11-14-2016, 01:10 AM
She leaves Mauve and Gardenia behind to play with Victra’s girls. They are an inseparable gaggle, and something about it reminds her of home before Home – the Amazons; of the sisterhood she had never come to love, not in the way that so many did. (It had soured, turned to ash literally on her lips.)
She had never let it ink her body with its possession – but she remembers tracing the triple goddess, fashioned from vines, on the bridge of mother’s nose with interested eyes.
She mourns the jungle inasmuch as she mourns her mother’s disappearance. The reckoning had obliterated the starting place from the face of Beqanna, the only place she could think to look, so Longear had done the only thing that felt right. She turned away. Not forever, and not without keeping a keen ear to the wind. Her mother was gone. She leaves, and she would come back. But for now, she has the girls to keep from straying into nonsense, the coyote to find solace in, and her grandfather to help.
She follows him, now, in the dutiful way she once followed her mother to the Field. Except, with more purpose this time. Longear is fleeting, but she is not silly. War had dashed that from her body, the reckoning had reset the bones, and she can feel what gentle strength she has incubating in her gut urging her on.
Tephra is like a fledgling dropping from its nest. New. Feeble. Vulnerable.
Longear is, among many things, a nurturer. A grower. A sustainer.
What the mists had revealed alongside Tephra had been, up to this point, a mystery to her. The forest their small group wades into is quiet and still; fog hangs like old ghosts, and she wonder if they are indeed just that – Beqanna’s disembodied spirits, chained to the feet of these new pine and redwood captors. She shivers, stopping when Magnus does, though her soft, golden eyes keep busy peering into the woods around them. She may still be without her rabbit, but not the nervousness that meant, to them, survival.
She ceases her concerned squinting only when Ruan offers his name.
She nods her head, her smile lacking none of its warmth despite her unease – she is, after all, of diplomatic stock. It is Jinju’s appearance that brings a kind of calm to her. She smiles at the girl, who is, perhaps, just a season older than her own daughters, “hello,” to them both, father and daughter, “my name is Longear.”
She elects to say no more. She may not be silly, but she is a greenhorn and defers to Magnus and the grievously quiet mare that had come with them, still an enigmatic stranger.
She had never let it ink her body with its possession – but she remembers tracing the triple goddess, fashioned from vines, on the bridge of mother’s nose with interested eyes.
She mourns the jungle inasmuch as she mourns her mother’s disappearance. The reckoning had obliterated the starting place from the face of Beqanna, the only place she could think to look, so Longear had done the only thing that felt right. She turned away. Not forever, and not without keeping a keen ear to the wind. Her mother was gone. She leaves, and she would come back. But for now, she has the girls to keep from straying into nonsense, the coyote to find solace in, and her grandfather to help.
She follows him, now, in the dutiful way she once followed her mother to the Field. Except, with more purpose this time. Longear is fleeting, but she is not silly. War had dashed that from her body, the reckoning had reset the bones, and she can feel what gentle strength she has incubating in her gut urging her on.
Tephra is like a fledgling dropping from its nest. New. Feeble. Vulnerable.
Longear is, among many things, a nurturer. A grower. A sustainer.
What the mists had revealed alongside Tephra had been, up to this point, a mystery to her. The forest their small group wades into is quiet and still; fog hangs like old ghosts, and she wonder if they are indeed just that – Beqanna’s disembodied spirits, chained to the feet of these new pine and redwood captors. She shivers, stopping when Magnus does, though her soft, golden eyes keep busy peering into the woods around them. She may still be without her rabbit, but not the nervousness that meant, to them, survival.
She ceases her concerned squinting only when Ruan offers his name.
She nods her head, her smile lacking none of its warmth despite her unease – she is, after all, of diplomatic stock. It is Jinju’s appearance that brings a kind of calm to her. She smiles at the girl, who is, perhaps, just a season older than her own daughters, “hello,” to them both, father and daughter, “my name is Longear.”
She elects to say no more. She may not be silly, but she is a greenhorn and defers to Magnus and the grievously quiet mare that had come with them, still an enigmatic stranger.
“My heart has joined the Thousand,
for my friend stopped running today.”