Ciri
Hyaline had been an idyllic place to live. The Isle was a drastic change but drastic was exactly what she had needed. Her life in the lake had taken up so much room in her mind and heart that she had almost drowned in it, submerged beneath water that filled up her lungs as she scrambled for the surface. Meeting Gale and Padme had helped ease the loneliness, coming to the Isle and finding purpose had helped even more. She no longer constantly thought of the life she had once had. And while she still thought of Amet, memories of him no longer threatened to pull her completely under.
Nash doesn’t ask her about her scars and instead his gaze lingers on her stars that blink dimly around her. It’s enough to make her warm to the stallion and she listens to him as she falls into step beside him. Her hooves sink slightly amongst rough pebbles and dark sand but she doesn’t mind as her swirling silver gaze looks out at the nearby sea. He speaks of Taiga and a brother, Yanhua, a name she’s never heard before. He also speaks of children and their mother and this brings an old familiar pain but she shoves it away roughly before it can chase away her smile.
“I was born in the Falls, the old lands.” She starts. She tells Nashua about growing up there, about her kind mother Soliel and that she had never known her father. She tells him of her adventures growing up when she finally left and when the world remade itself, of how she learned to fight and traveled for a year or two as a nomad. There is no hesitation when she speaks of how she fell into the Underneath, of the Leshen and the ravens and the Siren in the lake. She tells him how she found out that she came from the stars that night and how she washed up on the lake of Hyaline when the Underneath spit her out.
It is here that she hesitates, for this is also where she had not been able to continue with Gale when he had listened to her story. Both stallions were good listeners but perhaps it’s because she had started this time at the beginning and now feels the need to finish it, to get to the end, that she slowly continues. She tells him of Jah-Lilah and Amet, the ruler of Hyaline at that time. How Jah had also been in the Underneath and helped Amet to cure her from the fever and infection Ciri had gotten from the battle below. She tells him of how she fell in love with gold scaled stallion, how she then met Castile, and how it all stupidly fell apart around them, teenagers who didn't understand the price of love. She tells him of the son she bore only to be whipped away by another portal before she could even give him a name.
Something in her is unleashed and comes spilling out, words and stories that had been held in for far too long. She can’t stop even if she wants to, can’t seem to make the torrential downpour of her life stop falling from her lips, although she makes room to answer any questions that he has or to fill in blanks from spots she might have missed. By the time she is done, after she has told him of the other world and finding her son being raised by Jah-Lilah and seeing Amet again before being whisked back here when that world broke apart, she feels ten times lighter. As if a ton of weighted bricks have suddenly been lifted off her shoulders. And it is with a laugh that she finally turns a rather sheepish look to him, apologies in her swirling starlit eyes.
“I’m so sorry. I haven’t told my story in a long time. Not the full of it anyways, Gale only got the first few chapters.”
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
@Nashua