[open] find what you love and let it kill you; gates, any

[Longear]

The sky had caught fire and burned a brilliant orange. A prognostic kind of colour, she turned from it and the heat it seemed to burn against her face – in it she felt war and war’s price is what she aimed, always, to forget. And then it came. Like a wind. Like a plague, killing everything meaningful in its path. 

Like a battle, beating drums and driving a warpath through the latitudes of Beqanna.

It had split, creased and folded up onto itself and in panic she had fought against the shrinking and tugging of her own body, threatening the slumber of her unborn babes – blissful in their knotted, peaceful place. (‘This is not right.’)

If someone had asked her later, after she awoke, she would have said that the last thing she remembered thinking, was that she had never heard the second soul speak to her so clearly.

----

She stayed there for a long, long time. Curled up in a nest of rocks and foxtail, fattened and teary-eyed. “W-What do we do?”

(‘We must leave.’)

And it had been so, she knew she could not stay forever. 

She could feel it, in the ungiving and unwelcoming hold of rock beneath her body. It had a queer kind of distance about it, as if it were a weapon made of everything they once knew and loved – turned against them. She knew it, also, as she heaved to breathe thin and strange air, unaccustomed to her lungs (or her lungs to it); no, she could not stay, cooped up and together, not while she beared the weighty things of nativity and need – for the coyote. Her mother. Father. Brothers.

Home.

So she sniffed and shuddered and struggled to her feet, to pass through the unknown.

----

“H-Hello?”

Empty. Quiet.

So very, very quiet, and still.

Longear has never truly been alone, not since the odd circumstances of her birthing hours. Not until now. This is alone. This is single-mindedness. So quiet and still. And empty. She sniffs, blinking the watery blur from her eyes and passing trees and marks of land, testing their shape and texture with her lips and nose – she cannot tell if she has ever seen them before. If this is the forest, or the forest clearcut and reseeded. The meadow? Or something made to mimic it for their comfort.

Everything is there, untouched and perfect – bright yellow coltsfoot and white foamflower; rocks and springtime detritus – but replaced, sowed different into the earth. Different earth. Rearranged or entirely alien, she can’t tell by the scent because everywhere horses wander in dazes and bump into one another with ‘sorrys’ soft as lamb’s ear.

‘I’m lost,’ she thinks, and the whisper is meant for her, and it goes searching through her bones and meat to deliver the plea. No reply. So she wanders and bumps until no clarity comes but she thinks she sees someone familiar in the distance. Father. But, no – her heart sinks, because it is not him (with Fang in tow) but something too much like him to ignore. She is tugged to the stallion, looking for consolation in the wild, dark hair and yellow body – Trystane and Fiero are in their, somewhere.

“M-Magnus?” she has heard the name before, and now it is all her mouth can hold. She lets silent sobs wrack her body.