12-08-2018, 07:42 PM
Her life has moved through too many cycles, too many events forced into just one lifetime when there is enough to be strung through the lives of so many generations. But there is only her, just the one mare with her broken mind and her broken heart and body that refuses to be so fragile.
She remembers him, but it is not with the same weight that he remembers her. His memory of her - or the memory he has bound her to - has a gravity all its own, drawing everything to it as though it is the only aspect of his life that still matter. But she is her own gravity, drawing more than just one defining dark to the soul she has become.
Malis, he says, and she is struck suddenly by a sense of nostalgia that displaces her in time, takes her back before the loss of her children, her husband, any home she has ever known. To a time where she had not known how love could change her so, make her better.
Except it hadn’t, not really.
She had ruined that too, killed him and everything still left in her heart with a doom that followed her as devotedly as her shadow.
Until she had grown fat again, heavy with children she might’ve expected to resent. Children from a dark god she did not love, a man who was not a man at all, and certainly not the one she had given herself to. But in them she had found hope again, found a peace she did not deserve, a happiness that snuck up on her in fleeting smiles in one corner of her mouth, a flash of amusement when her daughter so gently outmaneuvered all of her wild twins efforts to bully her.
They were everything in her that had ever been, and would ever be, good.
But looking back into this face, this shade of purple so impossibly dark, so unmistakable as it claws to the surface of her memories, she thinks of nothing but her furthest past. Of a girl with plain brown skin and wings in her heart, of the faith she had held in such a gentle, loving world. So protected by parents who still loved each other so easily. And she finds herself asking, the muscles in her tense jaw drawing furrows in her cheeks, “Who would you have been, if the choice had not been made for you?”
She remembers him, but it is not with the same weight that he remembers her. His memory of her - or the memory he has bound her to - has a gravity all its own, drawing everything to it as though it is the only aspect of his life that still matter. But she is her own gravity, drawing more than just one defining dark to the soul she has become.
Malis, he says, and she is struck suddenly by a sense of nostalgia that displaces her in time, takes her back before the loss of her children, her husband, any home she has ever known. To a time where she had not known how love could change her so, make her better.
Except it hadn’t, not really.
She had ruined that too, killed him and everything still left in her heart with a doom that followed her as devotedly as her shadow.
Until she had grown fat again, heavy with children she might’ve expected to resent. Children from a dark god she did not love, a man who was not a man at all, and certainly not the one she had given herself to. But in them she had found hope again, found a peace she did not deserve, a happiness that snuck up on her in fleeting smiles in one corner of her mouth, a flash of amusement when her daughter so gently outmaneuvered all of her wild twins efforts to bully her.
They were everything in her that had ever been, and would ever be, good.
But looking back into this face, this shade of purple so impossibly dark, so unmistakable as it claws to the surface of her memories, she thinks of nothing but her furthest past. Of a girl with plain brown skin and wings in her heart, of the faith she had held in such a gentle, loving world. So protected by parents who still loved each other so easily. And she finds herself asking, the muscles in her tense jaw drawing furrows in her cheeks, “Who would you have been, if the choice had not been made for you?”