"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
The mists had gradually dissipated, revealing lands untouched, but taking more than what was given. Fiero had never known a loss quite like this one. He and Fang had been separated when the mists took hold of the Gates. They had been waiting on the border for Longear to meet them. Fiero barely remembers that much.
What he does remember is the last time he saw his sweet, earth drenched Vineine. Before the mists came, softly stealing everything with silent fingers, there had been hope that one day she would wander back to them, to him. But now, even as new lands have been uncovered, he knows the Jungle is gone, and with it, his Vineine (the one that was never his at all).
It's only fitting that Beqanna rips his children from him as well. How his heart bleeds out without the certainty of seeing them again. How the guilt pulverizes his lungs until he can do nothing but gasp hopelessly, silently, into this wretched new Beqanna.
She would have seen such beauty. She always had, even in the harshest of elements. He had loved that about her. Fiero can't bear to search for that beauty now. He hates it here, and he blames her, though she did not bring the mists. She did not take Fang or Longear away from him as she had Trystane. No matter how she embodied mother earth and all her wild power, Vineine did not do this.
He could have lived completely ignorant to her aching gravity if he had not met his son that day in the Meadow with Magnus - if he had not approached her when he saw her in the dappled forest light in the days that followed. He should have been mad at her then, and the pain he feels now would be nothing. He should have hated instead of loved, and he could have died lonely, but without knowing the difference.
He looks into the hallowed wilderness, new and unmarred by old wars, and he speaks to her, though she is gone.
11-02-2016, 05:38 PM (This post was last modified: 12-19-2016, 12:21 AM by Vineine.)
Teeth.
Teeth like treetops.
Teeth like mountain ranges.
Teeth like rocks jutting from a grey lake.
She spent a hundred years searching the earth’s dentition (– what felt like a hundred years –), following the gumline of rivers and rough woodlands. In the quagmires and gullies between wolf teeth and premolars; standing on the edges of sandy incisors and staring down the endless tongue of jade-green sea, into the back of a throat so vast, it contained the world entire.
But always, those jaws closed.
Closed as the sun gathered darkness on its lips, like a tiger’s – black.; as the tissue of rock and soil and leaf greyed, as if spat out of Hell.
Closed, as patiently she waited for the jaws to hinge shut around her, so that when they reopened, she could search some more.
---
She comes back.
She always does,
She, like a bird following a migration.
Nothing looks the same. It is reordered, remade. A fractured and reset world, one that had healed perfectly, though not equivalently. No. The Mother had been clear. This is a different place – with different trees and different winds coming off similar oceans divided by different continents.
She does not need to be told that the Jungle is gone.
The Jungle was consumed long before She reconstituted it; long before she had left, and then come back.
---
‘Longear.’
She repeated it like a mantra.
She remembered the magnificent moment her daughter had come back, wary and tired. She had pulled her close, kissed the whorl in the center of her forehead. Checked all the places in between her ribs and knees for safety. For unbruised and unbroken skin. She had thanked The Mother for her swiftness; the doe for her sacrifice.
For a hundred years she repeated it.
But always, those jaws closed.
---
—but, in the flesh, Vineine is little changed herself. She is still small, round, robust. Like a rock in a river or tree in a halestorm. As she has always been, hewn from wood and adorned with grass and vines; baptized in warm rain and spring run-off that felt, at first, like knives, until the skin grew accustomed to it.
Except that she has been searching, for a hundred years, and so she is wilder, still.
Moss-grown and dirty; hawk-eyed, she peeks around the trunks of reseeded trees, gathering twigs to join the many that stick from her wind-kept mane. She smells of soil and sea salt, of a hundred different lands – rose hip and dahlias; the sharpness of mint and the sweetness of overripe mango. Mountainsides and cliffs, patterned by the lines of their slow creation; salt flats and vast places that were once waterways – remembered only in the strange, spiny imprints of prehistoric fish in the bedrock.
These trees and this snow, are so painfully familiar.
---
‘Fang.’
Oh, but this one cuts deep. She had whispered it into the heavy, heady air of the Jungle. He had come first, and he had been a trial. Longear had come without a trace, and even though it was her first, she had sense something was not right. Passed like air, the filly had not fallen damp and heavy into the understory as she should have.
When she looked back she saw nothing.
But it was not lost.
When she examined closer, she found her, of course – pink, hairless and tiny.
Fang was substantial. Real. Nature, and so the struggle had been all the sweeter.
And then, on to the next.
---
When she hears his voice, she follows it. Instinctual. Like a bird on migration. She remembers this moment in copy, many years ago. Then, she had felt such overwhelming guilt. Now she comes to him, with those eyes that are bloodshot from the search, and she feels none of that.
She is tired, and she is expectant. She is patient, and she is disappointed,
“It was lost a long time ago,” she answers, one ghost to another, her forehead crinkling as she makes to close the gap between them. That, which had been gaping and indescribable for so long.
Lost.
When she had forced him out.
Lost, when she had waited until he would not stir. Would never stir, and so she left him to the tigers, interned lightly in what dirt she could shovel on his body with her hooves. “Where are my children? My boys? I’ve been looking for him, but...” (Had she seen Fiero? Before she left and after he had not stirred? In the moments between dusk and dawn, before she left and then came back, when she paced deep circles around her son and wondered why she had been forsaken...) “He’s gone, I think.”
