Oz

Oz had known what he would do for his life, maybe even the rest of time, since he was a young hatching watching his parents at work. But never once have they given in to his pleas to be taught to use the magic they so easily wield.

Tired of this and the favor they have begun to show his younger sister, he approaches his father Morpheus, the less terrible of the two, "Why do you always refuse to teach me anything?" he asks, "I have seen you with Parca speaking in the ancient language."

Morpheus cracks open an eye and appraises his surroundings, "Talk to me again when the night has fallen. All of this light will burn eyes."

Knowing this is a battle that he will never win, Oz uses his father's back as a springboard (out of spite rather than necessity) and begins a short flight up to the cave where his mother will be resting. The sun is high in the sky so she will not be in a grand mood either, but he has lost the patience to wait.

His father's Fae form is barely a blip in his perception when he reaches the maw of his mother's abode. The lip of the cave is covered with layers upon layers of moth-eaten clothes and the darkness that spills out makes him almost, but not quite, forget that it is day. He peels back a few of the cloths grimacing a bit when they come off and stick to his claws like spider webs. When he pokes his head through he can feel more of them sticking to his head, he's starting to remember why he stopped coming here.

He picks a few of them off from where they've gotten stuck on the scales around his eyes, jerking backward when he blinks and comes face to face his mother's eyes, shining bright and luminous from beneath her hood.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

He shouldn't have come. She looked in the mood to have her shadows through him back out the door, and she would have his father fill his dreams with his fears. But it was too late to leave now, that would just make it worse.

He averts his eyes from her gaze before she can start to read him properly and pushes past her. There's a spring in the center of the room that wasn't there the last time he was there. The liquid pooling up looks suspiciously like the night sky and his sister, Parca, is twisting the tips of her claws into it and lifting it upwards to shape constellations. She stops when she sees him, casting a wide-eyed gaze to their mother who stands at his shoulder breathing out heavily near his shoulders.

"You need to leave," she says, all four of her eyes locked on Parca who jumps with a little start and drops her tiny stars back in the hole in the ground with a plop.

"What are you doing Parca?" Oz has a good idea already, "Don't tell me you're practicing to move the stars."

Parca doesn't meet her eyes and wipes her claws against the ground smudging a bit of the dark liquid around.

"Is this why I haven't seen either of you these past few moons?"

Nyx places a claw on his shoulder and he lets out a shallow gulp, "Your father and I are aware of how much this means to you Oz, but we simply cannot teach you," his mouth falls open ready to protest but her grip on his shoulder tightens so it almost starts to hurt, "look at your sister. What is different between the two of you?"

Parca still won't look at him but he frowns at her, "Nothing but our wings. We are the same, of the same blood."

"Except that you are not," says Nyx, "it is a thing you are born with, either there or not. Parca has it and you do not, it is as simple as that. A matter of our biology. There is nothing you can do to change it."

Oz starts to open his mouth, but then closes it very very slowly. There is nothing he can say. As for his biology? Nothing is ever really set in stone. He’d suspect it had something to do with how much smaller he was than his siblings, but Nyx didn’t seem to find an issue with that.

He shook his wings open with a quick and deliberate movement, glaring at both of them before flying back out the entrance of the cave no longer caring what got stuck to his wings in the process.
Oz doesn’t move right away. They’d be expecting that as he had a tendency to be a bit more impulsive than strictly necessary, but this was far too important to be approached without finesse.

He spent several weeks not looking at the cave. He holed himself up several miles away in the confines of an old and dying tree and did his best not to think about the cave. Weeks turned to months, until he could no longer stand it and then finally Nyx let down her guard and she and Parca left the cave unaccompanied.

He hadn't slept or moved around much since he had made his decision to break in, so his wings throbbed uncomfortably when he took off, but it was too late to back off now. After all, he was quite certain that they had felt his eyes on them, if they sensed his presence near the cave they would not let their guard down again and one of them, probably his youngest sibling, Qaris, would be sent to find out his secrets. He would cease to be forgettable and become a problematic nuisance, never left alone long enough to achieve his goal.




Playlist: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Lorde
lore written by Bluebird88

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