Something shifts in the universe and in some foreign land a stallion wakes underneath a tree, a tree where he had once lain with his daughter, where he had been dying and then dead.
It had been a peaceful death.
His waking is not so peaceful.
Air sears his lungs like fire and he gasps, unused to breathing. He blinks, eyes unable to open in the glare of the sun. He opens his mouth, trying to moan, but instead it’s a weak, mewling noise; yet it still sounds like thunder in his ears.
He closes his eyes again. Breathing is easier now, the pain more ember than flame. His mind is waking, too, and he cannot bear it. Living had too often been an ugly, painful thing.
Time passes. He wakes more, his mind beginning to sharpen. He stands, and looks about for his daughter – he has a faint sense of time having passed, but doesn’t know how much. It had been close to winter when he died, he recalls, and the air feels like spring now. He doesn’t like this feeling, this discombobulation, and so he moves, stepping from the tree, from the land.
He goes back to the only home he really knows. The place he lived and loved.
The differences abound as he makes his way back and his throat feels dry when he begins to realize it, just how many years – decades? centuries? – must have passed.
They are surely all dead. Raendel, their children – his daughter. Mahala, he had called her, named her softly beneath that tree before he poured his magic into her, trying to heal her.
(He doesn’t know that his daughter lives still – a new name, a new woman. Perhaps he will find her, eventually.)
He staggers. He’s in a part of Beqanna he doesn’t recognize, a thick and smothering forest, shadows clotting over his gray coat. He feels the scream in his throat, his chest, his heart.
He can’t do this.
He can’t.
But what can he do? He reaches for the magic he knows he once had, and he feels it, faintly, but when he calls it, it does not respond. He is too craven to drown himself, throw himself from a cliff.
So instead, he walks.
All through the forest, he walks, sweat beginning to glisten on his skin despite the faint coolness of the air. He walks and he breathes and he exists and none of this, none of this was asked for.
you ask me about love and I tell you about violence