*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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Lei walks in memories now, in this clammy, misty morning. They swirl like ghosts around him, whispering in the gray-dark. Churning with words brought back by dark wings.
The first memory is his sister, whose face haunts Lei's nightmares now, who lingers when he awakes.
Siblings don't keep secrets, Lei-Lei.
But its not the Northern outpost, the beast in the metal shell, the creature with its mask pressed against the glass, that Lei thinks about when he thinks about her now. It's the memory of the in-between, the balance, the tipping point between before and—
After.
He was nine. It was a year after the slippery climb, a year of convincing themselves the monster was gone, that the glowing stones were talismen, wards for more than just darkness.
They weren't.
The monster was outside the bedroom door now, pacing, and Isi had snuck inside his room to be with him, had slunk under the bed too. In one of her hands was a jagged knife, the other held tight to him. They had bolted the door shut, but they did not know if it would hold; it was, after all, made out of metal.
"It's not her," she had whispered vehemently beside him. "It just looks like her."
Lei sometimes wonders what Isati would have done had their mother broken down the door that night. If whatever it was she had been so angry about would have boiled over, pushed her inside. He wonders if things would have changed; if Isati would have understood then, while she still could. While she still cared.
Because ten year-old Isati was wrong: the thing outside was, had, and always would be their mother. It's only two years after this that Lei learns that lesson all too well.
But first, suddenly he was ten, and she was eleven, and she was conjuring fire and metal, a little prodigy of smoke and steel... and Mother was so proud.
And on sparring mats, amongst the dust and the sweat, there was a new look in Isi's eyes sometimes, something gleaming there that wasn't before.
"Why aren't you trying?"
Lei's name started to sound different in her mouth; she no longer held his hand.
Then he turned eleven, and there was a flicker of something else in Isi's face. Something only caught in side-glances, an eerie glint even as she continued to wheedle and poke.
"You're still just a kid," she'd hiss, and when she swiped she now drew blood. "Can't even hold a sword right, Mom's going to be so mad—"
And then he Skilled. Eleven and, as Isati had said, still just a kid. He did it at a banquet, with his sister sitting primly beside Mother, hands folded in her lap. He presented Mother with the flower, drifting open and close, because he had thought it was beautiful; he wanted her to see, to be so proud.
