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aelwyn is almost four years old when she learns how to build her first wall. adaine is only a few weeks, maybe a month old - a baby - and she won’t stop crying. and perhaps it’s because mother and father don’t hold her like they hold aelwyn, perhaps her tears are rooted in the disapproving glances she has yet to recognise or understand. but that would suggest her parents aren’t good, and the one truth aelwyn knows with all the certainty an almost four year old can have is that her parents are good. after all, they love her. they shower her in gifts and praise and attention, all the things they deprive adaine of. her parents are good. they must be. and so, the only logical conclusion is that adaine must be doing something wrong, even though adaine is so, so small and soft and warm, and she smiles when aelwyn pokes her doughy cheek, and she stops crying when aelwyn lets her grab at her fingers and hair. adaine must be bad, because her parents must be good. but adaine can’t be bad, because adaine is just so completely and definitely good. so aelwyn builds a wall between these two beliefs, never letting them touch because each would destroy the other if given the chance.
aelwyn is eight when she learns her first cantrip, and her parents treat her like she’s an angel, when she really hasn’t done that much. she learns the words and phrases of arcana, but magic sits just under her skin, and jumps to her fingertips whenever she commands it to. but magic should be learnt, and not innate, so she stumbles her way through the books her mother and father tell her to, and she tries to teach adaine to do the same. but adaine is hot and volatile, like a scorching ray (a spell she will take just a bit too long to get the hang of, and her father makes his frustration with her lack of progress extremely clear), and she doesn’t listen to her parents. aelwyn tries to teach her to be quiet and obedient and good, but there is a fire deep within adaine, and its embers flicker whenever she is punished. adaine cries when she gets told off, screams until she’s red in the face. that is not how abernants behave. abernants are poised and prepared and perfect. abernants teach themselves not to flinch when they see a hand raised, or a fist clenched. abernants are beautiful. and adaine’s red hot anger and passion is ugly. it must be. sometimes, when adaine cries and wails and screams, aelwyn can feel empathy in her chest. but compassion is warm, and too close to the fire she is determined to avoid. she will be like ice, even if she freezes over in the process.
aelwyn is twelve when her parents enter her for her first spelling competition. she shouldn’t be there - the rules say you have to be at least sixteen - but her mother whispers something and her father clears his throat firmly, and that’s all that is said on the matter. she is good enough to compete with the other wizards, after all, so why shouldn’t she? maybe, a small part of her wonders, because the pressure bearing down on her is far too much for anyone to bear, let alone a child, but as her mother reminds her, prodding her back to straighten her posture, pressure turns graphite into diamonds. aelwyn thinks people are people, not things, but she holds her tongue, a habit she is so used to that it feels like second nature. she spends countless nights studying and preparing and practicing until she collapses into trance in the library, the most tired she’s ever been (a fact that will, of course, change). she wakes up with a blanket around her shoulders, one she didn’t fall asleep with, and she knows her parents wouldn’t even think to check on her, so it must’ve been adaine. gods, she wishes it was easier to hate her sister. she can’t think of adaine caring for her even when she has shown her nothing close to kind, because she might feel bad - or worse, feel anything at all. emotions are a distraction from perfection, so she swallows the small coal that cares for adaine down her throat, again and again, until she feels sick.
(she wins the spelling competition, of course. she holds the title of miss solesian spellcaster for the next five years, and she is lavished in rewards and compliments and pride, but that doesn’t stop the nausea from that night sitting just below her ribs. adaine never does it again, but she can’t forget the small, simple act of kindness from someone she has only shown cruelty. again, she swallows her small coal, again.)
aelwyn is fifteen when she gets drunk for the first time. what would eventually become a flimsy excuse to give her parents really was true in the beginning; she is spending the night at penelope’s to study, when the beautiful, terrible brunette girl convinces her to go to a stupid party at the black pit. even as she agrees, she knows it’s a bad idea. sneaking out, lying their way into a club and getting wasted with a bunch of older men sounds like her worst nightmare, at first. but then she gets a taste of what it’s like to be adored by someone other than her parents, and it’s dangerously addictive. the euphoria she feels slinking into skin tight dresses and winking at all the right people to get what she wants is like nothing she’s ever felt before. under the bright lights and the hot, heavy gazes of those watching her, aelwyn feels alive for the first time. she’s perfect. untouchable. untouchable to everyone except the one person who has always managed to reach her despite the odds, of course. adaine catches her sneaking home at four or five in the morning. she can’t tell if her sister has tranced yet or not - adaine always looks haunted by this exhaustion that finds home in the bags under her eyes and the slight tremble in her hands.
“where have you been?” adaine asks, in a tone somewhere in between curiosity and disapproval.
“out,” she replies, knowing what an awful answer that is even as she says it. she knows adaine knows where she’s been. adaine is going to tell on her. and sure, when have their parents ever listen to adaine, but what if they do this time? the very idea of her parents finding out about her secret habits makes her heart seize up with terror.
“you won’t tell anyone.” she says, and it’s a statement, not a question - an order instead of a request. adaine doesn’t say anything back, just looks at her with her huge blue eyes lined with bags. aelwyn intentionally shoves past her on her way upstairs, a childish move, but the only way she can hold any authority over her sister is through violence - she has learnt from their parents well. but as she walks away, she feels terror fill her chest and tears threaten to spill from her eyes. adaine is going to ruin her life. she sniffs and blinks the tears back. no crying. her life may be over, but she may as well walk into hell with her head held high.
she wakes up the next morning with a pounding headache - curse wizards for never learning any healing spells - and goes to meet her doom. but nothing happens. mother and father greet her with the same bored nods as ever when she goes downstairs for breakfast, and adaine doesn’t say anything at all, doesn’t even look at her. at first, she thinks adaine is making her stew in the fear and anxiety as an added punishment, waiting until she’s at her breaking point to break the news. but hours, then days, then weeks pass, and nothing. still, she waits another month or so to go out again, not wanting to tempt fate. she takes extra precautions to avoid adaine - greater invisibility, dimension door - but she can’t shake the feeling that adaine sees her, deeper and truer than anyone has ever seen her before. adaine sees through every wall she has built, every abjurative ward she has cast to protect herself from the world. (or perhaps, she considers, it’s to protect the world from her.)
aelwyn is sixteen when she first meets kalina. she’d seen the tabaxi around before after one of her glamorous, destructive nights with a boy from bastion city whose name she can’t remember, but she paid it no mind at first. she was used to seeing shadows and strange creatures in the corners of her eyes - it’s just that normally they were shaped less like a tabaxi and more like her father’s rage and her mother’s careful cruelty. her mother is the one to formally introduce her to the shadow cat, which makes sense. the resemblance that the two share is almost uncanny - both women are collected, calm and almost taunting in their sharp glances and sharp words. kalina speaks to aelwyn in whispers and hisses, makes her more flighty and unsure of who to trust. she grows to fear silence more than shouting, and the strangest part is that she starts to enjoy the screaming matches she and adaine engage in on a near regular basis. it’s the closest thing she has to being a real teenager, and she clings to it with reckless abandon. so sure, it’s a little cruel to provoke her sister, knowing exactly what buttons to push to send her over the edge into that hot, fiery anger that she hates and maybe envies, just a little bit.
sometimes she wonders if it’s better to burn alive than freeze to death under her own apathy, but aelwyn can’t think about that because that would mean everything she has learnt might be wrong, so she does what she knows best and builds another wall. there are so many now that her brain sometimes feels like a maze, impossible to navigate. no, not a maze - a bombed out city, she decides, as she figures out a spell to lock a copy of her mind away just in case. it’s a difficult task - no one has really tried this before, because who would need to? she’s probably just being paranoid, but she’d choose paranoia over being unprepared any day. she uses adaine’s divination notes to do it , and she can’t help but feel a tiny ember of pride at how well her sister is doing in class. she tries to blow the spark out before it can catch because she can’t be proud of adaine. that would make them sisters and maybe even friends, when in reality they are strangers living in the same cold, empty house. then again, does it matter? pride is a sin no matter who it’s for, but she isn’t really one for religion anyway.
aelwyn is seventeen and life is good. sure, she’s involved in a plan to bring back kalvaxis and there are horrifying shadows that cling to her dreams and she watches adaine get hurt by their parents again and again and does nothing every time, biting at her lip until it bleeds, but at least she’s young. she gets her driver’s licence and a car for her birthday and spends the languid summer evenings driving far too quickly down elmville’s highways with penelope, her best friend (and her only friend, if she thinks too much about it. there are people she knows, sure, but no one that really knows her). they scream along to pop songs with the windows rolled down, iced coffee spilling between their fingers. they pretend, if only for a moment, to be teenagers with nothing to lose but their adolescence; they ignore the cat that sits like a shadow at the corner of their vision. aelwyn parks on a rocky outcrop overlooking the town and squints at the setting sun, staring into it like it’s a challenge not to go blind.
“are you scared of growing up?” penelope asks, leaning back in the passenger seat. sometimes, when they’re alone, the preppy, perfect girl will fade and the real penelope will come peeking through the gaps. aelwyn loves her.
“isn’t everyone?” she says, instead of really answering, because the truth is her future is something too terrifying to comprehend, and she’d rather bask in naive, ignorant youth while she still can.
“i’m not,” penelope replies, too quickly to be true. “it’s just.. centuries seem like a really long time to live, and we can’t be kids forever.”
aelwyn blinks hard and looks away from the sun, seeing blue-black shapes swim before her eyes. forever is something she’d rather not think about. she can’t imagine being anything but her parents' perfect daughter, adaine’s superior sister. surely forever will make her grow out of the roles someday, and she can’t have that. all she is is how she’s been defined by other people. kalina grins an evil smile at her, and flicks her tail.
“forever is bullshit. let’s get drunk.” she says, avoiding the corners of her eyes, and that’s what they do.
aelwyn is eighteen when she first successfully traps someone in a palimpsest - that poor ostentatia wallace girl - while staring down her sister in the eyes at a house party. adaine shouldn’t be here, she made sure she wouldn’t be here and yet here she is, her brave, terrified sister glaring at her with fury beyond what any wizard would call rational. it’s admirable, almost. adaine’s passion and sympathy and justice make her a great hero, but not a good abernant. and aelwyn was born and bred to be a good abernant, so she swears under her breath, pockets the palimpsest and prepares to fight to only person she maybe doesn’t want to. there’s penelope, sure; and those hazy hudol boys and her stupid fucking perfect parents, but she’d face down all then without batting an eye if she had to. to some extent or another, they all deserve violence - herself included - but not adaine. adaine may be brash and stubborn and taunting, but she shouldn’t be left to the same fate as the rest of her enemies.
so she goes easy on her - not by much, since adaine and her little friends put up a decent enough fight - but easier than her instincts tell her to. they scream at her to just fucking kill her already, but she screams back that she can’t, not her, anyone but her. she could have gotten away - she always keeps a spell slot saved for dimension door, but adaine looks at her harder than anyone ever has before, truly sees her for the first time ever, and the magic fizzles out in her hands and from her lips. she has trouble remembering things now, but she remembers that night, its memory seared into her brain. adaine’s unbridled fury plays on an endless loop in her head, jarring and comforting all at once. (“you are going to get in so much trouble,” adaine spits. ‘no, i won’t,’ she thinks sadly. ‘we both know that.’).
aelwyn is eighteen when she is first broken out of prison and brought to fallinel. at first, she is naive enough to believe she will be welcomed home with open arms, because sure, she failed, but she tried, she worked harder and smarter and better than anyone she knows and isn’t that enough? of course it isn’t - she knows that now. but at the time, she allowed herself to hope, which made it all the more painful when they reject her so cruelly. she is systemically tortured for days or weeks or months - elven immortality makes time a strange thing, more so an acquaintance than a close friend. she loses track of time, of herself. she’s glad she managed to hide a copy of her mind away inside the ruins of her burning city, but it just means she’s forced to watch herself be destroyed from the inside out, amidst the glass and rubble. she stares, helpless, as her father meticulously finds and tears each piece of her already fragile mind, her barely formed identity, into unrecognisable shreds. he isn’t angry as he does it, nor the least bit sad. a look of concentration and the slightest smug grin rest on his face as he works. her father has abuse down to a science, and with dull horror aelwyn realises that every time he threatened her or punished adaine, he was going easy on them. seeing the true extent of his evil makes her childhood look like heaven - if only she could die to get there.
and then they put her in the orb. it’s strange and almost novel at first, the feeling of the ground slowly moving just enough to keep you from resting. but it quickly grows into the exact hell it's so perfectly designed to be, sapping the magic and life from her with each trance it steals away. she doesn’t know how long they keep her in there, only that it feels like a thousand cruel infinities occurring all at once. aelwyn has always been self loathing and self destructive - they both seem in her nature at this point - but she’d never been suicidal before. sure, the concept of immortality is scary and hard to think about, because a life that never ends when life already sucks this much sounds less than ideal, but she never actually wanted to die until now. and she wants to die so, so badly, just to end the nightmare her life has descended into.
aelwyn is nineteen. she thinks. she is gently told later that she was imprisoned for almost a year, but that seems like not enough time and too much time all at once. she can’t be nineteen - she’s still a kid. she’s not old enough for this. maybe adaine should have been the older sister. after all, it’s adaine who comes to rescue her, even though she couldn’t have done anything else to deserve it less. it’s pity, of course, and not love that motivates her; it can’t be love. aelwyn is everything love isn’t - cold, perfect, ruthless. but the fact that adaine is there with her, whispering comfortingly in the adjacent room, makes her doubt everything she’s ever believed about herself. adaine’s always sort of had that effect on people.
“how many spell slots do you have?” she whispers, when what she really wants to say is ‘why are you here? did they get you too?’.
adaine replies, “i have four first level spell slots.” but she can almost imagine her meaning ‘they got me, but they won’t keep me. and they can’t keep you any longer. i won’t let them.’ - though perhaps that is wishful thinking.
they have the same conversation over and over, aelwyn unsure which was the first time and whether any of it is real. and it is only here, with all her humanity and immortality stripped away, that she finally admits the truth, swallows the sharp edges of her pride, and apologises. the walls she’s been building since she was a child come crashing down, every single one of them, and aelwyn cries. aelwyn does not cry. crying is weak, and flawed, and it means you’re allowing yourself to feel. abernants do not cry. but all being an abernant got her is stuck in this god awful orb with a bombed out ruin of a psyche, so she cries anyway. she’s so angry and broken and hurt and sorry, but for some reason all she can do is weakly defend their parents’ terrible logic, that their abuse made them great. she needs it to be true, because otherwise they did it for nothing at all, and like the rest of her, her trauma is desperate for purpose.
but adaine says no, and she’s right. adaine says they damaged them both - damaged her too - and it feels terrifying and freeing all at once to admit that yes, the pressure of perfection is a burden that was placed on her far too soon, and that their mother was wrong - pressure may turn graphite into diamonds but it only turns little girls into awful, terrified ghosts of themselves. adaine says “expectation without love, what’s that?” and aelwyn wants to reply “everything i am and everything you are not, you beautiful thing,” but she feels her mind slipping away, and all is lost. (though perhaps not quite all; she hears “expectation without love, what's that?” and feels the small coal of her care for adaine re-emerge from dormancy. this time, she does not swallow it; she lets it sit on her tongue, bitter and powerful.)
aelwyn is nineteen when she is rescued by the people who had the least reason to save her out of anyone. but they do, because despite being called the bad kids, they are all completely and almost nauseously good. she’s too exhausted to complain, though - she doesn’t drift but falls hard into unconsciousness the moment she is freed from the stupid fucking orb that had been her home and personal hell for a year. she doesn’t need to sleep - a few trances and she’d be fine - but she sleeps anyway, because she’s not ready to be awake yet. awake means bringing herself back from the spell warded city in her mind, and even though it’s destroyed and broken and not even a place, really, it’s still somewhere that isn’t here. she sleeps for hours or maybe days; whatever little meaning time had to her before has been altogether lost. she’s nineteen, sure, but what in the nine hells does that even mean? she thinks other nineteen year olds aren’t trapped in torture chambers after trying to bring about the apocalypse, but she wouldn’t know. all her friends are either dead or not really her friends at all. adaine falls into the latter category, some gray area between enemies and sisters who deserved much better than what they got.
aelwyn is nineteen and she wants to scream when she sees kalina again. ‘really?’ she hisses in her mind, staring at the smug tabaxi from across the hot spring she’s bathing in. ‘i don’t even get time to make things right with her?’ apparently not, because why would she? it’s not like she has a great track record of being kind to adaine, so maybe it’s the universe trying to keep the existential status quo. or maybe, she thinks, as adaine hits her with a ray of sickness that is as familiar as it is cruel, the universe couldn’t care less about her, and she’s just too far over her head in evil plans made by evil people far beyond her understanding. she slips back into unconsciousness willingly, so she doesn’t have to answer. her next moves are easy: she lets her cunning instincts take over and doesn’t even have to think as she steals back her spellbook, tricks fig into leaving her alone, and escaping kei lumennura. escaping probably isn’t the right word - it implies leaving something bad for something better, when aelwyn is certain she’s headed for far, far worse.
aelwyn is nineteen when she stares her father in the eyes as he fires a lightning bolt directly into her heart. it happens so fast and it’s so unbelievably, unimaginably evil that it doesn’t feel real. she is a million miles away, swimming in adaine’s words like an ocean of seeing her more truly and deeply than anyone before. ‘you chose, of all of the schools of magic, to be an abjurative wizard. you won't let people in, because you're scared that if you let people in and they reject you, then you're not worth it in some way.’ her last thought before she is racked with pain too great for her senses or her body to handle is that adaine is exactly right, because of course she is, when has adaine ever been wrong - maybe every single wall she’s ever built hasn’t been to keep others out, but to keep herself in - trapping her own mind away long before her father had the same idea. in that moment, she feels every wall crumble and fall in an earthquake of empathy and the words held behind her prison barred tongue come tumbling forwards like an ocean crashing the gates of every time she was ever cruel to adaine when she should’ve been kind: “i’m sorry.”
and then the lightning bolt hits, almost as hard as the years of guilt do as they are washed away.
aelwyn is almost twenty when she returns to solace and finds a new home in mordred manor, a place filled with tieflings and half orcs and werewolves and everything she was told to avoid growing up. ‘they aren’t like us’, her mother would always remind her, with the ugly mix of a frown and a sneer on her face, but all aelwyn can think is thank the heavens they aren’t like her. one of her is enough, and maybe too much already. (she will never see her mother frown like that again, she realises absently, and it doesn’t hurt until it does. but she breathes through it, punctuating each inhale and exhale with the image of her mother being chased into the forest of the nightmare king, never to be seen again.)
mordred takes a lot of getting used to. it’s not a bad place, but it’s just so much. she’s used to cold, empty corridors and echoing silences, not the unexpected, raucous joy of finding someone in every room you enter. she spends a lot of time in adaine’s tower - adaine says it’s their tower, but it’s not; she is a stranger, taking up space in her sister’s home - but she ventures further as she gets braver, tip toeing across the threshold into rooms filled with the curious but kind eyes of her fellow residents. it takes a while, but they grow on her. (a small part of her filled with hope she thought was long dead wonders if she’s growing on them, too.)
she makes the first friends she’s had since penelope, kisses the first person since a hudol boy who’s face she can’t remember. she exists in a weird place on the periphery of the bad kids and the inhabitants of mordred manor, but she doesn’t mind it. aelwyn doesn’t want to be one of them, even when the pangs of loneliness strike her stomach like a gnawing hunger. she wants to steal adaine away from her friends and keep her sister to herself so they can make up every minute they spent living in the same house but never living together. but she has to - wants to - learn to be alone with herself, because she’s a person she hasn’t really had the chance to meet. she walks through mordred, and when it becomes too loud, through cravencroft cemetery, and stares down at the grave of her best friend. penelope’s grave is marked with an oversized headstone that reads her name in cursive, and far too many wilting flowers from people that loved her without ever knowing her. she wonders if she’s one of those people.
‘i should be buried here.’ aelwyn thinks, and words behind her mind’s tongue whisper that she shouldn’t be alive at all. she doesn’t want to die anymore, not really. but she should be dead and isn’t, despite all the odds, and it feels wrong on a level deeper than she can intuit. it would make her a statistical anomaly to be an elf who died before she was twenty, but she’s always strived for better than average anyway. she kicks the dirt at penelope’s grave and thinks that it’s not too late to change that. (she doesn’t, of course, but her mind finds comfort from dwelling in the dark places its used to.)
aelwyn is twenty when she gets her high school diploma, but if she thinks about that for too long, then the claws of self hatred will start to sink in, reminding her that she got it two years late, that she’s two years behind, that she’s a failure. adaine sees this, because she has never been able to hide anything from her brilliant sister (there’s a glorious freedom in not having to try anymore, in knowing they have forever to see each other with no walls, just windows).
“you’re not falling behind, aelwyn.” adaine murmurs from the bunk below her. “your life doesn’t have to stick to a perfect plan.” they both hear the unspoken ‘anymore’ that hangs off the edge of her words.
“but what do i have if not the path they laid out for me? what am i if not their daughter, still?”
she feels, rather than hears adaine sigh, and she can’t tell whether it’s filled with frustration or pity.
“you’re my sister.” adaine says, and aelwyn takes a moment to bask in the swelling of her heart at the notion. sisterhood has always been an ugly thing for them, but she feels light and love slipping through the cracks, making it into something beautiful and messy and glorious.
so maybe being two years behind isn’t such an awful trade to make when it gave her a sister, and besides, what’s two years in the face of eternity, right? she’ll have plenty of time to achieve the great, vague thing that weighs on her shoulders, and if that thing is to be good to adaine - it feels like a more than worthy task, because adaine deserves goodness more than anything - then she’s making decent time already.
aelwyn is twenty one, and she drives out to a familiar rocky outcrop with adaine in the passenger seat to watch the sky light
up with fire as the sun gives its last hurrah. her sister is golden in the light of the sunset, and she can feel herself glowing too, like the passion and fire she had forced to quiet down inside of her for too long. not anymore. she lets herself burn alive, and basks in the flames of being who she is; completely, entirely and unapologetically. somewhere, her parents grip her shoulders like phantoms clinging to the material plane, and she tries to shake them off before stopping. the ghosts can stay, if they’d like. they’ll keep her company until she is ready to let go of them, until she has learnt to let her soul walk without its hand in anyone else’s but its own. she doesn’t need to be okay yet. her recovery is utterly her own, and she isn’t afraid to admit that she is a haunted thing; it makes it easier to be gentle to the girl inside her who’s been through an awful lot, and could use a little kindness.
“i feel like i was defined by them for so long that i don’t really know myself at all.” aelwyn says, breaking the silence. she’s only ever been taught how to be better than everyone around her, only ever learnt to exist in relation to others, never on her own. but she doesn’t have to exist entirely on her own, not just yet. immortality will inevitably bring solitude, but right now, she’s twenty one and she’s okay with being adaine’s sister first and her own person second.
“we have eternity to find out who you are.” adaine assures her and ‘we’ sits in her chest, fuller and warmer than every coal she has made herself swallow until she choked.
“eternity. isn’t that a little scary?”
“with you, less so.”
aelwyn snorts very ungracefully and turns to roll her eyes at at her sister.
“there’s no need to be such a wet napkin, adaine.” and adaine doesn’t need a spell to know the meaning hidden underneath her words, fiery and passionate and everything flawed and ugly and beautiful. the meaning sings from her throat, dances around their sunset and into forever.
she smiles out of the side of her mouth, and adaine smiles back.
“i love you too.”
and forever feels a little less daunting with the comfort that brings.