as if death itself was undone; birthing, vulgaris

[leliana]

leliana

I could hear the thunder and see the lightning crack
and all around the world was waking, I never could go back

She feels surprise—and it is the most human emotion she’s felt in minutes.

But the surprise quickly fades into something like a curiosity, something like a need to understand. It pauses her, halts her actions, when she would have otherwise been in the air and gone. His anger, his rage, flow through her—nothing more than a breeze that doesn’t reach her core.

“You are angry,” her voice is puzzled, turning his fury over in her palm to examine it from every angle, looking at the lights and shadows of it. “How strange.” She can feel the flowers blossoming beneath her feet, feel them beginning to crawl up her legs—these precious reminders of a power she does not yet know how to harness, a power that floods into the earth beneath her unchecked.

“I,” it feels strange to say it—strange to connect herself with the actions and thoughts of her previous self, like a memory that does not have roots in her soul, “I have loved you through so much. I have forgiven your sins. I have lied to our children to cover up your transgressions. I have turned my cheek to your violence and accepted you back into my arms despite my own fears.” Despite her fears, she almost says, but she does not. She recognizes that she and that sad woman are one and the same.

She does not divorce them in her head yet.

“And yet at the barest hint of betrayal, you are so quick to cast blame and slip into anger.”

Sorrow, disappointment, anger—they are all things she could feel at his reaction.

Perhaps does feel, in that strange echoing of her heart chamber. But she dismisses it and just takes a deep breath instead, focusing on the vines on her legs and the whisper of breath around her.

“How frail your love for her must be.”

It slips then, but she doesn’t correct herself. For a second, the glow of her eyes fades and the hazel appears. Leaving the lovely lines of her face the same—a memory, an echo.

But it doesn’t last. It is just a breath of time. It’s just a heartbeat.

The power builds in her again and her eyes glow like magma as she turns her head toward the skies. It is time, she thinks, and although there is a tinge in her as she looks toward the tangle of limbs that is her son and daughter and takes comfort knowing that they will be loved and looked after and cared.

More than she could offer.

More than he would let her provide in this new form.

But it doesn’t matter—none of it does—and so she unfurls her wings and leaves.

[ no more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world ]

@[vulgaris]