Everything Has Changed

The Girl of Many Floods

Linh tried.

She did. She tried and tried to stop the floods from coming, but whatever she did seemed to just make the floods brim and overflow, wreaking havoc everywhere.

Foxfire. Mysterium. Choralmere. Especially Choralmere.

Choralmere's sea seemed to call to her like always, but stronger this time, like something had been awakened inside her and was ravaging to be let out.

Or maybe subconsciously, something inside her wanted to flood Choralmere, to ask her parents, Was this what you had in mind when you said you wanted me to be powerful?

Whatever it was, Linh didn't really know. But she knew that what she was doing was horrible and terrible and physically hurting people, and if there was one thing she didn't like at all, it was physically hurting people. She didn't want to think of the blood that streamed down her arms and her legs when she first manifested her life-sucking ability.

There was just one problem. And that was that she had no idea how to stop herself.

She'd been letting herself do whatever she wanted, feel whatever she wanted, to the extent that when she'd ran too far, she couldn't pull herself back anymore.

Every time she entered her bedroom she'd snap the blinds completely closed and switch on the lights, then she'd walk to her reflection in the cracked mirror she had in her walk-in-wardrobe.

Tam had caught her once, staring at herself in the mirror, and he'd declared that she didn't deserve to think of herself that way. Then he had raised his fist and punched the mirror, sending hairline splinters crackling over the glassy surface. He'd been bleeding, and even though Linh couldn't stand the sight of blood, she resisted herself and helped Tam apply healing balm to his knuckles. She'd almost let her ability seep in and draw blood out of Tam, and she was so ashamed of herself afterwards that she didn't allow herself to see Tam afterwards.

But even though Tam kept insisting that she shouldn't think inferior of herself, Linh still found her eyes drawn to the mirror, holding even more symbolism now that it had been broken. Then Linh had snuck a flatbrush and some gold acrylic paint from her mother's abundant supply of art materials and painted the cracks of the mirror golden.

Her strokes were choppy and the gold which had been painted on turned out a little translucent, but Linh thought it looked beautiful.

Linh twirled, watching her reflection do the same, then came to a stop as she paused to look at herself more closely. Now a pretty girl of thirteen-coming-on-to-fourteen, Linh's chubbiness as a young elf had evened itself out, turning her into someone with a slender and graceful figure. Her jet-black hair reached down to her waist, and her palest-of-pale-blue eyes felt like staring into a vast, endless ocean, with flecks of white-silver froth pepping the gentle lull of the waves. People acknowledged that she had something charming around her, but her blackened history as The Girl of Many Floods and her family status made them recoil back a step. After all,

1. She was a twin, and

2. Her parents were a bad match.

Linh definitely couldn't take the whispers and the snipes and the bullying, but if there was something else she couldn't take more than that, it was her parents.

Needless to say, Quan and Mai were parents with high expectations of their children (even though they treat them badly and when they mess up they'd push the blame on the fact that they were twins). And when Linh couldn't meet their expectations, paired with the countless times she'd flooded every place she went, they got really mad.

At first, it started with tiny, nervous hints. Mai would panic every time Linh stared out at Choralmere's ocean (it wasn't like she wanted to stare at the water, it was just because it was too captivating) and snap at Tam to shut the blinds and drag the curtains closed. And Tam couldn't exactly say no, he had to listen to his mother (but he didn't want to, of course), and he was worried for Linh too, except that his worries were completely different from Mai's and that made all the difference to Linh.