and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
There are few things that would destroy Etro to her core. One is seeing her mother crumble before her—the magician always so regal and composed. The other, oh, the other is the unfinished sentence that hangs between them. Yael does not need to finish before Etro begins to hear a roaring in her ears and feel her knees go weak.
They buckle, and she stumbles forward a step, her muddy brown eyes wild and unseeing, glazed over with tears. No. It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t imagine a world without her father—without the behemoth of a stallion’s shadow chasing the camels and then shrouding her as she raced beneath him on the sand, determined to keep up.
How—how could he be gone?
Without thinking, she staggers to her mother, leaning onto the mare and pressing her face into her golden neck. Tears begin to fall, and soon she is shaking with them, completely naked in her grief. “How?” she manages to choke out, between gasping breaths. “When?” Not that she wants to know the answer—she certainly doesn’t want to envision it—but she has to know. She has to know that it was peaceful, that he didn’t hurt. “I am so sorry, mom,” she gasps, holding her mother close.
“I am so sorry.”
For everything. For the shared grief of the loss of Vanquish—but, perhaps, more for the absence. She had left so suddenly, in such a fit of teenage rebellion, and what she had thought was harmless, she now saw as absentee negligence. She should have been there for her mother. She should have been there to comfort her and help the rest of the family. Instead, she had been fleeing her fears. She’d never forgive herself.
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang