WATCH THE FLAMES CLIMB HIGH INTO THE NIGHT

A winter storm on this midsummer day; I'd always imagined my children to be fiery, but they'd always come up with ways to surprise me. A spring goddess, a medium, a sullen winter soldier; they're less like me and less like Hestoni and all together their own. Despite my initial reservations about motherhood, it has turned out to be perhaps the most blessed part of my life -- no, not perhaps. Definitely. My children are my life - it is they who I returned for, as the world of the dead grew dark around me.

She'd not meant to tail him, but so many parts of the rat's life had been unplanned. Meeting her husband that day in the meadow, losing him to a sacrifice so powerful that he'd had to... kill... to have it reversed. She'd not planned a miscarriage that day in the Valley as she stood a prisoner; she'd not planned to give the crown to her nemesis Lagertha when a fickle labour threatened her life. She'd not planned to be a mother, since her own had been such a bitch; and she'd not planned to love those self-same children as much as she did...

But, she did.

In the wake of his wintery breeze, Scorch cloaked herself in the perfect mix of light and shadow such that she became essentially camouflaged, unless one looked closely. Her ears pricked to catch the muttered curses flowing beneath her son's breath, mouth turning down as she attempted to piece together just what on earth had him so worked up that he couldn't even smell his mother behind him. But that's why she was there, of course; to find out. To help. Even if he didn't want it; even if it killed him to tell her.

Sometimes being a mother is the same thing as being a bitch. Sometimes there's not a way out of the rock and the hard place. Sometimes, you just have to be both.

"Leilan." With the word, she discarded her cloak - mostly. Subtly, she kept herself dark by sending away atoms of light, preventing frostbite as the darkness absorbed the most heat that it could from the sun above. Her eyes - green, as they'd been long ago in this very land when she'd met Hestoni - squinted and tumbled through a range of curious emotions as she stepped closer to her son, a tender expression on her face - even if it wouldn't be for long. He had to know that she loved him.

"I won't leave until you tell me what got fucked up."

Scorch

Once Khaleesi of the Amazon Jungle

WATCH THE FLAMES CLIMB HIGH INTO THE NIGHT

She wasn't here because he hadn't visited. In fact, few of her children visited, even the dead ones - oh please, you would go mad if we were always with you - so it came as no offense to the veteran mother. Shahrizai, the child with whom she was perhaps closest, spent the most time with her these days, listening in that quiet and profound way of his as she lamented about all sorts of things, past and present. As her molten eyes scoured her younger son, she knew that this interaction would also be passed to dear Shah - she had never been a heartbroken young man, and she knew that he had been.

But, in another way, Leilan was right; she had a nose for these things.

With a blatant disregard for dignity or self-worth, Leilan spat the grass from his lips as if it were tasteless granules of sand. His eyes, brown like his father's, came about slowly to her - and then found her with a sickening snap. In response, her own expression darkened considerably; her thoughts about Shahrizai disappeared; she recognized this set of emotions now, as she stood before them and received the blunt force of their prowess. She remembered them, and without warning, they rose like bile from her stomach to her throat.

It wasn't the same situation, not nearly at all; but as a storm brewed behind her son's eyes, one came behind hers, too. She remembered watching her mother burn alive in a dream; she remembered being charred, but running in this life to find her mother despite the literal melting of her flesh; she remembered finding her, dead and dying and poisoned by the hands of her own true daughter; she remembered running, screaming, biting; she remembered bleeding in the middle of the meadow and, though she had no powers like Leilan's, practically killing the life around her for the sourness of her heartbreak; and she remembered the man who came and saved her from that pit.

She could only guess, but - she felt as though the saving grace in Leilan's story, had been the one to cast him into this pit in the first place.

I did.

"How?" The word is a bark, followed by a snarl as her charred lips curled up to show bared teeth. "As if anything in this life could push you to throw such a temper tantrum so openly." She returned the volley of his challenge, ears laying back as she ridiculed her son for his public outburst - one that she had had herself, so long ago. It didn't even occur to her that she could continue down the tender route; despite not being of Echion's blood, she'd learned bad habits from her neglectful and dispassionate faux-mother. She'd learned to be hard; too hard.

"Tell me, or else there will be no redemption for what you did."

Scorch

Once Khaleesi of the Amazon Jungle