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Sabra

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<p class="sabra_name">Sabra</p>
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I scream, when the earth gives way beneath my feet. Scream as if the Dark God himself is after me, and I think it is not impossible that he is. Why else would I find myself freed of my prison for mere breaths before the dark engulfs me once again.

How long I fall is anyone's guess. Long enough that I can't make out the sky when I drag myself upward, cannot even try to escape because there is no sense of direction in this depthless hole. To try would be to dash myself against the stone, to fail before I'd even begun. Violent tremors wrack my limbs as the darkness bleeds into the crevices of my mind. I have been here before. I have lived in this darkness and watched as it destroyed me from the inside out and I have only just returned to the way I once was.

There is an eerie keening cry that echoes from the impartial cavern, and it is only when the light catches my eye and the sound fades, that I realize it is from my own throat it echoed. A broken, haunted sound. How easily it finds me again.

I can't think about it too long. If I dwell on it, it will consume me and it will not matter how I came to be here or any chance I have of leaving. If there is time to panic, it will come, but I haven't come into it yet. If I can bear it, it will not come at all.

But I digress. The light, it is so faint at first, only existing in phantom blurs at the corner of my eyes. Perhaps it is my eyes adjusting to the dim, perhaps the glow grows stronger the longer I stand still. Sickly blue-white, damp and milky. It clings to the stone walls, gives me an outline I can work with. A larger space than I had realized, the dim glow dots and splashes on the rocks in random ways, a constellation I don't know how to read.

For a long while all I can do is stand, and take stock. I am alive. I can smell the mineral wetness, I can taste blood. Had I bitten my tongue on the way down? Rough walls, hard floor. The faint fungal light illuminates me in the barest ways, washing my colors out into an alien greyscale. I can hear... What is that? My ears pricked at the far wall, fighting to see the source of the shambling, scratching sound. It was quiet. Nearly imperceptible. If I could write it off as imagination, I would. Unfortunately, I am not so naive. This is not that kind of story.

There is already wall at my back, broken stone at my feet. There is nowhere to run or hide. Nothing to do but watch and wait, and hope that the slow-approaching rasp does not see me. A vain hope, of course. It always is. Any blind beast could find me then, the way my heart thundered in my breast. There was no initial surprise when the figure emerged, only grim acceptance.

"Mommy?"

The heartbeats stop.

"Miela,"

My voice breaks on the name. The daughter I left in the Afterlife. It's impossible. I know it is impossible, yet here she is, as washed out as myself, but I know it's her. It has to be. She is as I remember her, frail and lean, wings dragging on the unforgiving floor. That was the sound I had heard, the pale feathered limbs being pulled along. Yet something is wrong.

(She is so small, and it has been years since she died)

"Follow me, we don't have much time!"

Her voice, it is her voice, only it echoes strangely on the cavern walls. She sounds so far away, though she stands so close. I can't dwell any longer on it, because she is not waiting for me. Urgent, jerking steps pull her away, back into the darkness.

"No- no, wait! Miela, wait!"

My legs have begun to follow her without my conscious choice, a longer stride that still leaves me in her wake. As much as I hurry, stumbling over rubble and cracked stone, she is still out of reach. Weak as she looks, she is fast, the whisper of her lifeless wings sometimes my only clue for where we're going.

The fungi splotched walls are getting closer.

She has taken us down some side tunnel, heedless of my pleading for explanation. Not another word from her pale lips. Soon enough, I stop asking. My head is pounding with a dull staccato beat, too much has happened in too short of time. The little girl is leading me on, never looking back to see if I am still there. The dull phantasms that paint the walls throb and pulse in the corners of my vision.

The longer we walk, they more certain I am that the foxfire lights are not random at all. That whorl repeats, I know it does, that pattern of lines was on the other wall. The drum beats on, my heartbeat, my breathing, and something else. Something that crawls up from my hooves and through my legs, insinuates itself inside my spine. Knowledge I have been ignoring for some minutes now creeps into the forefront of my mind. We are going down. All this time our tunnel has been bringing us deeper and deeper, the weak lights growing more frequent, the tunnel walls closer together.

Too close! Too deep! I want to scream, but for once I find that I can't. The noise is caught in the back of my throat, choking me on its stillborn shape.

"Stop. Please-" I croak, husky whisper fighting for the air to breath. Any further and my wings will be pinned against my sides, feathers scraped away on ragged walls. I can't do it. I can't. I cannot be buried again, stone on every side and only steadily stagnating air to breath.

She hasn't stopped.

The eerie blueish glimmer of her is still moving away, step by jarring step. She knows something I don't, some way out that defies every instinct that is screaming inside me. She has to. My eyes are wide and bloodshot, every breath a desperate gulp, and I force my legs to move. To push me forward into this tighter grip. A few more steps, that's all I need to take. That's what I'm begging myself to believe.

And then I'm not moving at all.

I can't.

I'm trapped, wings stuck between shoulders and wall, and I can't press forward or back.

"Help," the sound comes mangled from my constricted throat, a cry too pitiful to be useful. Maybe it is good that there is no one to hear it.

Miela is gone. I can see now in the phosphorus light, the end of our tunnel. It lays mere feet beyond my dripping nose, a narrowing too small for anything larger than a rat to pass through. Not enough space for even an undersized filly to stand in. Not enough air to keep me breathing for any meaningful time.

I hear it then.

The rustling of feathers on stone.

The walls have me pinched, but there is a small space above my back. Enough that if I crane my neck, so very carefully, I could see behind me.

She is there.

Smiling vacantly. Staring at me with sunken eyes that I think have not blinked once since she has found me.

This is not my daughter.

I can see now, straining my eyes and my neck, but I can see. She is no child of mine. The image, maybe, had been plucked from my mind, from the grave. A facsimile that had passed only because I was desperate. Given form to this grinning thing that had led me into this airless, lightless tomb.

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<p class="sabra_quote">I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky
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I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die
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<a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-dress-shirt-lying-on-bed-3373401/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="padding-top:10px">Photo by Kareva Margarita</a>
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