Andarin: The Mountains: and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way ;

Beneath the canopy of wild star-fire and crowns of thorns, the world burns.

Her flames ravage her body in waves, leaving her skin untouched but her mind doubly scarred. In the chaos that is her, that is her Element – and she had not understood it before, from his Stories or even the scars that he bore the day his Earth and his Water had been torn from him, or he them, but she understands now, with her own flames thrumming indelicately across her spine – she is frighteningly still; a smile curls the dark, hostile edge of her lip and her dark eyes melt like honey. Asher is the only advice she has that perhaps this is not normal, but he cowers in the dancing shadows created by her flame, and she can hardly see him. Instead she focuses on the buckskin filly that trembles between her mother’s legs and the worried glances traveling betwixt all of them.

“Like horns?” she wonders softly; she does not understand these elements the way those who have experienced them do – she wonders if all were like her father, or like he promised he was, tall and black-silver and jeweled with the most precious of stones.

“You,” she whispers, and even dares to take a step forward – the motion isn’t threatening, not really; she doesn’t understand this yet, these weaknesses, her own strengths. “You like my flames… or, they like you – I can’t tell. Did you make them?”

Asher understands their woeful ‘no’, the way the filly trembles from the heat and her winds, too, soften in what seems like fear. But Kairi will learn this soon enough, so he says nothing and turns his attention back to the rainbows that sparkle and glitter before his eyes. He pounces on one, chases another, searching for a pot of gold until it proves to be she – the filly, Hesper, and with upturned eyes and a loud snort he condemns her lackluster to his dreams. Still he laughs, a bright, clear tone like his father’s, and darts away again.

“Oh,” Kairi says, and makes a miserable effort to shift her flames down, but barely succeeds.

Away, the silver eyes alight a warning glare upon her face, and she understands.

“Oh,” she says, softer now, smiling in the warm light of her fire, which dims itself appropriately, content to thrum along the line of her spine and drip passively like molten rain from her body. “You don’t like them, then?” A pause; she is less stand-offish now, more curious.

(What she ignores – the certainties that at that very moment Asher is coming to understand, and to fear – is that if this is true so, too, are the rest of the stories. That is a fate they had not meant to obtain.)

“Why not?” she carries on, oblivious to the innocuous tremble that claws through her brother, and she smiles again.