06-23-2020, 02:31 PM
SabbatH
i'll let you play the role. i'll be your animal.
She could stare at Basilica for hours, she thinks silently. Sabbath adores her bright eyes and the vibrant splashes of white across the stark black of her tiny body. Her uncomfortable smile draws a laugh from the serpent woman’s mouth and she gingerly places a kiss atop her forehead. Her first grandchild. Is this how Leliana felt when Sabbath came home to birth Prayer so many years ago? It softens all her coarse edges and melt the frost from her heart so easily, as if it were never there.
“She’s beautiful. I’m so proud of you,” she says, lifting her sage green eyes to look at Prayer. Her firstborn has always been gentle and good, that precious kind of thing that keeps Sabbath from thinking the world is truly an awful place. The other children have inherited their mother’s sharp tongue and callous ways, but somehow her eldest daughter had not.
“Dacre is grown now. You should see how gorgeous he is – tall and strong, just like your grandfather. He missed you an awful lot,” she says, her voice bordering on crying again. “You have two brothers and a sister, now. I never let them leave Tephra after you… left.”
And this time the tears do spill down her cheeks. Her child is home and safe in her arms, but the memory remains vivid, slicing through her heart. But she takes a deep breath and steadies herself. Sabbath presses her lips to Prayer’s temple to remind herself that this moment is real and it’s alright to feel these things again. It feels so dangerous to allow herself any comfort when everything seemed to fall apart at times like these.
“She’s beautiful. I’m so proud of you,” she says, lifting her sage green eyes to look at Prayer. Her firstborn has always been gentle and good, that precious kind of thing that keeps Sabbath from thinking the world is truly an awful place. The other children have inherited their mother’s sharp tongue and callous ways, but somehow her eldest daughter had not.
“Dacre is grown now. You should see how gorgeous he is – tall and strong, just like your grandfather. He missed you an awful lot,” she says, her voice bordering on crying again. “You have two brothers and a sister, now. I never let them leave Tephra after you… left.”
And this time the tears do spill down her cheeks. Her child is home and safe in her arms, but the memory remains vivid, slicing through her heart. But she takes a deep breath and steadies herself. Sabbath presses her lips to Prayer’s temple to remind herself that this moment is real and it’s alright to feel these things again. It feels so dangerous to allow herself any comfort when everything seemed to fall apart at times like these.