Andarin: The Mountains: we have lingered in the chambers of the sea

She feels it surge across her, racing across the tunnels of her veins like quick-spirited lightning. It is not, however, lightning; it is fire, raw and untamed, that licks across her face and rides joyously down the arc of her crest, nestling in her back and pooling in waves down her sides, flowing haphazardly onto the ground where the grass shrivels, turns yellow, and dies. Kairi takes in a gulp of air and breathes out ash. She looks solemnly to her brother, a gleam in her eye, her hand rested upon the throttle of power and might now bestowed upon her.

In the dark and silent grove of the trees, the red mare burns.

Asher watches his sister with wonderment and with fear. The elements poison, he think; they poison and they harm, and they take away our souls until we are no more than the rock and dust that created us – isn’t that what father said? His eyes widen, begging her to remember the scars that laced across Him, and pooled in a coin-circle where his brain was supposed to have been.

Nothing but pain, Asher thinks; that’s what the Elements are.

(And if he is to have one soon as well, vicarious and humming pleasantly along his own spine, he doesn’t know it yet; he doesn’t know their power, that they will overtake him even if he wouldn’t have it. He is his father’s son: weak to the bone.)

When the chirpy mare comes again, Kairi does not balk. Instead her flames curl around her again and again; with her weapons of heat and flame she needn’t fear.

This, thinks Asher, is why Father said the Elements came slowly; look what sudden power does.

Look what it did, even, to Him.

“Ah,” the young mare says slowly, her voice a delicate honey tone, even as the untamed fire flickers about her.

Asher wonders from afar if she could control it if she wanted to, and thinks not.

The gap between them narrows, and things happen then quite suddenly: rainbows dance, pure rainbows, in front of Kairi’s eyes, and where she is bewildered Asher is delighted - and her flame roars, a new level of intoxicating energy, until she is aflame as if in Hell, and the leaves - though her flames do not touch them - turn yellow from the heat. Asher is the first to act; skittering around the meteor-ball that is his sister, he darts up to the pair and in wide eyes watches the rainbow spectrum tumble across itself. He spares a thought for the newborn filly, and the flutter of lashes over delightfully ghostly silver eyes, but then Lycoris weaves her magic again and he is entranced, if not also afraid.

His sister, suddenly, finds her voice: “How did you do that?” She wonders aloud, her voice an eerily sage purr that floats mellifluously between the crackles and pops of her fire.

Then, softer, harmonious and disquietingly peaceful, “Lycoris, what did you do to me?”

When she laughs, the sound is whisked away beneath the layers of smoke and darting flame.