You're Just Like Heaven To Touch
An eternity passes, one where Tiercel experiences the worst pain he’s ever felt, followed by the strangest sensation he can’t put his finger on. At first it hurts more than anything, because Leliana’s brambles are so thick and wild he can barely see any light through them. But then… then it feels alright, in a funny way. Well not alright but not so bad anymore. He’s not even aware at first that another colt has come to help him: his ears have completely healed over a thicket of bramble wrapped around his head.
When that first wave of calm washes over him though, he knows. It’s momma. He wriggles against the binds that hold him tight, taking her emotion and amplifying it right back in the form of unbridled joy. Mother has come, mother will save him. The trembling is like a quiver of life in the otherwise hard, vicious hedge.
Another vibration joins in, down below him. It shakes through the web of thicket and Tiercel feels his heart leap inside of his chest. If he could just move in any way or direction he might able to do this… or maybe loosen that. But for now he only wiggles like a worm on a hook, encouraging the activity best as he knows how.
The battle for freedom gets louder. Tiercel can feel the thorny vines break and snap underneath the lion’s claws, one swipe taking a vine that’d grown into his hind leg and jerking the shimmering blue thing free nearly up to his gaskin. It hurt and Tiercel couldn’t care less. The free limb was thrashing wildly. The going was getting easier, somehow. The branches weren’t so hard anymore and his other leg twisted out. He slipped down a bit.
Amidst the struggle the boy’s eyes began to sting painfully, maybe from the way he was using his own weight to jerk and scramble away from a thorny grasp. It’s only when one of his ears rips open freshly that he hears the faint crackle and afterwards, the smell. The joy he’d been radiating out in clouds of forceful emphatic emotion changes suddenly to panic. Who in their right mind?! He thinks, selfishly unaware that Brunhilde hadn’t known of his current “predicament”.
To her credit, it makes him struggle that much harder and faster. Again he drops, suspended now by one thick rope of twisted vine that’s healed into both of his forelegs. “I’m stuck!” he screams out finally, “It’s getting hot,” and indeed it was, “pull me, just pull me Momma!” the boy screams, certain that the flame is about lick into his skin and devour him right up.
And then, he falls. Plummets a few inches that feel much farther than they are, directly into the embrace of someone waiting to hold him and with eyes that stare out into the gathering that had come to save both himself and Starsin's brave little Malone.
Tiercel