Tessa leaves home

[moonshadows]

The trail wasn't hard to find, really. Blood calls to blood and soul to soul, a beacon of shimmering sound connecting progeny to progenitor. But my mother wasn't of the People, and that changed things. The sound was deeper,  quieter. Thrumming like a heartbeat rather than the high singing of my aunts, or the clear bell-like baritone of my father - which I'd learned to ignore years ago. It made me wonder what kind of woman she was. I only knew the basics - that she had conceived me as a weapon to use against my father, and that my father took the threat seriously. He couldn't break her, and that scared him. He agreed to give her what she wanted in exchange for me. My father's mother takes pleasure in reminding me that my mother gave me up without a second glance, eager to relinquish her bargaining chip to achieve her goal.

For being such a valuable bargaining chip, I sure wasn't valued much. My mother had handed me over before I was even born, my father had dumped me with his mother shortly after my birth in favor of fleeing the Burning Legion. My mixed blood meant that I was smaller and weaker than any of my cousins or their friends, and whatever ability made my mother such a terror, I only had enough of it to know that it was as weak as the rest of my power. My grandmother never bothered to hide her disdain for me, and she wouldn't care that I'd left. She was probably getting a kick out of telling stories of the horrible end I'd probably meet.

Whatever it was my mother wanted in exchange for me, I'm pretty sure my father got cheated.

I don't know how long I followed the thrum of my mother, but time doesn't really have meaning in the Twisting Nether. Once I got closer, the thrum turned into a thread, a crease in the fabric of the universe that showed me in glittering motes where my mother had been. I followed the trail of dark silver glitter, found where it intersected a deep maroon mixed with my own silvery purple - but my own beginnings didn't interest me. The strongest trail led to one of the cities, where a silver-blue trail split from hers. Blood of my blood. I couldn't see who the father was, but I had a sibling. One who was doubtless a pureblood....whatever it was that my mother was. Decisions, decisions. Do I torment myself by seeing what I might have been? Well, on my mother's side. My cousins already provided me with plenty of evidence for how I'd be if I were wholly Nathrezim. Bullies, all of them. I would never have their flair for torture and torment, their joy in pain. Childhood resentment, defiance, the sour-grapes hope that since I was so bad at being Nathrezim, maybe my flaws were just the strengths of my mother's people at war with the nature of the People.

I was sooo going to regret this.

The silver-blue trail led back across the ocean, to another city. Color became sound, thrumming heartbeat mixed with the ring of steel on steel and a boy's voice raised in a wild war cry. I stopped, forming a window through the veil between the Nether and the world of flesh and peering through to find my...brother. I had a brother, and he was play-fighting with another of his kind. They lacked horns and hooves, wings and claws - but for all that, they weren't much different from my cousins in build. Brown skin, black hair, tusks. My brother was taller than me even though he looked a year or two younger, his spirit boiling with vigor in a red cloud identical to that surrounding the other one. They tossed comments back and forth as they fought, but the window I'd made didn't let me hear the words. I was just starting to feel better about myself - since it didn't seem that my half-sibling was special in any way - when his friend said the wrong thing and my brother just...closed.

I know that sounds stupid. 'Come on, Tessa, he closed?' But really, when that whole cloud of spirit just...withdraws into itself and turns into an unbreakable, invulnerable shell of deepest black shot through with a purple so dark it glows...how else do you describe that? In an instant, I was forced to revise my assessment. My brother was definitely special. If that's what my mother had done, no wonder my father couldn't break her. The other boy didn't seem very intimidated by the way his friend had just turned into an unbreakable juggernaut of will, so I assumed this was just something their people did.

And I couldn't. Oh, I tried, but all I got was a little darkening, a little shelter. Like holding your wings over your head to ward off a punch. In this, as in everything else I tried to do, I was a failure. A pathetic, weak, half-breed whose mother didn't care and whose father had abandoned her.

I let the window roil closed again and backtracked my mother's trail. I had no illusions that she would be remotely happy to see me, but I wanted to see her just once. I wanted to see the face of a woman strong enough to bring my father to his knees and hand over her child and expect to never see it again. I wanted to see what that kind of strength looked like.

I know, I'm sentimental. Just add that to my list of flaws and shut the fuck up, okay?