He had told her to run. He had told her that he would break her heart, but still she stayed. Still, she stayed until she waxed fatter than the full moon, full with child, and mother’s milk. She stayed, but he did not return. So, she slipped into the oblivion that is Mourning Mountains, into fog, into the jagged, toothy conifers.
Liselle was there.
Her daughter had grown strong, and beautiful. They had embraced, and laughed, and Locklyn had cried secretly as Liselle slept. For a time it was as if Liselle was just a small filly again, there shrouded in shifting fog - the two of them, alone.
When the twins came, Liselle hummed the lullabies that her mother had taught her, and Locklyn pulled them all close. But, she often wondered over Barret, just as her young heart had once wondered over Atrox. Their faces melded together in her dreams, until she couldn’t tell one from another. She caught herself staring up at stars that way He once had, and just as her mother once had studied spider webs.
He had told her not to fall in love with him, and yet a part of her had. She had not meant to.
She finds herself returning to the Meadow to find that part of her again when Liselle leaves to return to her own path. The twins cling to Locklyn as she guides them into a world beyond the mountain fog. Magdalena is the more daring of the two. She scampers over rocks, and explores every inch of her surroundings. Coatl is stoic, and stalwart, always watching over his sister.They never stray from each other.
Locklyn remembers the night they were conceived. She remembers stars, and smoke, and ash. She remembers Barret, and all his brokenness come to rest upon her. She had done her best to pretend to be an island, when she was no more than a stone within a raging ocean. She looks at her children, and she sees him in their faces. She sees herself sinking down, down, into the depths. Without them she would be gone - lost at sea forever.
They give her life. They give her breath. So, she gives them everything she has left.
She does not know what she expects to find here. Perhaps, memories laid to rest beneath the Meadow grass. Perhaps, one last breath of the smoke from His pyre. She wanders the familiar, well worn trails, while Magdalena hums, and Coatl eyes the treeline warily.
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l o c k l y n
belgarath x laiken |
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@[Barret]
12-10-2015, 01:38 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-10-2015, 01:39 AM by Barret.)
‘What do you see?’
‘Ghosts.’
If he did not remember, it would not have been the first time.
She is one of one thousand. She is one of so many that he counts them now like loose change, casually and without delicacy, learning the roads of their bodies for just long enough to map the lefts and rights of them out on canvas before blazing new trails in all the time it takes for the hands of a watch to spin from twelve to twelve. So if he forgot, if he fell shy of her memory, if he lost the flavor of the syllables in her name spelled out on his tongue, it would still be okay. It would be all right. It would be normal.
If he did not remember it would not have been the first time.
But he does.
She had smelled like the ashes of an empire he had held on his shoulders for too long.
She smelled like the settled smoke of a fire that consumed until there was nothing left but the bones of structures that once were homes. The sweat on her skin was raw and sweet, but real, more tangible than most things in those moments. She didn’t remind him of the pyres. She didn’t remind him of the graves that he had dug out. She smelled like torn up beaches and aftershocks. She smelled like galaxies and beginnings. She was not a kingdom, an empire built of shit. She was not red like the sunset, didn’t hate him like she should have. She was the antithesis of everything else.
She wasn’t Margaery.
‘What do you see?’
‘Ghosts.’
He had met her in the dark. They curled together like tessellating mosaics, swaddled beneath a blanket of galaxies and black velvet that seemed to roll out of the horizon infinitely, filling the emptiness of the skies like the last yellowed light of sunset. He didn’t want it. She touched him, and he had let her. He didn’t want it. She touched him, and he had been full of holes and bleeding heat through his skin like ice water pouring through the fissures of glaciers. He didn’t want it – but she touched him, and he was full and warm and forgetful.
He didn’t owe her an ‘ever-after’.
He had told her to run. He had told her to run fast.
He had told her that he saw ghosts – that he might even be one himself. He had told her, but then his lips had grazed that soft patch of skin behind her ear, and he’d exhaled breath that was warm and spilt across the expanse of her flesh like paint, soaking and staining all of the land on her body it ate up. He told her not to love him, and then he devoured her. He told her not to love him, and then he breathed her deep into his lungs like a cancer. He told her. He asked her. He told her not to love him, and all the while he thought about how nice it could be if she did – because love made him important. Love made him something wanted. Love took away the memories. Love made him someone else’s fate instead of mistake.
“What do you see?” He asks, instead of spilling out her name into the echo of the meadow. He holds that secret in the back of his throat, because if he says her name it means he remembers, because if he says her name it means that the night when he held the maps of her body in his palms that it meant more than just coordinates.
She has often turned back into her past to hit replay over, and over again. She has often wondered where she would be if she hadn’t given herself away to Atrox, and then to Barret. She turns back the pages of her memory to the times spent following the will of the webs with her mother. She had never understood them. She did not have the gift that her mother had.
Oh, how she longs for their guidance now.
She traces an old scar that climbs up a grassy knoll. Magdalena follows along, nipping at her mother’s tail. Coatl lags behind, hesitant to take his eyes off of the treeline. His skin prickles as he turns to follow his mother and sister, but it is not the treeline that yields danger this time.
Suddenly, as if by magic, there is stallion in their path.
Locklyn’s breath catches, and Coatl snorts, but Magdalena is slow to realize what is going on (her nose still busy with her mother’s tail). Then he speaks, and his voice is strange to the young foals, but so achingly familiar to Locklyn.
“What do you see?” he says, and suddenly the smoke and ash arises.
She had once asked him the same. Once, as he wandered through the starways - always just out of reach of her. That, her, who was everything that Locklyn wasn’t, and isn’t. Locklyn has never been blazing sunsets, and passionate fury. Locklyn has never been anything; she has just been… there.
“Ghosts.” She says, as her children rally to her, peeking out curiously behind their mother. Locklyn is almost thankful for the daylight, but fear still escapes through prickled skin.
What is she to say to him? Surely, he knows that these children are his, but Locklyn doesn’t expect him to be a father. Afterall, Locklyn herself had grown up fatherless, and Liselle had followed suit. Locklyn finds it strange to think of rearing children any other way except alone. That is not to say she had not once dreamed of a different life. Years she had spent in the mists of Mourning Mountains waiting for Atrox, but like she was for Barret, she had been little more than a place to lie his angst upon: a temporary release from their strife. Creation is easy for men.
He may not say her name, and even if he claimed he did not know her, Locklyn would know it to be a lie. He looks so different in the daylight, but still so utterly the same. She looks to her children.
“Coatl, Magdalena, this is your father. Say hello.” she says, pushing past the angst that chokes her heart, and strangles her resolve.
Magdalena is oblivious to her mother’s strife, and trots out from behind her shadow. Locklyn holds her breath. She does not trust Barret; She knows better than that.
“I’ve never met a ghost before.” says the little bay filly to the burning man, looking at him expectantly.
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l o c k l y n
belgarath x laiken |
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@[Barret]
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