"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
Sunrise, sunset.
Time has no meaning to her, their land, but she counts the days anyway. And each day that she counts, all those hours and days and years that bleed into one another, her children take from her. She opens her arms to them, gives them her magic in the form of everything imaginable, gives them mountains and meadows and all but the heavens themselves; and still, they take, they clamor for more, hungry mouths that are never sated.
She paints them every color of the rainbow; she gives them control of the water, the fire, the earth. She lets them turn into animals, lets them reshape their bodies again and again. She has always been free with her magic, has always supported them as they grow ever more elaborate, as they become angels and demons and stars.
She gives, they take, and they are thankless.
They take it for granted, this life of splendor, they use their magic – her magic – for petty squabbles, for wars that have no victor, to promote themselves as false gods. They forget from whence they came, they forget that she is alive still, that she watches. They forget all she has given.
To make them listen, she strips the kingdoms of their magic. She even floods their - her - deserts, soaks the sand until it’s an ocean. But they do not heed her warning, they continue to live recklessly, to stomp and squabble on her breast.
They have never been very good at listening.
She cannot pinpoint the exact hour when she decides she has had enough, when yet another drop of her magic is wrenched thanklessly from her, the final straw, the catalyst that finally tips her into furious.
She knows it’s a sunrise, though, the air pink, the world not quite awake.
Fitting, really.
Sunrise, sunset.
She builds the Mountain first, huge and towering, builds it from pieces of every land, a culmination of her work, of herself. She strips what magic is left from the land, gathers it back within herself. In every land there are earthquakes as she reshapes - remakes - herself, but she does not bother to listen to their screams. They will be safe; the fairies will make sure of that.
With the fairies, she then herds them to the Mountain, the last capsule of magic she’s deigned to give them. Around the Mountain, she creates a border, a barrier of invisible hands ready to gather the threads of magic about them and yank it back when they cross, to take back every brilliant color, nearly every gift she has given them.
The first magic was this: wings, horn, immortality. Before they grew greedy. Before they grew thankless.
This, she will still give. This is what becomes of her magic.
(It’s gracious of her, really. To give them this much. To allow the Mountain to have magic at all. She has always been too giving.)
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the Mountain is. By the time she is finished with the creation, by the time they have all been gathered here, bewildered, most of the day has passed, and the sun is setting. Fitting. She has no face, but Beqanna smiles, anyway.
Sunrise, sunset.
