you can't go home again

[Vineine]

***Her birth-mother had been so impossibly soft. Through the unbearable grief of a love and firstborn lost; having seen her jungle home choked (but not felled) by a mighty tide of water, killing Elladora's queen and displacing the sisters for a time. Through all this she had remained unjaded. She had been the lattice around which Vineine grew and formed herself — not self-same, but something approaching it. A growing glossary of biology and life, a well-spoken emissary, an observant and quiet nature... But she had been forged also by something more akin to iron. A warrior, and presumably, that was in there somewhere, yet untrained. ***War is brewing. Or, so she has heard, now out of her less wild state that lent her so easily to detachment. It is not her calling, though it may be her duty. And the Gates had been so good to her. ***But all that is yet to be played out. She will find out in time where she is needed and what kind of spirit lays under the soft covering of pinkish skin. After all, they are ever-evolving beings. Stilled in their mature forms for a while, waiting for age to proceed with de-evolution, they almost never die the same horse they were when they were bright-eyed and young. Nurture is not just a force a fillyhood, but an always driving mechanic of the character. Elladora is dead (returned to the roots a little heavier than before she ever felt the loosening of a friend's soul); perhaps by the writ of some perfect plan, Prague is in her life for the first time. And so were the sisters, still strange to her for the most part. ***The fog muffles sound in a eerie sort of way today, but she thinks through the sort of dampish scent of heavy air, she smells something familiar. Not just the fan-leaf and orchid of the jungle, but a more individual scent that was not to be missed. When the grey mare reveals herself through the press of fog, Vineine smiles and nods her head back. They have not met, but their fold is not so large as to miss each other entirely — certainly not for the mouse to miss the steely queen. “I still have much to observe,” If she is anything, it is greedily hungry for information of the world around her, spending much of her time so far nosing around taking notes. “But there are colours and sounds like you can not even imagine until you experience them for yourself.” Save for grey wintry days like this, this place is rife with soft lichen-greens and the sunny yellows of buttercups. The jungle is something entirely different, improbably verdant and lush — the animals contained within similarly bright to warn or to court, or to camouflage in the canopy. ***“I have seen only a small fraction of them, enough to take my breath away.” She wonders sometimes, if she closes her eyes tight enough, if she regresses somewhere too deep and early, could she ever recall the warm, humid understory in which she was birthed? But it was well before her threshold of memory. Lost. *magic-borne daughter of Prague and Elladora ****‘...Herself in the Heavens, her beam on the waves.’