03-22-2016, 03:58 PM
And through the branches twinkling fireflies trace their mimic
constellations --
constellations --
She leaves him there.
She waited, of course, until she was sure. Until she was spent.
She had licked him clean twice over and he had answered her tender stimulation with stillness.
The grey mare had laboured hard for both of them, for the first time feeling the immense and impossible strain of two. He had slipped out easily enough, head first and well sized. It may have been a small kindness that the buckskin boy had come second – some life after death.
She wondered, at first, how much of that flame, smoke and hellishness had worried her womb. The first two had been so peaceful. Perfect.
The third had been complicated and strange, to be sure, but nothing like this. Nothing like war.
In time, she leaves him there, when she knows there is nothing left to be done. There had never been anything to be done – he had been born gone and for the life of her, she cannot remember when she had stopped feeling two move.
She touches the living colt (so uncannily like Trys and Ear – they had made it; birth is not a tidy or safe thing). She lets him drink and inhales his scent, horsehair and herself. The other boy is gone. Perhaps long gone, and she leaves something of herself there – in their quiet place of ash and blackened fern – with him. It is a small part. She has the living boy to tend to and everything in her bends towards him.
He needs her, much more than his brother ever did.
She leads him past charred trees and dead things and she knows he is too new to know any different. It is hard to say if that is a gift or a tragedy. It just is what it is and as sure as winter, the vegetation will grow again and he will know the jungle as it had been. Everything in time.
She does not bring him to the clearing (stomped flat and dusty by the hooves and paws and cushioned feet of a dozen roiling creatures) where she had kept the sanctuary, and where sanctuary had been breached by hell. She gives it a wide berth, finding a spot closer to the border not spoiled by the stench of sea things, and presses him close.
“She left me you, though, didn’t she.” the mousy mare murmurs, “Hm, Fang,” she kisses the twist of hair on his forehead and wonders what she had done to be punished so.
Fang, like from the black and deepest mouth. Like those of the raw-throated and tawny-skinned guardians that had filled the spaces left by her doubt and her cowardice, who had lent themselves to a war that was never theirs to begin with.
-- Amazonian Charoli, mother, daughter of Prague and Elladora
@[madie]
