Not-brother

[moonshadows]

At some point, the forest through which I was running had become a city. Nothing like anything I knew in the waking world; no, this was a city, with towers and spires and soaring walls and grand trees woven through it all. Still I ran for the joy of running, although I was no longer alone. My shadow ran with me, in and out and under and through, until suddenly a dark shape reared up before us and a hand closed around mine and tugged me into an alley. Then I was chasing my shadow, who ran through twists and turns and finally crawled through a hole in some bushes to huddle in a tiny clearing.

That’s when I realized my shadow was male.

It was like looking at the twin brother I didn’t have: he had the same night-blue hair I did, the same sharp cheeks and long nose, although his chin was less pointy than mine.

“You look like me,” I said as I sat next to him, knees drawn up the way his were.

He looked at me as though seeing me for the first time. “You look like my brother. Who are you?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but the dream was whisked away and replaced with a gnarled, bark-brown face with laughing golden eyes and a mossy beard.

“And where did you wander off to, little fawn?” Cenarius asked.

“I…don’t know. It was a city, a big one.”

One wood-clawed hand touched my forehead lightly. “A sleeper’s dream. Interesting. You have a natural talent for this; I would not be surprised if your eyes started turning golden, like your father.”

Golden…

“He had golden eyes,” I blurted suddenly.

“Hmm? Who did?”

“The one whose dream it was.”

Cenarius looked at me thoughtfully. “Return home and rest,” he said after a minute. “I will inform your father.”

I gave him a hug, which he returned gently, and scampered off for the city I called home – which now seemed small and shabby after whichever city I had been running through the dream of. Normally I would have protested being sent to bed like a child when I was already sixteen, but I wanted to see if I could find my way back into the dream of the one that looked like me.

 

“Mom, how come I don’t look like either you or Dad?”

She turned and knelt before me, smiling. “Ah, but you do look like your father.”

I rolled my eyes. “Mom, his hair is green. Mine is blue.”

“His hair used to be blue,” she said, bopping me gently on the nose. “You look just like he did at your age.”

Unconvinced, I crossed my five-year-old arms. “Then how come he’s got green hair and gold eyes?”

“Cenarius’s influence,” she said patiently. “Being so immersed in nature magic changed his hair and his eyes.”

“So if I become a druid like him, I’ll have green hair and gold eyes, too?”

“Perhaps,” she said with a smile.

 

I slipped inside the building quietly, hurrying to my room. Mom would still be asleep, this early in the afternoon, but she would be waking up soon enough to prepare for the dusk rituals. The darkness of my room was a relief after the bright sunlight, and I plunged into it eagerly. Tunic and trews were tossed aside and I tugged on a nightshirt before practically throwing myself into bed.

Inhale. Exhale. Focus in, and down, find the calm center. Twist, out, and up, and suddenly I was flying, shooting through the afternoon sky like a bird, heading straight towards the night that loomed in the distance like a storm. The city spread out below the night, and past it, a lake spread darkly like a pool of blackest night. The instant I crossed over into the city I found myself on the ground again, running. This time I snuck a glance to the side, and saw my not-shadow running with me. When the dark shape reared up before us, I threw myself to the side before he could grab my wrist, and we ran in tandem to the hollow in the middle of the bushes.

“Where are we?” I asked, studying him eagerly.

“Zin-Azshari,” he answered, like it should have been obvious. He eyed me and said, “You came back.”

I shrugged.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to know more?”

His golden eyes narrowed and his face hardened, like my father’s when he was unhappy. “Who are you?”

“Ellekayne Whisperwind.” Although, if I showed as much druidic talent as Cenarius thought I had, I fully intended to take my father’s surname.

“Tyrande,” he moaned, looking sick.

“You…know my mother?”

That brought him up short. “Mother? You are Tyrande’s child?”

A trickle of unease trailed cold fingers down my spine. I took a breath and hoped my voice didn’t tremble. “I am.”

He must have seen my uneasiness, because he held one hand half out as though calling me back before I could run. “Ellekayne. I won’t hurt you. I would never hurt a child of Tyrande’s.” He smiled, but it looked more like a grimace. “I don’t think I could in a dream even if I wanted to.” The smile faded. “Unless, of course, you are just a part of this nightmare, and you are here to torment me with what I cannot have.”

“I’m real,” I assured him. “But I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

He looked at me for a long minute, sadly, and for the first time I believed my mother when she’d said my father had looked like me, because it was just like looking at Dad being sad only with the wrong hair. And no antlers.

“I love your mother, Kayne,” he sighed. “I know she doesn’t love me, but I love her anyway and I would never do anything to make her unhappy.” He looked over his shoulder as though listening to someone, but I couldn’t hear anyone. “She’s coming. I have to go.” He turned back to me, looking so desperate that I wanted to cry. “Will you come back again?”

I took his hand in both of mine as though I could hold him in the dream by sheer force of will. “I’ll try my best. I don’t know when.”

“Thank you,” he breathed with a trembling sort of smile.

Then I was alone in my room, lying in bed, staring at the wall and wondering why my parents had never mentioned that I had an uncle.

 

I slept through the dusk ritual, attended midnight, and studied with the other initiate priestesses in the early-morning class before helping with the dawn ritual. After that, I had some time to myself before Dad woke up to take me back to the forest, and I used it to try to find some answers. The problem with that, of course, was that our entire race had nearly been wiped out a century before and there wasn’t much in the way of records. I’d have to ask other night elves for stories, ones who’d lived through it, without making my curiosity seem unusual – and I couldn’t ask about my uncle directly. If Mom and Dad had never told me about him, there had to be a reason so until I knew more, this had to stay hush-hush.

I went to Shandris.

Shandris was basically my aunt or cousin; I knew she was a close friend of Mom’s from the war, and she led the Sentinels of the Moon. She was also the one who taught me the basics of how to fight with a blade. I found her drilling the Sentinels, and draped myself on the low wall around the practice yard until she wandered over to watch them for a bit.

“Ishnu alah, Kayne,” she said absently. “What brings you here?”

“I walked the Emerald Dream yesterday,” I told her proudly. “I’m not sure I did it right, though.”

“What makes you say that?”

I hefted myself up to sit on the wall. “I wound up in someone’s dream, running through a huge city on the shores of a lake with black water.”

Her eyes widened, although they didn’t leave the Sentinels going through their routines. “Zin-Azshari. Someone must have been having a bad dream indeed.”

“Zin-Azshari?” I repeated, as though I had never heard it before.

“It used to be the heart of our civilization, before the war. It was…no words can describe its glory.” She shot me a quick look. “Not that you need a description, if you’ve seen it.”

“What happened to it?”

Shandris gazed into the distance for a moment, expression half serious and half sad. “When the Well of Eternity imploded, it sucked all the demons back into it – but it also sundered the world. Zin-Azshari, and Suramar, and a lot of other places all sank into the sea.”

I’d heard about the Well, of course. Few as we were, every night elf child knew about the Well of Eternity and how the Highborne had attracted the attention of an army of demons with their magic, and how even after the demons were gone, they still couldn’t stop playing with the arcane and had been exiled. This was the first I’d heard about the Well’s destruction, though. I tried to imagine how terrifying it would have been to see the world sundered and whole cities being drowned.

“Is that why we have Moonwells?” I asked after a moment. “Because the Well of Eternity imploded?”

She stiffened slightly, and when she spoke, her words were chosen with great care. “A second Well was created on Mount Hyjal, using waters from the Well of Eternity. The dragon Aspects grew Nordrassil atop it to protect it, and us. The tree takes the Second Well and purifies it, and gives the water to us. That’s where the waters of the Moonwells comes from.”

There was a lot of evasion going on here, I suddenly realized. In all of our history lessons, the other children and I had never been told the names of anyone who had done anything, like the adults wanted us to know what had happened but not anything about night elves who had lived and died before now. What were they hiding?

“I better get back,” I said, jumping down. “Dad’ll be looking for me soon.”

“Good luck, Kayne,” she said with a grin.

“Thanks.”

 

“Cenarius tells me you found yourself in the dream of a sleeper,” Dad said as we settled cross-legged on the ground. “Today, we’re going to focus on how to recognize a sleeper’s mind so this doesn’t happen when you don’t want it to.”

I nodded, looking as attentive as I could, but I was trying to imagine him without the beard and wondering what it was that his brother had done. Together, we slipped into the Emerald Dream and he taught me how to find the minds of sleepers. Mom hugged me from her dream and praised me, shifting from a fierce-eyed girl my age to the strong woman she was in the waking world while a child that looked like Shandris sat on the back of a nightsaber and watched with wide eyes.

When I went home to sleep, I put my lessons to good use and went searching for the mind of my uncle. This time, I was able to see the boundary before I crossed it to run, breathless, through the streets of Zin-Azshari and crawl through the bushes with him.

“Do you have this dream every day?” I asked as we huddled in our tiny clearing.

“Recurring dream,” he said shortly. “Is it day? I can’t tell anymore.” Before I could react to that statement, he continued, “Are you sure you’re real?”

“I think I’d know if I weren’t,” I said dryly.

“How are you able to enter my dream, then?”

“Cenarius taught me how to enter the Emerald Dream. The other day was my first time going in by myself.”

He scowled. “A druid. I should have known. You should leave and not return; no doubt your father will be angry with you once he discovers who you have been visiting the dreams of.”

I scowled right back. “Maybe. Maybe not. After all, if he yells at me for visiting you, he’d have to actually tell me who you are and why I’ve gone my entire life not knowing about you.”

He stared at me in astonishment too profound for anger. “You don’t know…Ellekayne, you don’t know who I am?”

“I’m guessing you’re my uncle.” My arms tightened around my legs. “That’s the only explanation for why you look so much like me, and why you said I looked like your brother. But I don’t know where you are, or why, or anything about you except that you have gold eyes. Are you a druid?”

“What? No. Why would you think that?”

I shrugged. “Mom says Dad’s eyes were silver when he was my age, but that being immersed in nature magic turned his eyes gold and his hair green.”

“Gold eyes indicate that a child is meant for more than the usual fates Elune grants Her children,” he said slowly. “I suppose that has fallen to him, now.” He slumped forward, chin on his knees, as though the news had drained him of all joy.

Whatever he’d done to deserve a deliberate effort to be forgotten by even his own brother, he didn’t seem dangerous. I scooted over closer to him. “Tell me about yourself?”

“No, Ellekayne,” he sighed. “It would be impossible to talk about myself without mentioning my twin, and I am far too unhappy with him for everything. I’m not going to speak ill about my brother to his daughter.”

“That’s why,” I muttered.

“Hmm? That’s why what?”

“I’ve been trying to figure out why no one talks about what the world was like before the demons came, and why in all the lessons we’re given about the war and the aftermath, no one ever says who did anything.” With one hand, I gestured in frustration. “It’s all ‘this happened, that happened’ but not ‘So-and-so did this, So-and-so did that’. No names of anyone, either people who did bad or people who did good.”

He turned to stare at me in shock. “I’ve been forgotten?”

“You and anyone else who isn’t living with the rest of us.”

“Ravencrest? Stareye? Shadowsong?” When I shook my head at each name, he frowned. “Why would they do that? Why would they throw away our history, the heroes and the villains alike? Unless…” He trailed off, looking stricken.

I pried one hand loose from around his legs and squeezed it. “Unless it wasn’t that clean-cut, and they didn’t want people who don’t know any better idolizing the villains or hating the heroes?”

A bark of laughter exploded out of him, but he didn’t let go of my hand. “I should be so lucky. No, it’s arrogance to assume that this was done because of me. For all I know, your parents were trying to downplay their own importance in those events, and I was an afterthought.”

Still… “I’m not happy about there being so much to be told, and no one doing the telling,” I said hotly. “It would be bad enough if it were just my parents treating me like a child, but it’s all the adults and all the children born after the war. I can appreciate wanting to start our civilization anew without the baggage of the past weighing us down, but what use is it if only a handful of us know what to watch out for in case it happens again? I feel like I’ve been wearing blinders my whole life. I want to know, so I can make my own decisions.”

He burst out laughing, sounding amused rather than bitter as he had before. “You are truly your mother’s daughter,” he said between chuckles. “I could never say no to her. Very well, Ellekayne Whisperwind. I will tell you stories of what came before the end of the war, but you must understand that they will be flavored with my emotions.”

“I understand.”

“Don’t mention me to your parents,” he said sternly, “and do not repeat the things I tell you.”

“I won’t.”

“Alright. Next time you visit, we shall begin your education.” He hesitated a moment. “When next you pray to Elune, ask Her to forgive my circumvention of your parents’ will.”

 

“Kayne, is something wrong?”

I looked up from the porridge I’d been prodding at with my spoon. “Hmm? Oh, nothing. I’m just distracted.”

Yeah, nothing, except that when I’d gone to visit my uncle’s dreams, he hadn’t been there. But I can’t exactly say anything about something I should know nothing about.

Mom frowned. “Are your studies with Cenarius going well?”

She wanted them to be, because I was her daughter and she wanted me to be happy, but at the same time she wanted me to follow in her footsteps rather than Dad’s. “I’ve just been having weird dreams, that’s all,” I said, ladling a spoonful of lukewarm porridge into my mouth and chewing mechanically.

Mom shoved her own bowl aside and leaned forward. “What kind of dreams?”

Whoops. Better stick to what I’d already mentioned. “Running through the streets of some city, a really big fancy city on the shores of a lake with black water. I’m not afraid, I’m just running and I don’t know why.”

“I’ll speak with your father,” she said with another frown. “I fear between the two of us, we have been working you too hard. Why don’t you take a lunch and spend the night relaxing?”

I smiled gratefully. “That sounds great. Thanks, Mom.”

 

An hour later, I was comfortably curled up in the arms of a tree, my lunch tucked securely in another nook, and the Emerald Dream spread before me like a green dawn. By the time I found him, he was already huddled amongst the bushes.

“You came!” The words sounded torn out of him, his golden eyes bleeding relief. “Kayne – thank you for doing this. You don’t know how much your visits mean to me.”

“I tried to come sooner,” I said as I settled down next to him, “but you weren’t here. Did something happen?”

He scowled fiercely at a bush. “Maybe my life hadn’t been ruined enough lately, or maybe she was hung over and wanted to share the suffering. I don’t know, nor do I care why she decided to keep me from sleeping. Lucky for me, she doesn’t trust anyone else near me so I finally got to sleep when she did.”

“Who-”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he snapped. After a moment, he sighed. “Forgive me. You have been nothing but kind to me when no one else has.”

“It’s okay,” I said gently, gripping his shoulder with one hand. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“Do…do you still want to learn the stained history of our people?” He glanced at me as though afraid I would say no.

I grinned. “Of course. Is it safe to wander the city?”

He blinked at that. “It should be…the dream usually ends when I get here.” He stood and stretched, and I did the same. “I wish this was Suramar, though. I’d rather show you the city we were born in.”

I followed as he wormed his way back out of the bushes, and together we walked through grand and glorious streets while he talked about the Highborne and Queen Azshara and demons and magic.

“You haven’t asked my name,” he said as we stood on the shores of his memory of the Well of Eternity.

I shrugged. “If I don’t know it, I’m not lying when I say I don’t know whose dreams I’m visiting.”

He looked out over the black water. “You don’t know the things I did, or what I did to deserve being forgotten.”

“No,” I agreed calmly, “I don’t. If you want to tell me some day, you will. If you don’t, you won’t. I’m still kinda ticked that Mom and Dad would keep something like this from me, so the fact that you warned me away makes me inclined to side with you.” I glanced at him, but he was looking thoughtfully into the Well. “It’s hard to think of you as being my uncle, though. I mean – you look like me if I were a boy. Aside from the eyes. I know you should look like Dad, and when I visited Mom’s dreams, she went from looking my age to looking the way she looks now, so…” Deep breath. “That tells me that you haven’t seen your reflection since you were my age, and you still look like this in your dreams because you don’t know any other way to see yourself. That’s another reason I’m inclined to side with you, but…is it okay if I think of you as being a brother rather than an uncle?”

He stared out across the water, visibly mulling it over. “We were twins,” he said at last. “Me and your father. But I haven’t felt connected to him in a very long time, as if time has kept flowing for him while passing me by entirely. It makes me feel…lost. But if I were your brother, I would be anchored again.” He smiled shyly. “I would like that, Kayne. Thank you.”

My hug took him by surprise, and after a few breaths he returned it fiercely.

“Next time,” he said in a trembling voice, “I will try to dream of Suramar.”

 

Weeks and months passed. From my mother, I learned the magic of healing. From my father, I learned the magic of nature. And from my not-brother, I learned the magic of history. We wandered the streets of Zin-Azshari until the huge, shadowy figure no longer lunged up at us out of nowhere, and the smooth blankness of the history I’d been taught filled in with names and personalities. I learned of the beauty and cruelty of Queen Azshara, Stareye’s incompetence, Ravencrest’s cleverness, Jarod Shadowsong’s quiet certainty, and Maiev’s petty arrogance. I learned too about my parents: how my father came to be Cenarius’s student, how my mother was surprised with the position of High Priestess. My not-brother didn’t talk about himself, and I didn’t press him. I knew when he was omitting his part in any story he told by the pinched look he got on his face. When he told older stories of my parents, though, he looked almost happy and I didn’t begrudge him that simple pleasure.

Some days, he looked haunted and thin. I guessed that the woman watching over him was cruel those days, and started telling stories of my day- and night-time adventures to distract him. He soaked up every word as eagerly as I did when he told the stories. After one of those visits, it was very hard to look at my parents and not demand to know what my not-brother had done to deserve being locked away somewhere for a hundred years. I started organizing arguments based on what little I could glean: if he had acted out of arrogance or pride, it was painfully clear that those traits had been beaten out of him. If it had been jealousy, well, I couldn’t believe that it had been. Not with how he treated me. There hadn’t been a single instant of him expressing anything but wistfulness that I was the daughter of my mother; neither anger nor envy that my father had been the one to sire me ever showed itself in his words or tone, much less his expression.

I tried to think of motives and refute them. Lust for power, either magical or social, was out. I didn’t even know what path he’d favored before his imprisonment – and imprisonment it had to be, for him to not know what he looked like, and for him to be watched by a woman who held some kind of power over him and trusted no one else near him. He never once spoke a negative word about my father, even though it had to have been him that had sentenced my not-quite-brother to his fate.

Some days, I heard my parents whispering when they thought I was asleep, mutters about my continued withdrawal from the others my age. Some days, I wanted to scream at my father that he was a two-faced liar, lavishing affection on me while his twin languished, wasting away for want of social interaction of any kind. Other days, I wanted to weep for my not-brother and beg my parents to relent and let him out.

I still didn’t know his name.

My parents put my moodiness down to teenage hormones and reassured me that they loved me even as they held their patience with both hands and gave me space whenever they thought I needed it. Sometimes, I took the form of a deer and ran through the woods as though I could outrun my feelings. Other times, I just retreated to a tree and spent the time with my not-brother, who counseled me to forgive my parents and be patient with them. He tried once to convince me to stop visiting him for the sake of my relationship with them, but I wasn’t having any of that. I told him they had each other, and the entire night elf civilization, and the waking world, and that they could do without me for the few hours I spent with him while he had none of that.

When he ran out of stories to tell me, we ran and jumped and climbed the trees that were part of Zin-Azshari. He found a bladesmith’s shop one day, and from then on we spent many happy hours fencing with words while sparring with glaives. Eventually, things settled down. I completed my novice training, my combat training with Shandris, and the basic training in nature magic that fledgling druids got. My parents and Shandris practically held their breath, waiting for me to decide which path I would choose. I tried to talk it over with my not-brother, who seemed very withdrawn, but gave up discussing my future in favor of fretting over him.

“If you’re going to take my advice rather than choosing for yourself,” he snapped finally, “then be a druid. You’re unsuited for any path that requires you to obey orders.”

He snapped when something was eating at him, and it never bothered me. To be upset about it would have been like being upset at a wounded animal for snarling at you. “Thank you,” I said, and hugged him. He collapsed against me as though affection were completely unexpected, as he usually did. “What’s bothering you?”

“I…” His fingers tightened around my arms, but be didn’t raise his head from my shoulder. “It’s nothing. I’m being selfish.”

“You’re allowed to be a little selfish. What’s wrong?”

“Whichever path you take…you’ll have less time to spend with me. You’re my only link to the outside world, Kayne, but you sacrifice your waking hours to give me that link. I’m grateful for every second that you do, but I can’t help feeling that you’re wasting your time doing it.”

I thought about that for a second, and couldn’t deny it. “Well, this is my sleeping mind entering your sleeping mind,” I said slowly. “Do you know a way for one waking mind to enter another?”

He jerked in my arms, breathing quickly and shallowly. “I…I think I do,” he breathed, pulling back to look at me in wonder. “You would let me be a passenger in your waking mind? To see with your eyes, hear with your ears, and be a constant presence watching your life?”

“As long as you look away when I have to pee,” I said impishly. He laughed, as I knew he would, and I smiled. “You’re practically my twin. Of course I want to share my life with you.”

His smile faded. “You still don’t know what I’ve done.”

“And I don’t care. You love me, and you love my mother, and you love my father. Whatever you did, you’re not going to harm any of us, so I don’t see how it matters.”

The smile came back, trembling and fragile. “Your father will be mightily upset if he finds out. He doesn’t react very well to unhappy surprises.”

“Then I’ll just be mightily upset back at him,” I said with my mother’s stubbornness.

“He may, in the heat of his anger, tell you to leave.”

“Then I’ll go,” I said with a shrug. “It’s starting to sink in with the adults that they really are immortal. Mom won’t need me to step up as High Priestess when she steps down, and Dad won’t need me to be Archdruid in his wake. With everything you’ve told me, I know there’s a whole world out there waiting to be explored, and I want to see it.”

His breath caught, and I knew that that’s what he wanted, too. “It may take me several days and night to work out how to do this,” he warned, but I knew he would do it. “I will need to spend as much time as possible awake to figure it out.”

I hugged him again. “Do whatever you need to do. It’ll be worth it.”

“I’m going to get started on it, then,” he said somewhat apologetically.

“Do it. I’ll go tell Dad I’m following in his footsteps.” Suddenly, I grinned. “If he does flip his lid when he finds out, I’ll throw that back at him – that you thought I should be a druid.”

“You should,” he said indignantly. “You are too much your mother’s daughter to be happy taking orders from anyone, and too much the child of my – of your father to be happy in structured civilization.” His expression faded into something more sober. “Your mind has been expanded with the things I have told you. To pretend to live in ignorance will chafe at you. I fear you may suffer for my part in your education, but I cannot regret it.”

“I’m my father’s child,” I pointed out dryly. “I was about ready to be mightily unhappy at someone for all the things that had been hidden from me. Besides,” I said with a deep breath, “I think Elune wanted me to meet you. It couldn’t have been coincidence that I just happened to wander into your mind on my first solo jaunt into the Dream. I know if She wanted, She could send my mother a vision of this, and I don’t believe that She doesn’t know.”

He was silent for a long minute, mulling that over.

I gave him another quick hug. “You go figure out the waking mind trick, and I’ll go tell my parents that they may as well dye my hair green, and soon enough you’ll be able to see through my eyes, okay?”

“Thank you, Kayne,” he said softly as he returned the hug fiercely.

It really should have been obvious, I thought as I cantered home through the woods. I mean, who learns to take the shape of a deer before the age of ten?

Dad was waiting when I trotted up, a silent question in his eyes. I dipped my head and nuzzled his shoulder, and he hugged my deer body around the neck.

“My wild little fawn,” he whispered shakily, and when I shifted back, there were tears on his cheeks. “My precious girl. You’re sure about this?”

Behind him, I could see Mom emerge from the house on silent feet. Shandris lurked behind her.

“Being a priestess…being a Sentinel…it’s something I would do.” I met each of their eyes, willing them to understand. “Being a druid…that’s something I am.”

Mom frowned. “I was sure Elune had a special task for you,” she said slowly.

I thought guiltily about my not-quite-brother. “Maybe it’s something I can do while also being a druid.”

“I hope so. Well,” she said with a sigh, “Shandris and I have prepared you as much as we can.” She stepped forward into Dad’s arm and kissed his cheek. “She’s in your hands now, my love.”

 

It was almost a week before I found his sleeping mind again. Dad took my training seriously, and it took a few days to adjust to keeping daylight hours. He was pacing by the shores of the Well of Eternity when I found him, which wasn’t a good sign. Somehow, the Well in his dreams represented his heart, or his past, and for him to be there meant that he was hurting. The black waters were calm, at least; things were much worse if they weren’t.

Just to be a brat, I snuck up on him and tacklehugged him from behind.

“You came!” he half-sobbed, hugging me to his chest as though protecting me. He was very good at it, and I felt a sharp stab of wistful longing that he was Dad’s brother, and had hugged Dad like this.

“Sorry it took so long. Dad’s switched me to daylight hours.”

My not-brother’s breath hitched. “What…what time is it now?”

“The sun’s just setting. Dad gave me the night and the next day off because he’s been working me so hard. Were you able to…?”

He let go and held me at arm’s length, studying my face carefully. “You are sure about this?”

I smiled. “Of course! What do I need to do?”

“Nothing. It is a simple spell to cast, once it is prepared, but…Kayne, I will be inside your mind. I will see through your eyes, hear with your ears, and share your thoughts. I will not be able to control your body or force you to do anything, but the spell is one made for spying and I will be able to…strongly suggest.”

“Good thing we have a night and a day to get used to it, then.”

He looked ready to cry, so I hugged him again.

“I’m going to cast the spell. Are you ready?”

I hugged him tighter. “Do it.”

Suddenly, I was back in my own body, curled up in my favorite tree, wide awake.

Kayne? Can you hear me?

The words came from inside my mind, but it was like hearing a memory of my not-brother. My head felt full, almost heavy and warm in the back.

Yes? I thought tentatively.

Relief washed through me, but I could tell that it wasn’t mine. I felt the urge to breathe deeply, to look left, to look right, to examine my hands, to find the White Lady hanging low in the sky and bask in the moonlight. Instead, I took a long minute to get used to the sensation of having my not-brother riding behind my eyes. He was quiet, afraid that I would somehow eject him, but once I was comfortable in telling which thoughts and feelings were his, I indulged him. I breathed deeply, tasting each scent of the forest, each flavor of the air as though for the first time. I let my eyes wander, soaking up the rich greens and browns of the trees and the soft dusky velvet of the sky. I stretched, feeling the pull and burn of young, limber muscles, and delighting in the feel of the wind against my skin. In the back of my mind, my not-brother wept from joy that defied words and I tried very, very hard not to be angry with my parents.

It’s been so long…

Hold on tight, I thought cheekily at him.

My body flowed into the shape I’d spent the week mastering, a nightsaber with midnight-blue fur and Elune’s mark on the shoulder. I stretched and shook my head while his thoughts stilled in wonder, and then I leaped down from the tree and ran through the forest for the sheer joy of it. I stopped by a stream and drank, lapping up the icy water as though washing away a hundred years of lukewarm water that tasted of metal and rock. When our thirsts were quenched, I shifted to a deer and nibbled the grass, the bushes, a handful of ripe berries and an apple hanging just in reach. Each bite overwrote memories of dry, tasteless bread and stale nuts. Then I reared, pawing at the air, and galloped through the woods until I burst into a moon-drenched meadow filled with the heady perfumes of all the flowers he recognized. I ran, the wind in my fur and the moonlight painting everything silver, until my flanks heaved and then I lay down in the meadow and basked in the sweet exhaustion, grazing now and then, until my not-brother’s mind was no longer dazzled by the experience.

I could go another hundred years and be content with the memories of this night, he said in silent wonder.

But you won’t, I countered. I’m not going to change my mind and leave you alone again. Besides, you haven’t seen Mom and Dad yet.

The swirling maelstrom of his emotions threatened to break him.

Not yet, please, he begged. Let me get used to this a little first.

Alright. I thought hard about hugging him, hoping the emotion would convey my intent to him. After a moment, he returned the feeling in a warm pulse of affection.

I shifted back to my own body and lay on my back, admiring the night sky, while my not-brother recovered from sensory overload and the Blue Child chased the White Lady across the sky. When he was ready, I stood up and took the form of a deer again and started making my way home.

You do that so easily, he said in awe. I saw Malfurion do it once, but he had a much harder time with it.

I bugged Dad to teach me when I was little, I replied with amusement. I’ve been doing this since I was eight. Dad calls me his wild fawn.

Do you think you’ll grow antlers, too?

Not sure. I cantered for a few moments. Did Dad grow antlers before, or after, his hair turned green?

He thought about that for a minute. They both began at the same time, I think. By the time I noticed the buds, his hair was shading to teal.

I’ll watch for it then, but I’m not sure I will.

Why is that?

I tossed my head in amusement. I’m a doe.

He laughed.