"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
A cold wind skirts the meadows softly tree-lined edges.
On its journey through the newly greened branches of oaks it finds her, too, every facet of her quaking body as she writhes against its still-wintery jaws. The truth is that she hasn’t felt real warmth in what had seemed like eons.
Sometimes she thinks about the last time, about the warm autumn sun that filtered in through the eyelets of the leaves and left her body dappled by the shade of a red maple tree’s heavy boughs. There in the long grass, daydreaming about subterranean cities forged by the ghosts of people she’s loved, was one of the last times she’d felt anything at all.
She’s there in the meadow when the last fragments of light leave the sky, when the blue drowns the last colours of sunlight like the sky itself is an ocean. The clouds roll in then, leave the night as empty and light-less as she feels in these moments.
What stands here now, huddled in the thorny branches of a leaning hawthorn shrub, isn’t Eilidh.
A constellation of dried blood outlines the places he had touched her, like pins in a map; in the sunlight he began at the fall of her hip, and by evening, with hours of miles clocked, he sank into the soft flesh of her neck. Once she had been beautiful like her mother, with soft eyes and gentle curves instead of harsh angles; she is altogether different here, nothing soft left of her as her ribs and hips jut out where they shouldn’t, and with her dark eyes leaking rivers of matted hair down the planes of her face.
The sickness had ravaged her, certainly, but beyond it still it was the misery that ruined her, that sunk in to her cells far deeper than the disease ever could.
She wants to die.
She wants one thing left to her that is easy.
(“I wonder what they’d say to us right now.”)
She thinks of a different him entirely, then, lets a single fragile smile find her lips at Leander’s memory. Back then she had told him that her mother would have told her to find her light in the darkness, but now she isn’t so sure.
Maybe, instead, Moselle would call her home.
Maybe, instead, she would have mercy.
“What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end."
She is already sick. One trip to the meadow, and that had been enough. She couldn’t expect much else, really. Her entire life she has been a walking disaster, a black hole that sucked in bad luck. She might be part of the problem; she knew the risk she took when she came to meadow, leaving the protection of Tephra. She looked for trouble, and she found it.
It is just as well, she supposes. There was no use in quelling her wanderlust, in keeping herself confined to Tephra. As long as she didn’t interact with Skellig or Evenstar outside the borders, they would be safe. And truthfully, they are all she cares about.
It is easy to see the blood against the stark white of her coat. It is bright and startling, when fresh droplets run from her nostrils and spray from her mouth with each heavy cough. Her lips are stained a blush pink, and with her hollowed sockets and too-thin frame, she looks every bit the beautiful disaster she is. Her mane falls in thick tangles along the arch of her slender neck, and when her forelock manages to shield her scarred face, it easy to see that at one point, she had been iconically beautiful — not in the tragic, ghostly way she is now.
There is another nearby, and she can hear them along with her own rattled breathing. A ragged cough that sounds above the lullaby of the night, and she follows it. She comes alongside the younger girl, feels for her shoulder with her soft muzzle, and then she says gently, ”You shouldn’t be alone, in the cold.” Her statement is contradictory, as her own cough shakes her body and her skin shivers with fever, but Ryatah never has been very good at looking after herself first.
And maybe it’s mercy, or at least a form of it, that finds her next.
Because a gentle touch that grazes her left shoulder turns Eilidh’s cheek towards a stranger she’s never known but plays a role in her history, her making, regardless of her knowledge of it; a being who is not Moselle, but at least one who had perhaps once known the freckles across her cheeks, or the softness of her eyes, or the kindness of her heart, or maybe even, that she loved the stars — at least one who had perhaps once known all the reasons that her memory would still be worth dying for.
If she only knew.
Instead though they are perfect strangers, made obvious by the soft gasp to claw it’s way out of Eilidh’s gently parted lips at the rather garish sight of her. It’s obvious that she’s sick by the ways that her temples have sunk into her skull, and the blood that leaks from her nose that mirrors her own. Her eyes are only painfully empty sockets, as hollowed out as the rest of her — and even still, Eilidh follows the ogee curve of her face, pale and otherworldly with violent red splattered across her cheekbones and lips, and decides that in another lifetime she was beautiful, too.
The world had not been kind to either of them.
“You shouldn’t be alone in the cold,” says the stranger, as though the cold is what will finally end them both — not the disease, not the monsters they have known, not the misery. She almost laughs aloud at the irony, but instead shrinks back against the thorns she’s made a home from as though she’s suddenly afraid to be peeled out of the bramble and back into the night, as though the act alone would renew her in a way she isn’t yet ready for.
“There are worse things,” Eilidh muses aloud, a gentle smile curving her lips — because even here, even like this, dying and desolate, she is still a gentle thing.
“I think you know it, too.” Of course she did. Each scar that mars her once-pretty face was one worse thing, wasn’t it?
“My name is Eilidh,” she says, wondering then if this sightless stranger will be the last to know — the last one that she tells. There is a simple beauty to the realisation that this interaction is potentially the last. The air seems fresher, like she can taste the spring and the new river run off in every breath. Like the meadow, in spite of the night, is sharper. If this is the last, she thinks, she is ready for it.
“Who are you?”
Maybe she would be the last to know, too.
“What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end."
There are worse things, the stranger says, and the smile that plays at the edge of her lips in response is a melancholy one. There are always worse things. The universe had not always been kind to her, and whenever she found herself wondering, could it possibly get worse, she had been shown that it could. Over and over, her happiness had been stripped from her, until she finally learned to destroy it before fate could. It seemed to hurt less, when you are your own destruction. It could also get worse, but death is not part of the equation for her.
Death had not been able to kill her. Even after rotting at the bottom the sea, it had spit her back out. There truly was no rest for the wicked. She was destined for this, to break and repair, sometimes stronger than before, until she was once again turned to dust.
”I suppose there are,” she agrees amicably, her voice too placid and gentle for someone that has clearly endured so much. One thing the world had not managed to do, was make her hard. She is mild, and though stronger than she seemed — and often felt — it did not outwardly show.
Her name is not familiar, but then again, so few of them are. ”Eilidh,” she repeats, the lyrical name singing off her tongue like a song, and she adds with another simper on her blush-colored lips, “Your name is lovely.”
”My name is Ryatah,” and she wonders how many times she has said her own name; a hundred times over, at least, between all the kingdom meetings, the trips to the meadow, and everything that took place in between. Her name is worn, but she doesn’t expect the girl to recognize it. There are so few that still existed that would have ever known who she was; not even her own descendants knew her name anymore. She is a living ghost, and she has decided she is okay with that.
Eilidh feels the hot trickle of blood as a place on her hip she’s pushed into the hawthorne splits open and a rivulet begins down the side of her flank. The stranger tells her that her name is lovely, and for that Eilidh smiles again in spite of her aching body. “Thank you,” she answers, closing her parted lips before more can escape out of her from across her tongue and through her teeth. She doesn’t want to tell her its meaning — not here, not like this; not skin and bones and thorns with an insatiable thirst for mercy.
A light in the darkness, she would have said in another time, her chest puffed out with pride in Moselle’s unwavering optimism. Eilidh had always been so proud of her; her kindness, and her thoughtfulness had been unmatched. She’d always wanted to become something her mother would be proud of, too. Is it shame then that is gnawing now at the soft flesh of Eilidh’s belly, twisting her guts until she’s sick — or is it only disease?
Perhaps, like Ryatah, that’s what this is: her own destruction.
Perhaps that’s why she leans her hips into the thorns and doesn’t think to move. It’s a choice. It’s one small thing she has some say over when everything else has been decided for her. Maybe it’s not about loyalties (to Moselle, to the mound of earth that houses her bones) at all. Maybe it never was. Maybe it was one frightened orphan who had clung to the only sense of control that she ever could. All this time she had thought she’d been fearless, that she had carried on in spite of the havoc her beginnings had been.
But what if that was wrong?
Ryatah gives her a name then, one that she repeats softly aloud as she was accustomed to, tasting each syllable across her tongue. In these moments they are both echoing a previous one, though neither of them knows it.
“It’s lovely to meet you,” Eilidh says, not unkindly. It is lovely, even if they’re both dying, even if they’re both only shadows of who they had been before.
“Do you think Beqanna will survive this?” She asks, a small cough racking her little body with a wince to follow each heave as her insides throb.
It is too late for them, surely, but maybe not the world.
“What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end."
She knows nothing of the girl that stands before her. If she had any way of gaining the knowledge of her heritage, if she only knew who her mother was, it would change the very energy of this meeting. Ryatah owed so much to Moselle — including the immortality that kept her here, a gift from the magic mare so that she could always be there to keep the Dale safe. The porcelain once-Queen had succeeded, more or less, even though the rebellion had cost her her sight. It was the first and last time she had let her tongue grow sharp in the presence of Carnage.
But even still, without knowing anything, she is drawn to the younger girl. Perhaps it is their kindred illness, or because she can feel her sorrow without having to see her. She has always been allured by sadness, maybe because it has always blossomed in her own chest and spread through her veins moreso than blood itself. She understands it more than most other emotions; more than anger, more than happiness, and even love — her love has always been overshadowed by sadness.
”It’s lovely to meet you, too,” She murmurs her agreement from her reddened lips, and she moves forward at the sound of the girl’s sickly cough. She presses her muzzle into her neck, an almost motherly caress as her lips trail briefly against her warm skin, before she pulls away. ”Beqanna has seen times worse than this plague, believe it or not. There are always those strong enough to pull the lands from the darkness.” Another smile, and though laced with melancholy it is still hopeful. ”You’ll see.”
Her lips are stained red, Eilidh notes, trying to imagine that it isn’t blood that’s forged the striking gradient that bleeds out from the centre of her companion’s lips until it fades away, soft and fragile, entirely. It’s beautiful, she thinks without wanting to acknowledge it, as though she’d been dining on cherries and beetroots instead of dying. She looks away then, because there is something confronting about her red wine lips and there are quiet parts of Eilidh that are still trying, desperately and perhaps in vain, to patch holes in the name of keeping a sinking ship afloat.
Luckily, they are helped along somewhat, because in the next moment Ryatah presses those same red lips against Eilidh’s neck and instead of hyperfocusing on the fragile, cherry coloured mark she’d leave there on her skin long after she moved away Eilidh instead is thinking of her mother and all of the ways she used to feel just like this. She forgets the blood, lets the red drain away like the last of the sunlight at nightfall, and leans in against her lips. She closes her eyes, and for a single fraction of a single second, it feels like finding home again.
Of course it doesn’t last.
And as Ryatah pulls away, Eilidh’s eyes flutter open again to meet her companion’s face.
Beqanna has seen times worse than this plague, believe it or not. There are always those strong enough to pull the lands from the darkness.
She believes.
Even as the world falls apart around them. Even as her own body turns to rot in the wake of the contagion — she believes. Eilidh can tell by the way her lips curl into a smile, fragile and wistful though it may be.
You’ll see.
But with her bleeding hips against these thorns, and with every rib in her body threatening to burst forth through her skin, and the coughs that split her like earthquakes, it’s hard to imagine anything other than this colourless (save for red, of course) life; void of substance, void of promise, void of life. Moselle could have saved them, she thinks. Her mother had always known what to do.
“Have you seen much of Beqanna over the years?”
The words have escaped her lips before she can interpret them as rude. Once they’re out, however, Eilidh looks away in momentary embarrassment before continuing:
“Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry. I wondered, I guess, if you would have known my mother. You remind me of her, in some small way.”
She has never been one to cling to the past, and yet it always finds her. Not even her dreams replay her past to her; she moves on, she forgets, she is never weighed down by it and yet…her past always resurfaces. They find her, when she least expects it, and she is shaken every time. It is easy to be resolute when they are not next to her. It is easy to be loyal, when their breath isn’t hot against her neck, when their words aren’t conjuring memories she’s long chosen to forget. But once they are there…her resistance is non-existent.
But the girl before her — and maybe if she could see her, she would see something similar in the lovely angles of her face, or the softness of her eyes — is linked to something more innocent. A friendship, though it was born in darkness, and spun from the threads of violence. It had still been something almost pure. Almost — because everything in her life was tainted.
The girl’s statement isn’t lost on her, but it brings only a flash of amusement to her lips. She was used to that happening; either on purpose, by friends she has known so long that it’s not offensive, or on accident, by well-meaning strangers. She says nothing on it, letting it slip past, and instead she simply answers. ”I’ve seen more of Beqanna than most currently living, I would dare to argue.” Their bodies are close again, as she reaches to touch her lips to the younger girl’s forelock, as though another touch might hold the answer to the question she asks next, ”Who is your mother?”
