@[demian]
In your post, you can have the eagle come and swoop down to attack or whatever?
‘Longear! Run!’
And she runs. Her tiny heart pounds as she scrambles under emergent roots and leaps over soggy deadfall (the kinds of hollow and rotten logs she likes to play in best, and inspect insects that carve their homes in the soft skin – is that kind of fancy over? mercifully, perhaps she is too young to have all of the wonder poached from this place, even as it burns and belches smoke all around her).
She dodges the pounding, padded feet of an elephant and the sudden scrum between two leopards, rolling in a messy blur of spots and wild cries. They find in each other an outlet for their panic and stress, driven mad by the unnatural way that they have been made to leave their habitual solitude and come together in a close stampede of fur and feathers and thick, grey skin, and slimey backs and scaled bellies…
All around her, above and behind and before, charges a mighty parade of beasts.
The jungle in one, singular and destructive migration away from the immense hum and crackle of magic gathering on the borders.
‘Find the rest of the sisters, find the mare that is calling.’ She makes sad, scared noises as she runs, moans and sniffs pressing from her lungs alongside the gulping of air. For all the scarlet and indigo feathers that fall around and on her, and for the whoosh of verdant green and sparks of bright, white fire that herd the stampede zig-zagging towards safety, she is keenly aware of what she does not see – her mother.
Just run.
‘I am. But I need her.’
She slides to a stop when she reaches the hoof-cleared center, where all the beasts now sway and pace and where Prague roars like a lion. She screams, shifting into her filly self, turning ‘round and ‘round to look for mother. “Longear,” the bright, relieved sound clears the swell around her and she runs to her, touching and smelling and though she is almost two, she presses against her mother and finds calm there.
She should have stayed there. ‘Why?!’
Suddenly, when mother had been joined by wild cats and enormous, agitated elephants, circling not just their own young but the babes left behind by the warriors, she feels that familiar jolt of electricity run between her eyes and down the knots of her spine. She screams and rears back, fighting it and cursing it, but she is a cottontail and running, control of her body wrest from her by that second soul.
They are two. But they are not two in unity. They are two set apart by their fates – one well loved and nurtured, the other taken from the foot of death and both made to occupy each other.
Because we need to run away.
She could hear her mother screaming behind her, calling hopelessly.
She shoots a gap between sentries and speeds from the kingdom, down and away, through bushes near the border where her mother had found that ravaged rabbit nests and had changed the course of Longear’s life as she was readying to deliver. Overhead, smoke billows and gathers like angry storm clouds – from miles away, screams and licks of flesh on flesh fill her ears. She runs (or she does not run, but is carried) far, past the Valley’s borders and the playground, and into the clear of the Meadow, where she regains some agency and skids to a stop, sent tumbling through the dry grass.
A shrill screech sounds from far away and in a moment of panic, she grabs control and shifts, breathing hard and shakily getting to her hooves.
LONGEAR
Fiero and Vineine's little bunny.
And she runs. Her tiny heart pounds as she scrambles under emergent roots and leaps over soggy deadfall (the kinds of hollow and rotten logs she likes to play in best, and inspect insects that carve their homes in the soft skin – is that kind of fancy over? mercifully, perhaps she is too young to have all of the wonder poached from this place, even as it burns and belches smoke all around her).
She dodges the pounding, padded feet of an elephant and the sudden scrum between two leopards, rolling in a messy blur of spots and wild cries. They find in each other an outlet for their panic and stress, driven mad by the unnatural way that they have been made to leave their habitual solitude and come together in a close stampede of fur and feathers and thick, grey skin, and slimey backs and scaled bellies…
All around her, above and behind and before, charges a mighty parade of beasts.
The jungle in one, singular and destructive migration away from the immense hum and crackle of magic gathering on the borders.
‘Find the rest of the sisters, find the mare that is calling.’ She makes sad, scared noises as she runs, moans and sniffs pressing from her lungs alongside the gulping of air. For all the scarlet and indigo feathers that fall around and on her, and for the whoosh of verdant green and sparks of bright, white fire that herd the stampede zig-zagging towards safety, she is keenly aware of what she does not see – her mother.
Just run.
‘I am. But I need her.’
She slides to a stop when she reaches the hoof-cleared center, where all the beasts now sway and pace and where Prague roars like a lion. She screams, shifting into her filly self, turning ‘round and ‘round to look for mother. “Longear,” the bright, relieved sound clears the swell around her and she runs to her, touching and smelling and though she is almost two, she presses against her mother and finds calm there.
She should have stayed there. ‘Why?!’
Suddenly, when mother had been joined by wild cats and enormous, agitated elephants, circling not just their own young but the babes left behind by the warriors, she feels that familiar jolt of electricity run between her eyes and down the knots of her spine. She screams and rears back, fighting it and cursing it, but she is a cottontail and running, control of her body wrest from her by that second soul.
They are two. But they are not two in unity. They are two set apart by their fates – one well loved and nurtured, the other taken from the foot of death and both made to occupy each other.
Because we need to run away.
She could hear her mother screaming behind her, calling hopelessly.
She shoots a gap between sentries and speeds from the kingdom, down and away, through bushes near the border where her mother had found that ravaged rabbit nests and had changed the course of Longear’s life as she was readying to deliver. Overhead, smoke billows and gathers like angry storm clouds – from miles away, screams and licks of flesh on flesh fill her ears. She runs (or she does not run, but is carried) far, past the Valley’s borders and the playground, and into the clear of the Meadow, where she regains some agency and skids to a stop, sent tumbling through the dry grass.
A shrill screech sounds from far away and in a moment of panic, she grabs control and shifts, breathing hard and shakily getting to her hooves.
Fiero and Vineine's little bunny.
In your post, you can have the eagle come and swoop down to attack or whatever?
“My heart has joined the Thousand,
for my friend stopped running today.”