10-19-2026, 08:02 PM
It is fall now, and the cooler temperatures have stolen all the green from the trees that tower above him. He likes it when the seasons change, when the stagnance of time shifts to make old things seem new again. He likes the reds and golds and brilliant burnt oranges, shades that seem borrowed from gemstones and sunsets. There is a part of him that wonders if there is something innately inside him that notices more of the world in this way simply because of who his mother is - because of her bark and her flowers and the way spring unfurls from her very being.
Quake is not like her, but he is not unlike her either. While he is almost wholly flesh, all soft and gray and dappled warmth, there is evidence of his lineage in the wooden wings at his shoulders and the branch-like horns atop his head. The horns bend backwards and they aren’t smooth like willow branches, the wood is dark and gnarled, twisted and with a handful of smaller leafless shoots and thorns that make the edges lack uniformity. The wings are perhaps even stranger with their thick branches where bone should be, and a plait of dense ivy leaves in the space where feathers should be. There are even white and periwinkle flowers that bloom from the smaller ivy vines that wind in and out of his mane and tail.
Sometimes he forgets how much of his mother exists within, how much of her physicality, at least, because he feels such a far cry from the stories of her he’d heard as a boy. Of a girl full of stubbornness and fierce love, of something who had fought for everything she loved and everything she had decided was hers to keep.
In that way, Quake feels only a gaping emptiness. It is not quite a chasm, not quite a depth he cannot climb out of, but every day that passes the same as the last makes that emptiness grow just a little bigger.
Perhaps it is this nameless restlessness that pushes him from the comfort of the forest where his family has always lived and brings him instead to the river at the outermost boundary. There is a shade of quiet surprise in the pale glass green of his eyes as he leans down to peer at his reflection in a part of the river where the water seems almost lazy. He traces the curve of his horns, the sage of the leafy wings relaxed at his sides. He looks at his eyes again and does not linger long enough to name that deep ache he finds in their reflection. He tracks the grey of his skin like storm clouds and fog, smiles the echo of something like fondness at the iridescent blue dapples the same stolen blue as his father. It is a wonder he can be so like, and unlike, both of them.
He watches as the wind catches in his mane, pulling loose one of the white flowers from the pewter strands only to drop it into the gentle current of the water below. Mindlessly, he follows at the edge of the bank to watch its passage right up until it swirls into a wedged, upright branch half buried in the waterbed and protruding up past the surface. He stops to watch the flower spin and spin, caught in the obstruction, in the gravity of something so small and yet still so much larger than itself. “Well, that makes two of us.” He says aloud to himself, and there is true warmth, if not an ounce of self-deprecation, in the laugh that falls unbidden from his lips and alights in the pale green of his forest eyes.
Quake is not like her, but he is not unlike her either. While he is almost wholly flesh, all soft and gray and dappled warmth, there is evidence of his lineage in the wooden wings at his shoulders and the branch-like horns atop his head. The horns bend backwards and they aren’t smooth like willow branches, the wood is dark and gnarled, twisted and with a handful of smaller leafless shoots and thorns that make the edges lack uniformity. The wings are perhaps even stranger with their thick branches where bone should be, and a plait of dense ivy leaves in the space where feathers should be. There are even white and periwinkle flowers that bloom from the smaller ivy vines that wind in and out of his mane and tail.
Sometimes he forgets how much of his mother exists within, how much of her physicality, at least, because he feels such a far cry from the stories of her he’d heard as a boy. Of a girl full of stubbornness and fierce love, of something who had fought for everything she loved and everything she had decided was hers to keep.
In that way, Quake feels only a gaping emptiness. It is not quite a chasm, not quite a depth he cannot climb out of, but every day that passes the same as the last makes that emptiness grow just a little bigger.
Perhaps it is this nameless restlessness that pushes him from the comfort of the forest where his family has always lived and brings him instead to the river at the outermost boundary. There is a shade of quiet surprise in the pale glass green of his eyes as he leans down to peer at his reflection in a part of the river where the water seems almost lazy. He traces the curve of his horns, the sage of the leafy wings relaxed at his sides. He looks at his eyes again and does not linger long enough to name that deep ache he finds in their reflection. He tracks the grey of his skin like storm clouds and fog, smiles the echo of something like fondness at the iridescent blue dapples the same stolen blue as his father. It is a wonder he can be so like, and unlike, both of them.
He watches as the wind catches in his mane, pulling loose one of the white flowers from the pewter strands only to drop it into the gentle current of the water below. Mindlessly, he follows at the edge of the bank to watch its passage right up until it swirls into a wedged, upright branch half buried in the waterbed and protruding up past the surface. He stops to watch the flower spin and spin, caught in the obstruction, in the gravity of something so small and yet still so much larger than itself. “Well, that makes two of us.” He says aloud to himself, and there is true warmth, if not an ounce of self-deprecation, in the laugh that falls unbidden from his lips and alights in the pale green of his forest eyes.
QUAKE
i leaned in and let it hurt