staring at the ceiling in the dark
same old empty feeling in your heart
Just as Elio is wondering if Lepis thinks him so easily tempered, his mother wonders if her son forgets that he is the seventh child she has raised. She knows that twinkle in his eye, recognizes the way his mouth twists up. There is so much of his father in him.
She’d been lucky with Pteron – the rest of her brood have been far too headstrong for their own good.
The dun mare scowls at him, but it is quite tempered by the smile that she does not keep from the twitching at the edge of her mouth. His concession is met with suspicion, though her brow does smooth in admiration at quick adjustment he makes, her expression displaying a mixture of pride and mild exasperation. Whatever needs to be done, he says, unaware that the only way to truly end this might be to destroy his father. Lepis, though entirely aware of this, has not yet accepted it. There are other avenues that have not been explored yet, possibilities that might work.
Wolfbane had managed to ruin one of them already by disguising himself as a greyed unicorn, but perhaps this is her chance to try again. Perhaps. No harm in trying, after all, and this is a task without much inherent danger (at least if rumors are to be believed).
“Go to Nerine,” she tells him, “and find the magician Brennen. Ask him what he knows of curses and ways to control shifters.” If her earlier plan had worked, she would know this already. Stealing Brennen and Jesper had seemed a simple task. The magician would have been released after sharing what he knew, and Jesper would be released after that knowledge had been used to capture Wolfbane. But Brennen had not been captured, and Lepis had little use for the leader of an empty island in the long run.
“And remember: You heal quickly, but you are not immortal” She reminds him, and though she means it in caution, her voice catches as she reaches out to tuck a lock of crimson hair behind one gold-tipped ear. That is a lesson that Lepis had learned in the most terrible way, and she knows herself well enough after these years to know that she cannot learn it again. She has not hidden the loss of Gale from his younger siblings, his death both a tragedy and a warning to her too-bold children. When she pulls back (after smoothing just one feather, maybe two) at the base of his left wing, she manages a small smile, enough to reassure him.
“You come back to me in one piece,” she says, “Or I will know why.” The kiss she presses to his forehead is one for the small colt he no longer is, and though she must stretch to do so it does not dissuade her. For all that he is a stallion grown, some of her will always see him – see all of them – as the wobbly-legged children they had once been. Letting them go has never been easy, and Elio most of all. Its time though, she thinks, and if she must provide herself a bit of acceptance that is only understandable in such a situation.
@[elio]
LEPIS
staring at the bottom of your glass--
hoping one day you’ll make a dream last
but dreams come slow and they go so fast |
