[mature] Wrapped in skin

[City]

Whenever the gray mare is close she can hear Pangea’s hums and moans; her song. It calls to her, reaches out with bony black fingers, like smoke curling around her to drag her in. She always smiles deviously to herself and ignores it, appreciating the call but always too lazy to pursue the eerie land’s cold chant to bring her in.

City is getting old, older than she cares to count. If she had not sought the Mountain’s fertile rocks and fairies, had she not given birth at its base, she would have succumbed to her geriatric pregnancy and died somewhere. She would have been curled up on the wet ground like robin who has smacked a clean window and soon turned into a pile of brittle bones. City can’t have that. She has daughters to birth, rear, and stalk.

Every so often she will catch a shadowy glimpse of her own mother and it reminds her that she will soon be the vanishing shadow in the corner of her daughters’ sharp eyes. Always present - lingering - but in a good way, mostly.

Pangea’s song echoes in a particular way she does not ignore today. She listens as her daughter, a long legged little pinto born just a week before, nurses greedily under her freckled belly. She swishes her long blond tail and casts her sulfur-yellow eyes to the skeletal trees on the horizon that mark the eastern border of Pangea. Time to go, she bumps her gray nose to the filly’s shoulder and commences a calm walk toward her destination. The tiny filly doesn’t hesitate, in her short little life she has done almost nothing but walk at her mother’s hip. She’s covered much ground in just a week of being alive, by the time she is six months old she will most assuredly know these lands by heart.

It’s not long before the fleabitten old mare and her bouncy child find the pair, three wet children, a bleeding mother and a stallion standing over them. Because she is a creep, she listens before she breaks passed the curve of bright sandstone to reveal herself. She hears him declare he will see her soon, cooing to the children like a father and saying odd things in a soothing tone. City was suspicious.

Was this some murder suicide? What in the fuck…?

“Hey.” Her chilly voice cuts the quiet, the only other sound being the clop of her hooves to the stony ground. “Normally I would mind my own business…” She sort of mumbles this, regretting already that she was wandering by. “But what exactly am I looking at?” She looks to the very dead mother and her three newborns, who the stallion seems to address like they’re full blown adults…. City has raised two, almost three, daughters and not one spoke before they were a month old…but perhaps that is because City does not often communicate with her voice to them that young, but nudges and purrs, grooming and gentle nose bumps. She was almost curious to see if the children addressed him in return.

She clearly died in childbirth, surely three foals can rip through a vessel like an iceburg… But what was this about seeing her soon? Her first guess was naturally that murder was about to be afoot. Her child, at her hip, simply watches blinking and quiet.

CITY & PADME
the high black water, the devil's daughter

8

@[Tähti] @[Clayton]

<3333 sorry if i rambled.