Silence, they say, is deafening.

It weighs, heavy like a thick, wet blanket, against her eardrums. It beats a strange and unkind rhythm – until she realizes it is the constant thrum of her heart pumping, base and bloody. And though it has surely always been there, as basic a function as it gets, it had been white noise to them both. The thing behind their bickering and reflections. Thump-thumping away.

It is a lonely sound. 

She does not recoil from the peaks, as so many do. Though she feels a sickness ache in the pit of her stomach at the sight of the long, ireful shadow it casts. But rather lingers by the mountain’s roots (garish, it certainly is – an idol hewn out of hubris to punish them; she had been weaned on natural studies – seeds, harvests and deaths – but there is nothing like that here; this thing is something else entirely, built off the back of many-magic, it had torn asunder good things, just to be). But all the same, she leans into it, turning her head this way and that, testing the air like an aerial for that frequency.

For the small voice, through the fuzz of long-carried knells. For her other, so cruelly ripped out from their shared skin. But she, too, gets silence for her trials. Such heavy, previously unthought-of silence. The last words she had shared with the rabbit had been their clearest, as if they knew it would be their last.

Eventually, as it always does, it becomes too hard to imagine her up there, suspended in cold, thin air, waiting without a body. Guilt. That is what is left, among many things, like rubble after a disaster. “I’ll be back, maybe tomorrow, if the babies do not come... I will have to bring them up anyway, of course, because I can tell...” She likes to think that she hears her, and that she gets some comfort from it. That she knows the labour that climb is – understands it to be a near impossibility.

It never softens the moments. It is betrayal and abandon, over and over again.

She does not return immediately to Tephra, to her grandfather and the thing that is meant to be home (in time, maybe, when the puzzle is put back together), but slows her course to the Meadow. There is some vague comfort in its familiarity. Really, it was home for a long time, though mostly in the nooks and crannies, protected by brambles. She feels almost uncertain so high up – and undoubtedly ungainly, rather larger than she has ever had the right to be. She circles her old places, wonders if those dropping left are hers of friends’. She drags her feet around the river, run off from winter. Feels it all, the breeze, yawning with floral scents and unsettled dust, though in a hollow kind of way. Equine and singular.

She can only smile when her eyes focus on that indigo and brown, and it takes her a moment to recognize that so much has remained the same, still. When she had met Victra, however, she had been whole. She had freshly shifted, she had begun to feel how incompatible her children were with the form. That had been a frustration – if only they had known. “Victra! There must be limit,” Longears says softly, waddling in the truest sense of the word, “before one bursts.” They are both nearing it, like two steam engines.

Neither, certainly, had expected this would be the Beqanna they brought children – all five, if it can be believed, between them! – into. But the rabbit has seen a jungle fallowed by war. A great ocean, and all its moaning creatures, set outside its border. Everything as fire and smoke. Stampedes of striped and spotted creatures. She has come to accept, by force, that her children will be lucky to know a life without catastrophe.

This land breeds it.

(@[victra] - thread title is both a quote from Watership Down, as usual AND they are both fatties)