Daughter of the Storm

[Reign]

Once born. Once adopted. Twice orphaned.

I never knew my birth parents. Rather, I was only a few days old when they found me wrapped in a ragged blanket on the front step of a fire station near the docks. The only security camera in the area tracked an old crone of a woman who brought me there. When authorities questioned her, she was vague as so many in that god forsaken town were, saying only that my parents were both dead. She wasn't related, just doing them a final favor after their deaths. I landed in an orphanage soon after but I didn't stay there long.

I am the daughter of heroes.

They loved me as their own, raised me as their daughter, treated me no differently than their first daughter was. She was my sister and I was hers, no matter our blood.

But then the city fell and we made our retreat. My parents stood as the last bastion of hope between humanity and the creeping void that had washed over everything else. But their magic and their tenacity were mighty powers in their own right and thus it seemed like we may very well weather the storm.

And then they died, my adoptive parents. First one and then, against the odds, the other. It was her grave I stood over, my hair whipped by the bitter winds that stirred the fallen leaves of the trees high on this cliff as well as the white capped waves of the sea below. My sister was gone, lost to time or space or where ever she had been pushed by a mother's desperate attempt to save her before she died. My godmother had buried my mother here, next to her wife, my other mom. Together their final resting place looked out over an endless sea under a twilight sky turned drab grey by the sheer force it took to keep the void at bay. Two weapons propped against a single headstone, a blunt, warped rapier and a battered gunblade, the former over the latter as if to protect it. The weapons had not been there before. In fact, it had been at least a year since I had last seen them.

"Soti?" I asked.

Behind me, the semi-opaque apparition of a black clad witch floated half a dozen inches above the ground. She wore black, even if I could see through it. I didn't have to look, it was always the same. Black hat, black bodice, black high waisted shorts and a black cloak flecked by true starlight. She had a mischievous mouth and seemingly never-ending hair in a gradient of white-blonde to pale pink.

"Mmh?" Soti answered, the spirit shimmering in the glint of twilight.

"Can you help me find her? Help me find my sister?" I asked, kneeling to pick up both blades. They were battered and worn but I scooped them up reverently as if they were made of glass.

"I could..." Soti said.

"Okay... will you?" I sighed, turning to face the apparition.

Soti smiled and tipped her head to the side. "Of course I will."

No warning, no time to prep. Soti touched my shoulder and I was launched through time and space ass over tea kettle until I landed with a whump in a snowbank in what I could have only guessed was Rhydin City.

Not my Rhydin City, of course. But... here I was.