City

When she met the group in the field that desperate autumn day she had been just three quarters of the way to the end of her pregnancy. As her mother before her she doesn’t have too much more weight on her other than the child squirming inside of her swollen abdomen. She travelled west that day, knowing it would take her ages to get there in her condition…and that was before the great quakes and massive chunks of land falling into the hungry sea. Beqanna had rebelled again, she set off her alarms and shifted her pieces, and the faeries have feasted for now. One can always feel it when the faeries decide they’ll take a break. City travels slow and methodical, taking her time as she picks along the coast. She spent time in the River, waiting for the winter’s first signs before heading northward for the final push. For one whole day she struggles with intermittent pain and a restless prisoner within her.  Rain drifts down ever gently. She’s on the coast; storms are brewing and thundering miles away and within her as well.  Each time a flash of lightening and a crack of thunder webs across the sky the fetus inside of her, no fetus anymore, kicks furiously. She walks with her ankles buried in soft sand and lapping sea-foam from the gentle waves crashing along the open beach to the north-east of the hills. In the night the rain beats harder and come the morning she had to find a thicket among the shallow hillocks and birch forests bordering the lake. She was born there in the early rose-colored hours of a wet spring morning in a thicket of winter-berries and white trunked trees. Oleandar, said with City’s thick Valley accent, purring softly in your ear. 

By that afternoon the child was dry(ish) and fit to travel. The pair makes their way out of the hidden thicket and back on the main path, the pale, wide-eyed moth child awkwardly steps in the light for the first time. The forests dappled shadows drink her happily and beside her exhausted looking mother she seems to glow in the dawn’s light. City stops for a moment to preen at the little thing a bit more, checking her over carefully. The filly is all legs and pale gold. Her nose is a mottle pink fading into white that moves up her nose and sharply stops at a point between her large baby-blue eyes. Those eyes see more colors than any regular filly could ever imagine. For now things beyond the distance of her mother’s freckled hip only melt together; the sweet smell of her mother’s milk and an occasional soft nicker pulling her along. She bears wings, bright and delicate. Each wing is constructed of two parts so that they may fold against her ribs like a pair of regular Pegasus wings. Long tails dangle from behind her, rusty and yellow colored. Each fragile appendage adorns a set of gray and black eye-patterns on each side surrounded by yellowish green and rusty patches throughout. An inky black border lines the edges and paints the very tips of each. Her mouth looks only slightly different from your typical equine muzzle, but just a bit parroted. Her top lip narrows and extends rather dramatically to help control her long nectar hunting tongue (her proboscis). As she grows older her mother’s milk nor her mother’s method of feeding will healthily sustain her. In time she’ll only want fruits, occasional fodder and nectar from special flowers. Her long legs are high-socked, the white marking serrated at their edges as they crawl up her lank, fuzz riddled limbs. These leg hairs are long and fluffed like feathery fishbones, or like dandelion seedlings floating in the breeze. They can read those very breezes as they subtly dance in its mild current. For now the baby doesn’t do much but follow her mother wide-eyed and silent. 

They travel for a few more days before she can hear the crashing of sea to granite wall. The saccharine smell of heather mixed with the wind-swept aroma of salt is the first thing both of them notice, both digesting it differently. To daughter the smell is one of the first to burrow itself into her memory, among those of the soil she was born on and the scent of her mother. The mother welcomes the aromas, having never lived by the sea before, immediately soaking in the bugless flow of constant wind. This wind keeps the trees at bay, she can see as she walks quietly over the invisible border of Nerine. She’s still on the coast, travelling by sand-way and sometimes in the small forests along the ocean’s edge. The pale mother leads her tiny leggy moth-baby inland a mile or so. The earth seems to rise in front of them and the ocean sinks at their backs. They scale the greenery lining the granite steppes; it is a giant land ramp in some parts and a dead drop in others. Trees only managing to group where the wind does not rip. Heather of all colors masses across the lush landscape. She  stops out in the open somewhere, the afternoon sun finding her grazing and  her child nursing happily. Every so often the freckled mare will lift her head and scan the horizon with her yellow eyes to look for someone moving in on them, but otherwise she chews hungrily at the spring grasses at her feet.

rushed and filled with all I found
more, give me more, give me more

City

The moth-baby is still unsteady on her long pale legs; those knobbed knees shaky as the terrain morphs from stones to grass and back again. City tenderly picks at and grooms over the baby, bending her milky freckled neck to snake protectively around the fragile little thing as she nurses. Orion comes lumbering forward, his footsteps making the ground tremor beneath their toes, Oleandar breaks away from her mother with a start. City’s tail sweeps calmly from side to side with a subtle message of calmness for her daughter, the baby abides and returns to nursing while the blurred stone-gray figure of Orion approaches.

Molten gold. The day’s light hits her eyes just right while they peel over the dappled man coming forward so bravely, as if they’re good friends. She resists the serious temptation to snap at him and demand he give her space but she lets it go and keeps her teeth herself. She does nothing to hide the hard stare or the flare of her gray nostrils. He prattles on, a greeting, small talk and inquiry of her child’s name. No, but thanks. She’s about to find something to say, trying to feign interest in this recruiter who gave her a free pass to these cliffs, for which she is genuinely thankful for (so far). She’s saved however, another silhouette is slithering through the grass toward the trio. Two, actually.

The daughter is now staring with her giant globular eyes, pale jade in tint, pupiless and metallic in their lids and under those long white lashes. Her pink nose twitches and blinks curiously, her butt tucked against her mother’s underbelly. She can see the stranger sharply now, the day’s sunlight blinding to her sensitive night-keen eyes. The second stranger is only but a dark cloudy blur at first, but her voice precedes her approach. Another shadow creeps forward and she's not sure if she's seen another... Olea’s long, skinny almost antennae like ears flip toward the women and her intriguing voice. Her figure is broken in color, smoke and clouds, or stone and snow. The baby has only seen landscape in her short life and so these coats of all kinds are akin to such, apparently. Another child comes forward but they’re voiceless at first, blurry and then detailed as he gets closer. This one smells funny to her, that is the colt smell, different than the sweetness of her mother’s milk, the fern sort of smell of another mare or the musk of a stallion – no, colts smell much different, she’ll discover. City does not bother to snap at the Queen’s son but she eyes him suspiciously all the same as he seems enamored with the little winged thing pressed against her. the freckled gray mare disregards the coy game of wit the Queen employs; something about trespassers? The blood-eyed mother has zero interest in humor, or playful games of intimidation, or whatever the painted woman is trying to do. City ignores everything but her name and nods.

“I’m Castile” City’s attention, her eyes, flick back to the colt almost involuntarily but she says nothing, only looking to her pale wide-eyed baby for a reaction. She has a mother moment, realizing this is the first child, the first living thing beside City, to say anything to her. The mother wonders briefly if the baby might be frightened, but she’s not. She’s still and blinking, and silent. She’s still so very little. She is, however, very inquisitive and reaches out to bump her pink nose against his own. Something like a smile creeps at the edges of the mother’s lips but she soon remembers where she is and who she is around. She turns back to Nayl. “City.” She leans toward the boy, “Her name is Oleandar.” Her valley accent laces each word. She smiles awkwardly, noticing she is sort of pleased with how the boy is interested in the moth-baby. She finds the piebald mare again, “When she’s grown a little more, I can be of better use than just a body – intelligence, military, whatever. I can earn my and her spot here.” She casts her yellow eyes out to the populace scattered about, from horizon to horizon and back to Nayl. She expects the woman to tell her more; what shape is the kingdom in perhaps? What should the citizens do? Goals? Such a fetal little Kingdom must have goals and laws, yes? She searches the mare’s face, the Queen’s face for something deeper than a common greeting.

rushed and filled with all I found
more, give me more, give me more