My First Sister

It's a warm summer night, and in my memory (dream?) I've finally put Liliales to bed when I join another Fae on the balcony, overlooking the sunset. The other Fae is a few years younger than me, and freshly awoken as Summer. She's 5 this year, and it's her first time being female since she was 2. I've been with them for their entire life and while the feeling isn't the same as with Liliales, it's similar.   "Having a hard time?" I ask. "You always seem to know these days - is it because you're a parent now?" "That too," I say, but there is an extra layer of sadness about it... I can't quite remember what was making me so sad. They confide in me more about what they're struggling with.  

Everything feels hard right now - but the song I'm working on, it's just too tragic. Elvish funerals are hard, but this woman... she spent the last two months of her life in crippling pain because the magic that could have purged the poison in her body would have, at the very least, stopped the child she carried from ever touching magic. She risked everything to be able to give them a better future, and she still died within months of giving birth. As much as I joke that the Grove must want me to take my own turn at motherhood with how I look this time, I just can't relate to what she must have been feeling enough to write the music for her song. I know I'll be long passed by the time her son is old enough to really listen to it, so I want to make sure the illusory bead helps him feel what kind of person she was. Big sis - I know you don't like writing funeral songs, but can you help me with this one?

  The two of us stay up late and conversation moves between the song they're trying to compose and me own feelings as a parent, eventually dancing over the strained relationships my sister has with our parents. She has been out of cycle with your father for most of her life, generally only getting a single season where they're both awake, and since turning 3 she's been largely out of cycle with our mother as well. It's been me that's taken care of her as she figured out what it means to be an adult and to be independent - and I were the one that introduced her to elves who needed help turning stories into songs.   She's struggling, in part, because last time around she was a mystic, and this time, she's a scoundrel - her music keeps trying to run away from her. It's not she's losing her ability to play, but that if she isn't careful it quickly becomes unbridled and whirling - her own song tries to assert itself strongly in work she's trying to do for others. At the end of the night, I remember telling her "Let me write this one for you. I don't think you should do anymore of these for the rest of this year. Go make this year about your own song - you can come back around to songs for others later if that's where your future is."   The two of us drift off to sleep, sharing a blanket on the balcony - the last thing I hear from her is "If my whole world has to be different this time, I'm glad that it let me be sisters with you while everything else changes... as long as I've still got you"