K'antor tes Kholi'ani

K'antor is my twin brother. He is older by just a couple of minutes.

He was my only friend and playmate when we were little. We were completely innocent and carefree then, and never questioned why we had been sequestered away from the rest of the village.

I still remember racing for miles and miles through the treetops chasing him, large climbing claws on our hands and feet, done with our adaptive shape shifting abilities. I remember the faces of the Alt'ari who would look up at us in surprise. We'd get to the cliffs by the sea and run headlong toward the edge, shifting the claws away and replacing them with our great white wings. Leaping off the cliff we'd fly out over the water, then stop in mid air, shift the wings away and quickly replace them with gills on the sides of our throats and then dive headfirst into the sea to swim. We called it "let's go swimming" and we had no idea that other people could not do what we could.

Had it been known we could do that, we probably would not have been allowed to live to adulthood. If it had been known by the Tainted members of the Council in the capital city how close to being Teachers the children of the 'Lesia of Sarna were, they would have found a way to have us killed.

When we gained complete control over our powers, we were told we must never do it in front of other people and why. Our mother moved us to the main house in the village, and there our training began.

I was apprenticed under my mother, of course, being her heiress. K'antor was apprenticed under the aging weathermancer who was wishing to retire to the village of his birth. We worked nearly every waking moment.

K'antor spent most of his time in the weathermancing tower learning about each crystal there and its specific function in operating the grid. He became very good at it.

Soon, the weathermancer retired, and K'antor took over the job full time. He rearranged the rain schedule into something that made much more sense for everyone, and became rather well regarded as a result.

K'antor held the Gate with me for the People to pass through on the day we were supposed to leave. I don't know exactly what happened to him when I died. The collapse would have been enough to kill him too. There is part of him in Sarna yet. I have met him there. I do not know however, if the person I met was bi-locating there from somewhere else as I was or not. When I met him there, he seemed somehow less of himself than he had been before the Gating.

I also suspect that what I saw of him may have been his bi-locating self because there is someone here in this incarnation who looks remarkably like, and has almost exactly the same energy signature as, my brother. I have been in the same room with him before, but we haven't ever met. On that occasion in 1984, I tried a Send to him, just calling his name, and his head snapped up and he squinted at me, trying to find me in the crowd perhaps. That could have been a coincidence though. There are other clues however that lead me to believe that this person incarnate on Earth may indeed be K'antor. Time may tell.