[private] we're up in flames

[Cress]

cRess

like a house on fire we're up in flames; i'd burn here if that's what it takes
In the end, he had broken her.

She had sworn to him that she wasn’t so easily broken, but he had made quick work of that. It had only taken hours and endless pain to convince her that she wasn’t as strong as she had thought, and then he had left her for dead on the edge of the meadow. It had taken everything in her to not let herself die right then and there - something within her had recognized the new life already beginning to form within her womb, and she knows that if she cannot live for Ravine, she has to live for this small one.

And so she lets the pregnancy drag her energy away from her, and she lets the wounds the drake had inflicted fester and rot. If she can make it to the child’s birth, she will leave the foal with Dawn - Dawn always knows what to do, how to protect her mother and her own children. Dawn has grown wise with age, and she will know how to properly protect the child if Cress cannot. Silver Cove will be a good place for her child to grow up in, or Tephra with Leliana if Dawn is nowhere to be found. The child will have a good life, of that she is sure.

Her wings carry her to the black sand shores of the Cove and she lands heavily on the pebbled beach, her breathing hard as she progresses swiftly through labor. This is her fifth child, and she knows the ropes. She stands and lays down over and over again, letting the child move further into the birth canal, and when the pain becomes too much, she finds a secluded overhang just off of the beach.

In less than an hour the filly is born and nursing, with Cress slumped against the cavern wall for support. Her birth had been swift, but not an easy one, and Cress doesn’t yet have the energy to knit together the tears in her that the yet-to-be-named girl had left. She is black, just like her eldest daughter, but she has starlit swirls all over, and Cress can’t stand to look at the dragon tattoo upon her chest, the same as the one on her own breast, only galaxy-colored. The blues and purples are different from the man who had sired her, but there will be no mistaking her.

In her exhausted haze, she barely hears the soft clacking of feet on the pebbles along the shoreline. Her brown eyes flick upward and she sees someone approaching, but the sunlight is fading and she can’t quite make out who it is. “Dawn?” she calls softly, praying that it is her daughter silhouetted against the ocean.

@[ghaul]