Everything ends.
She nearly does, too.
She almost steps into the dust that rises when the mountains fall. She almost breathes it in, lets the blackness fill her lungs instead of the crisp oxygen of the pines. It would be easier, she thinks, to choke on the soot than to flee. Easier to die than to leave.
Her eyes tell the story of death already.
The bodies all clamor for a way out of the hell that the Dale has become. Boulders and trees fall in equal number. She watches as one overlarge rock tumbles down the tallest mountain, playfully bouncing off each descending hill. When it finally crashes into the ground, it crushes the hind end of a retreating doe. Talulah watches it scramble for purchase against the dirt with its front hooves, watches the lights fading from its frantic eyes. She almost envies the quickness of its end.
Because she decides then and there that she will not leave. Not when the river has flooded and swept away the tall grasses she had run through as a child. Not when the hillsides become valleys and the dirt she had given birth on sinks below the surface. Not when the last wolf has fled nor when the mountains become piles of rubble. She will not abandon the place once Forbidden. The kingdom that has given her everything will not die alone, not so long as she is alive. She will not be alone in death, either.
Everything ends, but she doesn’t.
One final glimpse of the mountainland is all she gets. When the blackness rushes in, she closes her eyes – and opens them minutes, hours, days later in the meadow.
Her heart aches, because she knows it is futile to go back. There is nothing to go back to, anyway, and the knowledge settles like lead into her stomach, a weight she will never shed. All she has now is her family, or the remains of it scattered to the wind like the rest of their world. She will pick up the pieces as best she can. Even if it no longer fits together perfectly; even if they are missing some of the pieces entirely. She will yield to the yolk, even if the work seems fruitless.
She looks up and he is there. Nothing becomes everything with him. Their lives are forever entangled, intersecting at the most unexpected moments. Now, she needs him more than ever. Now, she is not sure she can go to him. Talulah wavers, stuck between her grief and the magnet her heart becomes when he is near. In the end, she cannot resist his pull. But she is not the only one.
“Tiphon,” she says, her voice like smoke, hazy and dark. It takes all of her strength not to collapse against him, to bury her face in the crook of his shoulder and cry until the tears won’t come. Dead, she would wail. All of it. Everything. The Dale. Our home. Our people. Our son. The darkness rushes up again when the magnitude of loss shakes her. She focuses on the perfect porcelain of his skin to keep it at bay, remembers how resplendent he looked framed in the sun between the mountains. There is a peculiar scratch in her throat that she doesn’t understand at first, and it pulls her from her thoughts more than anything. It is persistent, a need she can’t ignore.
“I’m thirsty.” Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth as she says it. “Why am I thirsty?” Talulah looks at the buckskin before turning to Tiphon. He will understand her, at least. For a woman who’s never had to drink (or eat, or sleep) this newfound need threatens to break her hold on reason. The simple questions keep her sanity from crumbling. If the mountains can in the end, perhaps she is not unshakeable, either.
t a l u l a h
metal woman once of the dale