somewhere else – somewhere filmy and dark, where silky silhouettes swirled in and out of a blurred existence. A voice materialized from the haze, and the sound was so close that it made him start. His own voice felt as though it were underwater as he dragged words to the surface. “My sister?” It was Kora who came to his mind first, and he felt a pang as he remembered how they had parted.
And then a clear trickle of thought, like liquid through murky waters. “You mean Rhy?” Yet she would only answer his question with more of her own. Her voice wasn’t exactly bodiless, but everything here was diluted and indistinct. He could see her, but not as clearly as she seemed to see him – no, not even close. Leander’s lips parted as though to speak when a deep-seated sense of regret welled up within him and gave him pause.
What did he know of his sisters? He knew what his parents had told him about them as children – that their relationship had been strained from the start – that Kora was soft and shy and often frightened – that Rhy was bold and resilient and often fearless – and that his mom and dad loved them both so very dearly. Yet so much was not as Rayelle and Riagan had told him it would be. It seemed he would never know either of his sisters for himself. Not when Kora was impossible and Rhy was dead.
Light and shadow undulated as his heart squeezed and slackened to the rhythm of all that had been lost in between. “Not enough,” he managed at last. Lee couldn’t bring himself to say more, even though there was so much more he wanted to say. Yet it was weighing heavily upon him now – everything he didn’t know. Everything he couldn’t know. Everything he wouldn’t know. She was right, after all. He knew so little.
He never had the chance.
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
She knew the answer to the questions before she asked them – of course she did. Wysteria asked to make them answer, because in answering the truth was given a voice, made real, and they were forced to face things they often ran from (or crash landed on the mountain from, as the case may be). "Perhaps it is time you knew more. You are like her - your golden, electric sister, that is.” There is more to that statement than what sits on the surface, but it’s the only clue Wysteria will give him. He has to earn the truth for himself. “It is not my story to tell, however.” With that, she vanishes, giving him no inkling of what is to come unless he is truly, truly listening to the words she does not say.
***
A moment passes, but in this strange limbo, perhaps it feels longer to Leander. Then a light, and far more clear than Wysteria had been, Rhy stands in her place. She looks like Leander, except there are no wings on her back. She still bears the mark of Amazons, the land not yet lost when she’d left her life behind. The vine crawls up her leg, the red bloom splashed beautifully across her chest. Unlike so many red things, it doesn’t look like a wound, doesn’t look like blood, but simply a beautiful flower. Electric sparks dance along her skin, no longer kept in check in death. Rhy no longer has to fear hurting anyone – what could she do to them now? So, in death, she can be herself, freely and fully.
“Leander,” she says, warm and full of light. Closing the distance between then in a blink (there are no rules, not here), she reaches out to touch noses if he’ll allow it, not bothering to check the electric sparks that dance along her skin. She cannot hurt him, not here, not now. Though she is solid enough, this is little more than a dream, and she does not dwell in the world as he does. Besides, Rhy knows what Leander does not. “Leander, little brother,” she says, grinning now, tasting a name and a title she never thought she’d have the occasion to use while he still lived. “Not so little, anymore. Mom and Dad send their love, as always.”
She takes a small step back, looking him over. He looks so much like their family, and she’s simply so glad to see him that it takes her a moment to remember she has a job and a time limit. It takes magic to keep her here, and though magic in limbo is easier than magic in life, still, it is magic they need to fight the plague. “I know what Kora did,” she says, sobering now. There’s no surprise there, simply disappointment and something like resignation. It was so very like Kora to simply not try, though there had been moments where Kora had tried. Glimmers of what their relationship could have, should have, been.
Lightning cracks in the darkness around them, breaking the strangeness of this place. “When we were in the womb, I had no control. Lightning and pain began Kora’s world, and as such, she was born afraid. Afraid of lighting, afraid of me. Our parents tried to teach me to control it, hoping that when I learned Kora would be less afraid. I learned, but she did not change, and so they took her from Beqanna and left me behind.” She doesn’t say it bitterly. Her life had belonged to the Jungle, and her family became the Sisters there. She’d had all she needed, and she understood her parent’s decision. “Poor Dad, did he still have the patches of missing coat from getting lightning burns? I think I made him permanently bald in some places,” she chuckles, knowing that the patches were long gone now. In death, they were whatever they wanted really, though she found most everyone was simply themselves.
“Things were slightly better once Kora returned. She was granted power over winter and her magic gave her a strength she never knew before. There were moments when we were almost okay, but never fully, and it never lasted. I think, in some ways, the ice simply froze her heart over those years, though I wasn’t around long enough to be sure, and I can only speculate now from what I see.” She believed her speculation though, that the ice had simply frozen her sister from the outside in.
“We had planned to come find you, little brother. Together. And I’m so sorry we couldn’t, didn’t.” It didn’t matter why, they simply never did. Yes, things hadn’t exactly gone to plan, but they could have stopped all their plans and simply left to find him. Instead, they’d felt invincible, pretended to be invincible, and if magic hadn’t left Beqanna perhaps they would have all persisted in that lie. But without her magic, Rhy hadn’t been strong enough to survive the magic that hadn’t quite left her womb. A perfect storm of events, and in truth, Rhy didn’t miss living, didn’t know where her place would be in this new Beqanna anyway. Still though, she had failed her bother, and she had never known him until now, and that she would regret. Though they had a moment now, it was only that, a moment, and it could not make up for the lifetime she missed.
Something cryptic was in the apparition’s voice when she spoke again, and a tremor ran through him just before she vanished into the ether. Leander felt a sudden tension that he couldn’t explain, his muscles taut and his heart beginning to pound as though his body were preparing for a blow to land. He couldn’t be sure how long he was left like this, with the faerie’s last words lingering like cobwebs in his mind as his thoughts raced on and strange shadows swirled about him. Everything was darkness until the flash.
He was struck numb by the fact that she was the spitting image of his parents… of their parents. Sparks were dancing along her skin like fireworks and a red flower blossomed richly at her breast, and the world spun on its axis when she said his name. It was so familiar –– she was so familiar –– and it felt like second nature when they touched noses in greeting. Leander knew exactly who she was, even before she called him brother –– and yet there was so much more to the sparks they shared than simple recognition.
“Rhy,” he breathed in complete stupefaction. “It’s really you.” The eyes that were the same brown as their father’s welled with emotion as he looked at her standing there, bold and bright and grinning, and suddenly he was launching himself at her like he might have done as a boy if they’d ever had the chance to grow up together. He wrapped his muscular neck about her shoulders in a fierce embrace and felt the tears slipping down his cheeks into her mane when she said, ‘Mom and Dad send their love, as always.’
Wordlessly they separate, looking each other over with similar expressions of warmth and wonderment. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he laughed. His eyes shone a little as he paused and swallowed, considering the implications of their meeting. “Does this mean I’m…” Lee couldn’t bring himself to utter the word, dead, though not because he feared that he was –– a world where he could be with his eldest sister and his parents again didn’t scare him. But leaving Kora behind…
It was as though she could read his thoughts, for it was Kora’s name that Rhy uttered next. He listened with a furrowed brow as she explained the reality of their beginnings and everything that had happened because of it. He had heard his parents’ version of this same story, of course, and that Rayelle and Riagan had urged Kora to return to Beqanna to try and make amends with her estranged sister, but he knew nothing of what had come afterward. A somberness lingered about his mouth as Rhy now filled in some of those blanks.
“It was a blessing and a curse, then,” the splashed stallion murmured as he mulled it all over. “Her winter, I mean.” He leaned on a haunch as he sighed heavily, regret painting a mournful picture as he continued. “I’ve tried breaking through to her, Rhy. You’ve probably seen how well that’s gone.” Shaking his head, he met his sister’s gaze and voiced his greatest fear. “But if her own child won’t melt her heart, is there anything that ever will?”
After they finished talking of Kora, his electric sister spoke once more. ‘We had planned to come find you, little brother. Together.’ Leander felt the way his jaw slackened, felt himself blinking hard as she added, ‘And I’m so sorry we couldn’t, didn’t.’ With misted eyes, he took a step forward so that he could place his muzzle against her in quiet consolation. Kora certainly hadn’t told him that before –– yet while the revelation had caught him by surprise, he refused to find fault with either of his sisters because of it.
Leander cleared his throat a little as he pulled away. “It’s okay. Really,” he said reassuringly before a spark of mischief crossed his expression. “Though I suppose this might be my only chance to act like the annoying little brother you never had, so I demand you make it up to me,” he teased, flashing her a lopsided grin that was anything but demanding as all was forgiven.
In truth, the two might have been quite close had they actually grown up together. Their temperaments weren’t identical, and yet the like-mindedness that existed between them could have harkened the forging of an ironclad bond had they both lived. If only. He knew what he needed to hear from her next, and while Leander truly did want to know more about her life, it pained him to remember that in so doing he would inevitably learn more about her death. “What about you, Rhy?” he ventured after a while. “What happened to you?”
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
She laughs, loud and clear and overjoyed, as he launches himself at her. The sadness stays away, though when she gives herself the space to truly think about it later (later, so as not to ruin now), there will be sadness too that they will never truly know life together. He pulls away and she finds herself a little bereft as his touch disappears from her skin. He’d touched her so freely, so easily, without the hesitation that was a constant of her life since the very beginning with Kora. Kora was the most afraid, of course, but in some small way most horses shied away from her. She was the electric lioness, and as such, even those that trusted her feared what she could do.
What would life have been like if they’d been together as children? How different would she have turned out? Would he have stayed with her, when their parents took Kora away? She doesn’t dwell on the possibilities, because despite everything, her life had been good. Short, but wonderful and bright, and perfectly suited to a girl made of lightning. Instead, she grins slightly as he stumbles over the realization that seeing her might mean he’s dead.
She shakes her head, reassuring him. “No, not dead, just unconscious. I probably should scold you for flying through a thunderstorm up a mountain, but instead I’m mostly just impressed.” Rhy, certainly, couldn’t fault someone for being reckless. She fell in love in the midst of lightning storm in a jungle, after all, of their creation. Lucky for them they didn’t burn the whole place down.
She sobers though, as the topic of Kora always seems to do to her. Kora. The sister she tried so hard to reach but never really knew. All she can do now is shake her head slightly. “I think only she can make the choice to change, and for her, perhaps she’s been through too much.” It was something Rhy could understand all too well. She’d died young and the only reason she didn’t fully welcome death was because she left her two children behind. Otherwise though, she’d been through enough. She’d lived her life and had everything that mattered ripped away, and eventually, it’s simply too much to start again.
She laughs as he pretends, for a moment, to be a petulant little child. “I don’t suggest demanding anything from me,” she says with a wicked little grin. The lighting cracks, dangerously close to his behind. It doesn’t hit him, her aim after all these years deadly accurate, though in this half world it wouldn’t harm him anyway.
He switches topics and she finds herself taken aback. When had she ever been asked about her own life? Her life had been about the Amazons, about Kora, about everyone but her in some way. It takes her a moment to figure out where to even begin, but then, she nods to the flower on her chest. “I found a home in the Amazons and a family in the Sisters there and our mother’s heritage. I fell in love with a stallion that controlled electric as I did. Together, we answered a quest for Carnage and were sent to the afterlife to retrieve his true love. She would not come, but the afterlife was born through her, and I was thrown back into life through a tear in the worlds. It gave me the power to shift into a ghost, to travel between life and death.”
She pauses, realization dawning, and a laugh escapes her. “I can travel between life and death. I don’t know if the rules are the same on this side…but Lee. Oh, Lee, if they are I can visit you. I will try.” She’s never tried it, never had a reason to. Kora didn’t want to see her and Leander hadn’t been here. Why leave death when her parents were there and nothing was left for her in Beqanna? Oh, but now, now there was a reason in Lee and Rae.
She shakes her heads, getting back to the story, sadness creasing her eyes now as she realizes just want part of the story she is at. Had Leander been there, when their parents died? “That quest was how I found out our parents died. I found them in the afterlife, before Vanquish chucked me back into the world of the living. We didn’t know, wouldn’t have known, if it weren’t for that quest.” She pauses, sad in a nostalgic way for that moment. She had her parents now, had them as much as she wanted, but it was never quite the same to be dead.
“Kora came back to Beqanna not long after. I told her what I knew, and that was the meeting where she almost overcame her fear. It was the closest we ever were to being sisters, but it wasn’t meant to last. Life always has different plans. War broke out across Beqanna, senseless and violent and without purpose. In a blast of magic, my memory was wiped and, for a time, I thought I lived in the Desserts with Kratos. I became pregnant with twins, but something was always, always wrong with that life that seemed like a dream. The magician responsible was, well not killed, but removed in some magical way, and my memory returned just in time for the world to turn upside down. The lands we knew were torn away and we were left only with the mountain, no magic, and a new home. Somehow though, it didn’t strip my twins of their power until they were born, and their power ripped me apart. Without my own electric, I couldn’t survive what those two are capable of.” She grins, not sad now, but proud. Proud of her children that she knows only from a distance, but proud still.
“My daughter, Rae, is back in Beqanna. Find her, Lee, if she’ll be found. She can teach you what you can do, and you can watch my girl, not that she really needs watching.” Rhy chuckles at that, thinking of Rae, of her sky-touched daughter who was more powerful than Rhy and her plethora of traits could have ever dreamed of being. “You’ll find her in the sky. You’ll know her, she looks like you but her wings are dipped in blue, not black.”
Between the moments that were solemn and bittersweet, there were moments that would burn bright in his memory – moments that shone. The two bantered as naturally as if they’d been doing it all their lives. For instance, even as he sidestepped the bolt shot toward his rump, he was grinning. “All right, all right,” he chuckled wryly, “My big sister’s not to be messed with – got it.” Besides their mutual teasing, there was something like pride in Leander’s tone. Perhaps it was admiration. To him, Rhy seemed so fiercely alive – and he found he couldn’t fathom how her life had ever been snuffed out in the first place.
All of this and more would remain with him until his own life came to an end, but until then it would be the laughter they shared that Lee would look back on the most in the days, months, and years to come. The sound of it contained everything that could have been – a dream he had dreamed all his life that would forever remain an impossible reality – for theirs was a family that had been apart more often than together. It was a fact that would always ache, deep within the marrow of his very bones. Yet he already knew he would treasure this – he would treasure being here, laughing with Rhy.
He listened to her story with avid interest, soaking it all in, trying to process everything she told him as best he could. And when she explained that she could travel between this life and the next, that she would try to visit him, the smile that broke across his face was wider than ever. “And here I was, thinking I’d never see you again.” His eyes blurred a little, his emotion apparent within their brown depths. “I can’t tell you how much that would mean to me.” They had both experienced Kora’s cold shoulder firsthand, but there was an ease between Leander and Rhy that felt as comfortable and familiar as looking in a mirror. Blinking away his tears once more, Lee bumped his sister’s shoulder in wordless camaraderie as she took up her tale once more.
The overo stallion’s expression shifted between incredulity and shock as Rhy’s story neared its conclusion. “I’m so sorry for everything that happened to you,” he murmured with feeling, knowing he couldn’t fully comprehend the extent of the confusion, heartbreak, and tragedy that must have resulted from all the twists and turns she described. More than anything, he wished that he’d had a chance to be there – in another life, they could have been there for each other. But in the end it was a look of determination that etched itself across his pure-hearted features. “I’ll find her, Rhy. I promise.” Lee was so focused on the fact that he had another niece out there, he hardly heard the cryptic remark embedded in his electric sister’s words. He grinned, adding rather cheekily, “I’ve been known to be infuriatingly relentless when it comes to family.”
All too soon, the shadows began swirling about them once more. Instinctively Lee rushed forward to wrap Rhy in a strong brotherly embrace. “I’m so glad to have met you,” he managed fiercely, pressing his eyes closed and breathing in her warmth, even as he felt the substance and weight of her fading against him. “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“And tell mom and dad –” but he didn’t need to finish the sentence.
He knew his sister would tell them everything he couldn’t.
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
@[Wysteria Fairy] eeeep... told you I'm worse at posting than you >_<
BUT SERIOUSLY THESE TWO <3333
