War comes with no warning, no morning epiphany on the day where it settles its roots deep in the soil of someone's home. It comes quietly at first, quiet in those first few moments where an unfamiliar winged-silhouette framed in such beautiful gold drifts across a familiar sky. She had seen him come, but the only thing she had been struck by was his beauty. Gold and glowing softly in certain places, certain shapes, a halo above his angelic head - and even when his lips part and his mouth opens, even when fire ruptures from him with an intensity that startles her, she still doesn’t understand.
Fear is slow to find her, for there is no reason she can think of that this is an act of war, of deliberate violence. She does not know instantly that she and Choke are in danger, does not realize that she should go find her family before worse than this comes.
And it does, of course.
It comes.
When fear does finally find her, it is a perfect bubble in her chest, a glass bauble that shatters the moment understanding touches it with open, forceful palms. She cries out against the fire, horrified by the indifferent way it ruins everything it touches, by the way it turns home into something unfamiliar and charred. The trees remind her of skeletons as the leaves burn away, as the branches crackle and fall like broken bones, broken ribs that bare an unprotected heart within. She wants to cry over such loss, wants to stand and stare at this destruction until her mind can make sense of it. But there is a boy at her hip, so small and so perfect, her boy, and instead she bends around him to shield him from the ash that falls like burning comets in minature over their skin. “Come here, baby,” she murmurs as she pulls him in closer against her, presses trembling lips to each brow, brushes kisses over his ears, “stay close, don’t leave my side.”
It is a strange feeling that bubbles up inside her until it fills her throat and chokes her words, a fear that is unlike what she felt even in the face of the quests. That fear had been for herself, for what the future might bring. But this fear is for him, for the beautiful boy pressed to her skin and a rabid worry that she won’t be able to keep him safe from a world that cries tears of fire over their backs. She doesn’t know where to go, where to take him that might be safe. Doesn’t know where her family is or how far this destruction extends.
She knows only what she can see, and then, abruptly, she can see nothing at all.
The darkness is like night but for the absence of stars or the sliver of a yellow moon sitting in the branches of a tree. The only things she can see are the trees as the burn red, and the veins of magma that cut paths of bright to a volcano that sits above them like a furious, trapped sun. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, for her mind to adjust, and then in a flash of lightning the skies open up to pour on them.
She is breathing hard, feeling increasingly more frantic as the light from the fires dim and go hazy with smoke as the rain falls. But she is moving now, hurried by the clash of something nightmarishly loud overhead, by the impression of something dark and sinister in her periphery as she tries by memory to take them closer to the ocean. She moves only as fast as her baby can, pausing to kiss his faces in places where the mud is so thick they can hardly pull their hooves free. But the ocean is what she knows, and the whisper of the waves against the shore still call to her beneath the din.
There is another flash of lightning and this time it brings her face to face with a hazy silhouette. She is not a warrior, but in that moment she curls her body between him and her child, dropping her brow so that the tines of her antlers are pressed against his throat. Despite the soft ethereal glow of her body, of the ridges of bright bone and brighter antler, the blood streaked in red across her skin is enough to make her appear menacing, violent. She opens her mouth to say something that might make her sound like the warrior she is not, but she is interrupted by the sound of her name on a voice that makes her heart ache.
“Nightlock,” she breathes at him in a voice the color of pain, of tears, of raw vulnerability, “why are you here, you can’t be here.” But there is some wretched part of her that is glad he is, some broken selfish thing in her chest that is relieved when he presses in so close with his lips beside her ear. She turns to coax Choke between them, to tuck him beneath a beautiful silvery wing where he can be safe from the fire, safe from a world shattering apart around them. For a beat she closes her eyes, trails her lips across that tiny little crest of neck covered in downy baby mane so that she can breathe in the scent of him. But there is no more time to borrow with them because Nightlock is already doing his best to herd them away. She doesn’t realize it at first, is too busy lifting her nose to breathe in the smell of him, of cedar and deep forest, of smoke. Busy burying her face against him so carefully so that the antlers don’t wound him.
You have no business being out here, he tells her, and for a moment she feels scolded, small, until he presses his lips to her neck and she feels something entirely different from him. It finds her like a flicker, something important revealed to her in a flash of rawness that makes her turn and press a soft kiss to the soft skin behind his ear, lingering with eyes closed at the smell of his mane again, at the way it makes her heart ache in her chest.
He makes it so hard for her to deny him, so hard to tell him no. So hard to tell him she needs to leave Choke with him so she can go help the people she’s watched and known her whole life, and even those she hasn’t. She didn’t fight to help find the cure only to watch life decimated in some other violent way. But instead, and despite the war that rages on around them, she asks, “Is that why you’re here, Nightlock, for me?” It is soft and so tentative, gentle when she leans back to press her trembling nose to his, to find him through the strands of red forelock with eyes the color of pale green oceans.
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love