Once upon a time (birthing) - Gleam/Spark/any

[Alight]

once upon a time;

She loves them.

She protects them fiercely, wrapping her spitting, hissing wings around her swollen body and taking to an oddly carved cave at Pangea’s outskirts. She paces that curved, twisty, dark hideaway like a mother wolf, flapping those great flames at anyone and anything that comes too near her hollow.

She presses her nose against the round of her belly, breathing into them, feeling them rustle and move under her skin—and she knows it is them! She can feel it, pressing full and firm in her stomach, that there is more than just one heart beginning its frenzied, ready beating. There is one for each of them to hold at night when they do not hold each other.

***

She feels the agony of labor wash over her, hard and cruel. Everything about this travailing had been done in the name of love. This is no different, though when the time comes, her mind grows fuzzy with pain and she thrashes, her wings licking the sand and filling their den with a burnt smell. Then she settles on her side for the parturition—digging furrows in the sand with her restless body. The cave grows cold and dark as the sun dips below the scarp, but her wings light the quiet room and provide heat.

(She loves her.)

The girl comes first, plopping out with a heavy grunt, onto the sand. There is immense pressure released and for a few, precious moments, she spends time alone with her, releasing her nostrils from their sac and licking the slime from her coat. “Ohhh,” she breathes softly into her forehead, never letter her lips leave the damp skin; an astral cloak unfurls across her bird-delicate body. “Look at you, Gleam. Your daddy can teach you the names of all those constellations, one day.” She is just like him and it is anguish to let her go when the contractions come like the clouds of a storm.

(She loves him.)

Alight presses her head into the sand, bearing down on the earth below her. She can hear the soft sounds of Gleam moving behind her, shaking in the darkness. Woosh. They come again, reminding her of Tephra’s shores and the waves that lap the sand up like dessert. ‘Ooff,’ she grunts, her eyes closing tight. Woosh. The ache draws her free wing in a wide, errant arch down across to clutch her belly, wafting heated air into the cave. ‘Ahhh…’ she knows this pain. Caustic and unbearable, her body does not relent to it like it had before the flowered mare had saved her, but the tissue that burns and dies must do so before it is replaced with another sacrifice. Over and over, she moans in torment as his head and feet are thrust free, and she panics, twisting to look over her shoulder at Gleam—“careful,” she just barely months, before her eyes lose their focus and she droops back down, his smoldering wings slipping free from her, loose of their singed sac.

***

She lays with them, careful not to touch Gleam with her wings and careful to keep Gloam’s contained, too. “My beautiful loves. You must hurry.” She stands, and this prompts them to try, too, searching for their mother’s milk as she delivers the placenta onto the dusty ground, an offering this ugly hell does not deserve. She lets them nurse, admiring the twinkle of her and the conflagration of him. 

They are little mimics, in opposite, so perfect and tiny.

“Come. We’ll go see daddy, now.”

***

She does not notice their struggle, though she keeps them close to her, wings draped over their heads in mean defensiveness. “Just a little farther, now, my dears,” she coos at them. The walk from Pangea to Tephra is a long one—walk and swim—and she does so lathered with sweat and sore in the groin.

(All of this is for them So they can be together.)

She sets her teeth and drags on, deaf to the complaints of her babies, marching along on either side of her. (Gloam huffs and groans, staggering now and then over uneven ground, catching himself on his mother’s side with his bright, burning wing. Every few steps he peeks under her belly at his sister, sighing in her direction.)

The swim across the strait is hard. 
Alight lingers on the shore for a while, pacing and considering the consequences of failure. But they are so close, and perhaps these babies are like her and mother, and cannot be choked out by the water. She considers Gleam, her perfect skin and knows she could test the durability of it—her wings snap and spit sparks, their cruelty stills her. It is a chance she is unwilling to take. Alight clings to these maybes, anyway, and to the draw that keeps her pining for the volcanic island, late night making the water dark and daunting. “Come on, then. It’ll be fun. You’ll have to get used to it eventually.” She tries to hide the shake in her voice, flanking them to nudge their bums with her nose, guiding them into the cold water.

***

She sees them across safe enough, hurrying them from the water and checking the nooks and crannies of their little bodies. “Not so bad right?” (Gloam coughs and grumbles, standing still for his inspection, his eyelids blinking sleepily.) She smiles and comforts them both, then turns to look across the beach and into the thick nest of vegetation at the foot of the volcano, Gloam to her left and Gleam to her right.

The waves come and go, softly as they wait, the mare intimately aware of the nocturnal way he wanders.

“GIVER!” she calls, finally, a demanding bellow that echoes rudely across the slumberous kingdom. (Gloam startles and squeaks.) Alight smiles, nudging one and then the other with her nose, “he’s coming.”

He cannot help it.

PHOTOGRAPHY © TASHA MARIE

[Giver]

It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?

It had been such a vivid dream.

He watches as she does not grow heavy and gravid, perplexed. He watches as her stomach does not move, as he supposes it would had it not be a dream.

It was a hard dream to relegate to unconscious fantasy. It had been so real. The feeling of her lips on his cheek and neck; the feeling of her beneath him, knees held tight as he explored newness like nothing he had ever felt before. For a while, he wondered if she was not just playing with him—he kept his lips tight, not desiring to hurt or unsettle her. 

It was easier, for him, to let it burn in his chest like a little candle threatening larger flames. 

If it was a joke, it had been cruel and gone too far.

But every day, she stayed the same—wild, wind-blown, earthy and small; beautiful and as she always is—and he spoke no more of it, only tossed it around in his head as he paced the hot shores, wakeful. When he closes his eyes and finally relents to dawn sleep, if he is lucky, he relives the moment—skin and warmth and all; her scent becoming more than grass and flowers, thickening with something far more intoxicating and arousing. A scent he had taken in before, but never opened up and released like he had that night. 

Or had not.
Or had in a most vivid dream.

He is sleepless tonight. Unlike what Alight might have hoped, Giver does not feel them enter the world, miles away in some dusty cave. He does not feel the earth move beneath his feet. He does not feel the stars shiver on his skin as the little girl joins the venerable. Their birth is a natural thing—though their conception had not been—and it was private, as most are.

He wanders through the forest, unknown to them and unknowing.
‘GIVER!’
His stomach clenches sickeningly. He knows that voice. It is not one he can easily erase from his mind. It had been his voice, sometimes, when he was a boy. It had been the voice he relented and answered to, happily, for many years. “Alight…” he mutters, unsure of how to feel and even less sure of how to act. A liberated sliver of him steels against the clout of that voice—‘you are not hers any longer.’

Another part unravels as easy as a woolen blanket tugged at.

He goes to her, anxiously, hoping Spark has not been alerted. Hoping nobody has, so he might have a chance to deal with this alone. His bright, twinkling body passing through darkness before emerging from the thick growth. She is easy to spot, hemmed in fire like a sun. He sighs, slowing down to approach her. They hide well beside her, small and quiet, but as she raises those great flames up and hot light casts their shadows long and strange, their faces are lit up. He stops for a moment, brows furrowing.

It does not make sense. He carries on, having not yet seen the way the filly looks like him and the way the colt looks like her.

“Alight… what are you–”

But she twinkles under that sun like a night sky, her skin like his, sharing that old energy and the tiny particles of stars caught up in that aura. Breath rushes out of him as he stares at her, his mind untangling the cloudy image of their young minds—scared, tired, confused? “Alight…” he gulps and looks to her left, where the colt stands, his own bright wings drooping to the ground, his skin gold and his eyes bright.

“Alight… what… what is this?”

Anger foams in his throat—a holy, perplexed, unfamiliar anger—“what did you do?” He takes a staggering step forward, his mind racing.

(Gloam squeezes himself with his wings, blinking up at the man.
He can feel his protective nature calling to him in a primal way, but the ire and confusion—two things he is too young to understand, a vile mixture—keep him at bay.)

It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger

[Spear + Spark]

For the first time in her life, she begins to know more and more of loneliness.

Spear has forsaken her for his own dreams and needs.

Giver comes and goes, always finding her - always orbiting around her, like now - as he comes back, happy and aglow with the stars back in his skin again. He had touched nose to cheek and her own small insignificant world righted itself a little more in that moment, from just that one connection of skin to skin.

He spread his starshine glow like sunlight and she came to crave it more than the sun itself. Happy to bask in his affections and constellations both, that she did not miss it (or Spear, cleaved so neatly from her that it was almost surgical in its precision - their split from one another and she did not have time to really mourn it either). But behind him, lurked a shadow of mare with flaming wings and a hard daring stare that left Spark curious as to why she bore the brunt of so much dislike, and sometimes, it caused a hint of unhappiness to lay to rest the smile about her lips.

Eventually, the shadowy mare went away and Spear still did not come back to her.

All she had was Giver and herself, and at times, she told herself this was all she needed.

At times, she told herself this was enough.

She traverses the hot and heavy landscape; often passing by the volcano and the orchids, a few of which have become stuck in the curling folds of her hair. Spark smells more and more like this landscape, exotic in some way but still just a horse - small, wooly, and often marred by grass stains or soot from long ago eruptions. Maybe she is less wild for having stayed put, but she cannot think of this now because he comes, happier than she has ever seen him. He seems changed, but she cannot think of how because she presses her nose to his cheek, aware that dusk creeps behind them and the stars in his skin will ignite the moment there is a healthy enough lack of light. For now, she steals that one touch and smiles up at him.

“Where have you been?” she teases softly, as if chiding a wayward colt that has only now come back to the herd.

He doesn’t answer her, and time marches on…

Time that keeps that together, sees them gone from one another less and less but she cannot stomach the way he looks at - stares, so often. His look of confusion is one that leaves her just as confused and even scared, like he is expectant and unrewarded. It starts to become too much for her, and she leaves him as he leaves her - him to the hot shores and sleeplessness, and her to the darker more volcanic heart of Tephra. The shadow of the volcano feels cold despite the heat that slumbers inside the big black rock, and at times, she leans against it - lets the volcano hold her up because she cannot stand it, their separation or the way he looked at her so much, every look more perplexing than the last! It sickened her until every bite of grass and every sip of water turned to ash in her mouth. When she can stand it no more, she pushes off the volcano’s hard black side and turns to find him --

GIVER!

The impatience and command in that single word alone, stuns her.

It takes her longer to find him then, facing the mare from long ago that always cast hateful looks at Spark like thrown stones. But the mare is not alone, even she can see that in the magnificence of light that binds all of them but Spark together. She looks at him and her in miniature, tucked up close to their mother’s side and she feels a tear or two roll down her cheeks and a hurt in her heart that she has never felt before.

(Gods, how she wished Spear was there!)

(He is not, and she is small and alone beneath the vastness of the deed that has been done and the way the world grows frighteningly bigger and darker despite the light of all of them before her.)

Unnamed emotion stops up her throat, and she is in some small way glad of that.

They may notice her and they may not, but she cannot stop staring at the foals that look like Giver and Alight.

(She knows now, that is why he fretted in quiet and looked at her so much - he looked for signs in her that were never there to begin with, and she remains virginal and small while Alight looks like a conquering goddess all aflame. Spark hates her for that, hates her for but a moment as her own heart cracks open beneath a great weight of betrayal.)

Spark

[Giver]

It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?

If she could have remained unnoticed by him and alone in her anguish, it would have been a mercy. But she doesn’t – she can’t. She smells too much like something he knows he needs, he bends towards her because she does not want to possess in chains but grow entwined the way ivy does. Alight’s face twists in antipathy for shadows that stretch out behind him and he turns to follow her gaze, his gut clenching viciously as his mind feeds on unfaithfulness and sips on woe. He is all the more angry for Spark’s appearance – angry at Alight, for having brought this profane chaos to these shores; for the wedge he had let her drive between them – green and insidious; 

Anger at Spark’s searching heart, that it could not have slept out the rest of the night in ignorance.

His mouth moves dumbly, desperately trying to piece together the puzzle – missing so many pieces himself – so that he can explain it all to her in a way that would be enough. Explain how a dream can become reality in mutant monstrosity; explain to her how Alight is dangerous, not just broody or lurking and acidic. But ugly, now, in her confusion and her mania; that somehow the depths to which her mind had sunk had birthed something corrupt and twisted—

Somehow all her aching and imploring had breathed life into a painted-up mimic.
Somehow it had worked.

Somehow.

How?

“Wait. Spark… wait, I can… it isn’t what it looks like.” In any other situation he’d hope – maybe even arrogantly expect –  she would believe him. One hopes the bonds woven are strong enough to carry through to gentler shores, but this is a kind of unearthly storm. He breaths, heavy and frenzied, turning his eyes back to the babes – he can feel that they are deathly tired, shivering under Alight’s great wings despite the heat wafting from them; they are confused, sensing things they cannot understand. This feels like a hopeless situation. Like beaching on a deserted island rather than by an oasis – if Spark turned her back on him now, he couldn’t possibly blame her.

He’d rile against it. He wouldn’t give up, not without trying.
“I thought.. It was you…” he beseeches, fully aware of how strange it sounds.
Of how he should have known.

“Tell her what you did,” he demands, hard and cold and quiet, his bright eyes now boring into what conscience Alight might have left, tatters and rags. He takes another step, this one more commanding, towards Alight and the children, who she seems to grip tighter and tighter with her wings (now, unthinkingly pressing those flames dangerously close to both of their bellies – if it weren’t for their immunity to the heat, they’d catch and burn). “Tell her what you did Alight! How did you do it!”

---

(Gloam shrinks back, further behind mother’s inferno;
In front of him he feels righteous anger – so pure even he, a baby, understands its baseness.
Beside him, he feels something slimy and queer – terribly off putting; one day he will find out the sensation is like touching a tangle of worms with his lips; one day he’ll understand how vulgar it is – but the obscurity of Alight’s emotions make them safer to him. He leans towards her to find stability but finally his knees give out, dropping him on the sand.)

---

“What? Tell her what Giver?” she whispers, turning her wide, mean eyes to Spark, glowering. She does not feel Gloam lay down. It isn’t about them anymore; it is about the hard, smarting aggression in Giver’s voice, the way he advances on her with such ire on his lips… those lips. Those lips.

(Those lips.
She had touched them.
Had he not touched her with them?
Are they not hers?

They are hers.)

“What is there to say?” she speaks in contrived bewilder, countering his own emotional, raised voice, her wings pull up, spitting a thousand hot sparks into the air, exposing Gleam and Gloam, “what needs to be explained?’ (The filly blinks, with the same miniature constellations as he; Gloam is the same silvery buckskin.) She smiles, and it is a victorious and callous gesture.

“Does anything need to be explained, Spark?” she asks, calmly, hugging her wings back in around the twins.

“Don’t fight me, Giver. Please. Look at them.”

He continues to close in on them, slowly, the end goal a hazy thing – lashing out at Alight? Sending them all to the deeps of the black, calm waters at their back. He watches the boy collapse and his gut twists.

They are his. He knows this.
It is an alien, uncomfortable feeling. But they are, and their weakness – which he knows as clearly as if it were his own, tasting the bitterness all the way to his cortex – disturbs him. Her carelessness with them incenses him! “I don’t know how you did it, I don’t know why… what were you thinking would happen?” she wasn’t thinking, he knows. Because she is crazy. He cannot point to the exact moment it happened. It had been a slow progress, or else it has always been there.

Alight takes a step back, water licking her ankle, pulling the girl along with her, leaving the boy in a tiny heap on the damp beach. “Giver. Stay back,” her voice is shaky and warning, she snaps the heated air with her wing – that is a warning, too.

He clenches his jaw, something possessing him – something primal and something novel – “Go back, Alight. Go back to wherever you have been hiding.” If he ever sees her again, he thinks, it will be too soon. This severance feels swift and final, but in front of him it dawns on her slowly. Painfully. Her mimic smile fades and it is replaced by unclothed disappointment. Horror.

She knows – that does not mean she will ever accept it.

“They are still yours, Giver. You firsts,” she calls the last word, pointing it towards Spark like a whip’s tail, “that will never change.” (It had been beautiful. It had not been right, of course, because if she could have had her way, she would have come to him as she is – flamed and golden – and he would have had her.) She stumbled back, pulling Gleam along, back into the sea, fumbling at her other side, feeling for the boy that is not there anymore.

Panic takes her. She reaches for him, crumpled over. “Gloam, get up. Come here baby.”

It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger

[Spear + Spark]

This entire debacle is a car crash in slow motion;

She cannot look away --

Spark has fallen down the rabbit hole into a terrible vile dream - a nightmare, even.

She shuts her eyes against the miniature visions of them - Giver, Alight, and wishes hard upon every star in every constellation he has ever made dance across his skin and the air for her to go back in time, back to sleep, back to before - whatever that was, just before this, before she stumbled upon them and all the sad unhappy revelations of deeds done to everyone but themselves and mostly, to themselves. They are vile beasts, him and her and it is only the hurt in her heart that makes her think that because there is no way that Giver could be so vile as the viperous Alight in her happy gloat. Despite it all, she loves him and she plants her hardy feet in the ashen soils of the Tephran shore. (She should balk at this, she knows she should but some temperament of steel straightens her small backbone.)

“It is every bit of what it looks like,” she says to him, quiet in her assurance.

Spark cannot turn her back on him - not now, but she cannot quite go lovingly to his side at this moment either. She believes that Alight has tricked him and most cruelly, but she does not know how and doesn’t care to know. The knowing might further undo even her and she is fragile enough as is by the appearance of the foals, those poor beasts that seem so tired beneath their mother’s flaming wings. Unbeknownst to her, her heart goes out to them and some of the hurt leaves her like a sighed breath.

She says nothing further to him, for the moment.

Believes, but the fierce beat of betrayal is still strong like a war drum in her pale breast.

Spark stares at them, Alight and the twins; her eyes are a mismatch of black on the left and red on the right. She sees the colt collapse upon the dark sand and a tiny gasp leaves her mouth in response to it. Alight seems not to notice or care, and she almost advances a step as if to do… what exactly, she isn’t sure but there arises in her some feeling of responsibility for the poor thing. Some uncontrived spark of emotion that bursts inside her, completely unexpected as she stares at the jumbled heap of silver buckskin fur and exhaustion.

(So like Giver, so like his father…)

Alight’s glower draws her eyes away from the colt and to the mean mare’s face.

Spark’s face is set in a tired pinch of emotion, almost expressionless but the voice that leaves her once trembling throat is oddly calm - “No, no explanation is necessary.” She takes yet another step forward, hot on Giver’s heels as he begins to spark and react. The violence in him does not scare her but her concern for the twins begins to mount as Alight almost cowers before him. Spark detests the way that the petulant mare uses the filly as a shield, no - a bargaining chip, and clings to her as a lifeline. Above all else, Spark recognizes in Alight what the other fails to see - that she is pathetic, chasing after something that will never be hers because it is Spark’s, and that is Giver’s precious heart.

This and this alone allows her to temper the sting of Alight’s hurled barb about the babies being his firsts, even if ill-gotten through trickery and magic. She smiles sadly in the wake of Alight’s attempt to hurt her further and regains Giver’s side, not really forgiving him just yet but aligning herself with him in a show of solidarity. “You should go and leave them here, you don’t really care about them. It was never about them, only him and you’ll never have him like you did before.” It does not pain her to speak the truth, she states it in a strong hard tone of voice as she advances a step further than him towards the mare, the babies and the sea.

Spark