07-26-2020, 06:46 AM
l e p i s
gave me the blues and then purple pink skies
Lepis takes a long breath, and the spring air is warm and wet in the back of her throat. This near to the ocean, mid-spring is indistinguishable from summer, and the humidity had arrived with the rising sun. The taste of the ocean is heavy in the breeze that pulls at her dark hair, and the pegasus’ blue-grey eyes trace the horizon of Beqanna’s southern bay. She turns to the right, tracing the shoreline of the distant Pampas, and a small smile appears on her age-lined face. The smile turns the somber-faced mare into someone far younger, a mother of grown children but not yet a wizened elder. Yet the expression lasts only long enough for her to look north, across the hills and ridges of the red kingdom.
The pegasus had wanted the shift of responsibility to feel different. Handing the reins of the southern empire to someone else should have lifted the burden from her shoulders, and yet the ball of worry in her stomach has grown no smaller since naming Oceane as Queen of the Southern Lands. She considers, not for the first or tenth time, gathering up the threads of Straia’s gift. They seep out of her, intangible in every way except the most powerful, spreading peace throughout the lands of Sylva, Brilliant Pampas, and Loess. They’ve been successful in the only way that matters, and that is worth the toll of bone deep weariness.
Kestrell is safe. That is all that really matters.
The knowledge of her other children is another weight she carries, but they are men and women grown. Though she wishes them here, her power over them as a mother vanished with adulthood, and they have made their own decisions. That thought resurfaces, and Lepis shakes her head as if to physically rid herself of it.
Another gust of wind catches her mane, and Lepis descends the dune she’d been standing on, and makes her way down toward the shore. A ways down the beach, a gangly gray and white colt splashes in the shallows. Lepis keeps the young pegasus ever within earshot even as she wades into the water and rinses away the dust of their travels just as she’s instructed of Kestrell.
The pegasus had wanted the shift of responsibility to feel different. Handing the reins of the southern empire to someone else should have lifted the burden from her shoulders, and yet the ball of worry in her stomach has grown no smaller since naming Oceane as Queen of the Southern Lands. She considers, not for the first or tenth time, gathering up the threads of Straia’s gift. They seep out of her, intangible in every way except the most powerful, spreading peace throughout the lands of Sylva, Brilliant Pampas, and Loess. They’ve been successful in the only way that matters, and that is worth the toll of bone deep weariness.
Kestrell is safe. That is all that really matters.
The knowledge of her other children is another weight she carries, but they are men and women grown. Though she wishes them here, her power over them as a mother vanished with adulthood, and they have made their own decisions. That thought resurfaces, and Lepis shakes her head as if to physically rid herself of it.
Another gust of wind catches her mane, and Lepis descends the dune she’d been standing on, and makes her way down toward the shore. A ways down the beach, a gangly gray and white colt splashes in the shallows. Lepis keeps the young pegasus ever within earshot even as she wades into the water and rinses away the dust of their travels just as she’s instructed of Kestrell.