To the mountain.
It calls like a summons, from Her. From the Mother. From the All-Goddess. From the Earth and the Seeds; Harvests and Deaths. All. It calls. She gasps for breath, bumping against trees and bodies, jolted from their sleep and back into groggy aimlessness. They lash out with angry grunts and moans; with teeth and cocked back legs, primed.
She stumbles onward without a sorry uttered.
(Darkness masks the roots that now mean to trip her up. Things she had considered friend, turned against her. Their new world is an unkind one.)
She had been born in the evening, after the Mother had made Vineine her vessel. Her carrier of misplaced life – Her gift, the meaning of which had been strange, passed along in ancient and unknown tongues; in the electricity that had snapped against mother’s nose like a small spark when she touched the pink and hairless wretch, it had been much more for her rolling filly, something like a great storm’s mighty exhale – lightening. It had been her first taste of pain, though she cannot remember it fully, now, only as phantoms – as She sowed them together, stitching the fabrics of the souls to one cloth. One body with two shapes.
Mother had been proud. It had been a revelation. She had swollen, not just with the product of her earthly love, but with the makings of divine intervention.
(After the war, Mother had shook loose everything she once knew. Of nature and seed and the soil; of fertilization and quickening and labour.
She displaced those things with the faint and eerie calls of sea-creatures, black-skinned and wry-toothed demons. And so when Fang was born and she left the other behind in their den, covered in dirt and the yearning to forget, she had blamed the loss on all those things. The Mother had stopped talking to her, and so she had left.
The Mother gives. And, by gods, the Mother takes, with equal fury.)
As day begins to break, she falls to her knees. Surrender. The mountain looms, jeers and taunts, purple, in the distance. They had meant to do this together, the two of them. They had laboured together. Grew fat and fuzzy. I’m sorry. She moans, gently letting herself to her side. She can do naught by push, it comes to her in primal waves that she both agonizes with as is glad for.
She need not understand it.
The first slides from her, with a wet and heavy sound, she has time to glance around her belly, to consider the writhe in the membranous sac before the next begins her journey. So she pushes. The second comes no easier, but for the wave of relief that follows her. Longear knows this like the alphabet, somehow – seed and soil and harvests. She places a front hoof on the ground, shaky but sure, hoisting her body up to tend to the babes. I’m sorry.
She licks noses clean, kisses the whorls on their foreheads. Whiffing along the dark stripe down one’s back, “Gardenia,” and the jolly rabbit’s tail on the other, “Mauve.”
I’ll climb with them, soon.
@[woodrow]
“My heart has joined the Thousand,
for my friend stopped running today.”