Onaitarah Amari

**Onaitarah Amari**

Her official faceclaim is Halsey.

## Species

A banshee like Oliver is known to herald the death of a family member, usually by wailing, shrieking, or keening. As other cultures believe, she hears voices, and her screams often predict the death of another supernatural being. Often this leads Oliver, subconsciously, to murder scenes. She sometimes writes or draws messages from the voices without intent, leaving messages and codes to be deciphered at a later time.

### Abilities

* **Death Sense, Piercing Scream, Electromagnetic Interference**

## **History**

i. new

The delivery room waited wiith bated breath, each person in it surprised and delighted as your siblings squalled, rushing out ahead of you. Your mother, exhausted, squeezed tightly to your father’s hand, and he squeezed back. You were always difficult to see on the ultrasound or detect with magic – your siblings had always shone so brightly, and from the moment you were conceived you remained behind them, waiting to be noticed. They waited, and waited, but you refused to come out, stubborn in your own right even before you were truly formed.

They needed to cut you from your mother, and perhaps it was a sign. Maybe they should have left you there, or maybe they should never have told her you were inside. You were pulled from her womb with a swath of dark hair and a stubborn refusal to cry, whimpering just enough for the doctors to know you were alive. If your siblings were storms then you were a drizzle, trailing in their wake, crossing the finish line three steps behind.

ii. waxing crescent

Even in your differences, your siblings would not let you separate from the pack, not let you be left alone. They were always different, but they took care of you, seeing your instinct to retreat and anchoring you nonetheless. This is what family has always meant to you. In games they let you be referee, on the sidelines but included, protected but valued, and you took the opportunity to tell them what to do with glee. You watched from high in a tree as they argued and chased one another and you smiled at being loved so, even then.

Other friends were harder to come by, but you never minded. Your siblings were not ever interested in the same things as you, not really, but they let you tag along, and they never quite let you feel alone. Not really. And if you faded into the background against the Sun’s blinding light, or got lost in the ever-whirring mind of the Star as they blew your peers away, who could blame you? You would never be them, but you could be next to them. You could bask in their warmth like it was yours. Your parents, unsure of what to do with you, nonetheless did their best to make you feel included, especially when you were small.

No matter how hard you tried, how much they wanted, something about you was intrinsically not the same. As early as two years old, you were crawling into your closet, behind all your clothes and toys, just to curl into the darkest place you could find. You squinted at the sun in the sky and darted beneath trees, playing hopscotch in the shadows left by their leaves. The most fascinating thing about the light was the way it made shapes in the dark, and you loved the way the dappled light looked against your skin. You used to reach up toward the sun for hours, lying on your back, watching the way the shadows moved against your arm.

iii. first quarter

When you eventually started school, when the sanctuary of your home was taken from you in so many little ways, you began to understand the word different. Before you had understood each being to be individual, just as no two ladybugs looked quite the same the closer you looked at them. But children are not known for subtlety, and there were too many questions for you not to notice.

Why, you wondered, were you so different from your siblings? The Sun would claim they shone so brightly so as to deepen the shadows for you, just at their side. The Star would argue that it didn’t matter how effervescent they’d become if you were not there next to them, for if there was no quiet beneath the loud, there would be no contrast in the world. Yet when playmates asked how you could truly be a triplet to them, you with your darkness, you with your nervous stutter, you with your pale skin and too much love for the moon? You didn’t have an answer. Perhaps you never would.

It didn’t matter what you wanted: you could not make yourself vivacious as them. You could not fit yourself into their same boxes, and while they soared, while children flocked to them like busy little bees, you skirted the edges. You were happy for them, always. You loved them most assuredly. You were jealous absolutely, all the time.

iv. waxing gibbous

The more things changed, the more you wished they’d stay the same. Oh, how you hated to grow apart from them, your beloved family tapestry falling a little to the wayside each new year. Beneath the surface, you shared interests at times – neither of them were pure light without a bit of darkness underneath. Yet you could not keep up with them as they skyrocketed forward, and you played within their shadows, hopping from one spot of darkness to the next.

You didn’t mean to mind it, the idea of staying behind. In theory, it was best for everyone – your siblings acted as your shield, while you found ways to peek out from behind their backs, one eye open and the other shut tight. One foot after the other, you told yourself, and never looked up to see how far they’d come.

When your magic began to show, you kept it secret, just for a bit. Your siblings had normal magic, energy and light, catching attention like grass seeking dew drops. They were not… afflicted, with this, the amorphous thing that lived beneath your skin. You came from all things warm and vibrant and glittering, crawling and covered in muck. It was not until you fell into your shadow and scared the Star half to death that you were brave enough to show your parents what you could do. Their furrowed brows and worried glances made certain you would not forget what you were, not even when they tried to smooth it over with treats and kindness.

v. full

You tried to hide it, all the darkness that clung to your skin. When things got too intense you would lock yourself in the closet, just like you were a little girl, and hope your parents didn’t call you down to dinner. Sometimes panic would eat at your lungs and leave you gasping, and you would crawl under your bed where no light could get to you, dipping your fingers into the shadows and sighing as they clung to your skin. They loved you, always, darkness oozing toward you like a moth to the flame. And in this time, you learned to love them too.

It was difficult, to let go of your desperate hope to fit, to force your square peg into the same circular hole your siblings fit through so nicely. You wanted so much to stand hand in hand, to face the darkness together, but inevitably you would let it in, let it wrap around your heart and hiss at anyone who got too close. This was when you learned to fall in love with the abyss, just a little bit. You didn’t really stop hating yourself, didn’t stop wondering who’d decided to make you so different from everyone you knew and loved. But you couldn’t hide it anymore, and it felt so much better to give in than to keep fighting what was in your nature.

What had always been there for you, even when everything else went wrong.

vi. waning gibbous

The more you embraced the magic, however, the further you seemed to grow from those you cared for. Perhaps fate made a mistake, putting you in the same place with glittering jewels, showing you what you could have been and taking it all away. Perhaps your first taste of jealousy was a childlike dip, your hand brushing the waters of the ocean that grew in your heart. Envy started bitter and ended sweet, stuck in your throat and refusing to move, every swallow reminding you that you are less. It took you a long time to understand that part.

Your parents, your classmates, even your siblings at times, those you loved the most, knew you were not as much as they. The Sun filled a room, the Star a supernova at its apex, and you pressed yourself to the wall, desperate for the dark, clinging to anonymity and loneliness in their cold comfort. There was nothing particularly powerful in the shadows, nothing they would tell you, at least. Your parents discussed your power in hushed tones locked in shadowless rooms, and you didn’t listen, too afraid of what you might hear. Yet there was a comfort in not belonging to the same group as your peers – you had never fit in with them, anyway, why start now?

Perhaps you wanted to join them, wanted to dance in golden light, but you were a realist first and foremost. This was never in the cards for you.

vii. third quarter

Becoming an adult in the world of magic was an awful lot of work. Everyone you knew seemed to treat it like a joke, but you knew it for what it really was – the beginning of the end. It was the waning of your safety net, the time where the shroud around you was lifted and you were forced to declare yourself in front of the fates and everyone. You wanted Arcana as much as you loathed it, wanted to immerse yourself in magic and wanted to carve it from your heart if only to be done with it all.

You began to fight with your parents in earnest. You weren’t sure when it happened, when they decided that if they never stopped loving you, they would never try to understand you, either. You chewed on glass just to make them happy, and they pretended they couldn’t see you bleed, for it hurt them too much to see you so dark and alone. You could not persist this way forever, and the more they tried to force you to be happy, to pretend, the more frustrated you became. You didn’t ask for this power, didn’t ask to inherit all the parts of themselves they couldn’t bear to look at. You became the dark mirror for what made them uncomfortable, and they no longer knew how to look at you.

School turned from a curse to a blessing in the span of a year.

viii. waning crescent

You are impossible to classify. You turn through pages of descriptions, of classes, of various affinities and all of them make you feel sick. None of them fit you, none of them capture the magic bursting through your skin. You hoped that when you reached University you would finally find someone else, you would learn not to be alone, you could be accepted. But even here you are lost, alone in a sea of people who should be like you. Somehow you’re still one step behind.

You throw your pamphlets from your desk in a blind panic, climbing into your closet and stuffing jackets into the cracks in your door until all you see is the inky black. It comforts you, like an animal brushing against your hand, like a familiar face after a long time at sea. You worried for a moment that perhaps you were wrong, maybe the magic in your chest was something normal, manifesting itself in the darkness because you’ve always liked it best. But the shadow-creatures whisper to you, telling you a story of the girl who ran with wolves, the girl who slipped into darkness and never came out. Maybe she was always you, or maybe there was a you before you came along, but it doesn’t matter. You were meant to be here, and you cannot pick any other path but this.

In order to curate your curriculum, you have to meet with what feels like a thousand advisers, performing your magic over and over until you feel like a monkey in a circus. Even the darkness seems to tire, like it’s tapped out, and you hate the way it feels to put on a show for them. Your magic is not suited to the spotlight. They try you at shadow magic, at necromancy, at glamour, and you’re passable, you’re plausible in those things, but they don’t sing to you the way that perfect dark does. Deep down, you know that you are okay in the shadows, but you are best where no light can reach you, where light is forgotten and there are only the dark, broken, rotten things beneath.

Eventually, they decide you’ll take more general classes, while they look for a tutor that can teach you how to harness your potential. You think this phrase falls flat in the face of their nerves, how they look at you like you’re a hairs breadth away from true dark magic. Or perhaps you’re already there. But the shadows and their whispers don’t feel evil – they feel like home. They feel like never having to be alone.