there's a moment we make a decision; Zai

[Valkerine]

there's a moment we make a decision
not to cower and crash to the ground

Her heart is breaking, and she isn't sure where to go. She can't go to her sister; her sister needs her strength, needs Val to be the strong one for the both of them. She has to leave Thorny alone with her grief for just a moment, to get away, to go somewhere where she can let it overcome her.

And so although she is hardly thinking clearly, although she can hardly remember anything, she remembers the one place she's ever been that wasn’t the Valley. The one place that, she strongly suspects, her sister won't follow her.

She remembers him, standing there with them after they'd lost her mother. She remembers how he'd supported her, how he'd been there for them when they'd all needed it, despite not being born part of their little family. She isn't the kind of filly to be seeking out an individual – she is still fiercely independent, as fiercely independent as she's ever been – and so she heads for the jungle more because she knows she's guaranteed solitude than because she expects to be guaranteed company.

She enters the borders without a thought, unhesitating and unconcerned. She isn't of the Valley then, she isn't of anywhere – unless that anywhere is her own grief. It wraps around her like a wet blanket, dulling her usually ebullient personality, crushing her under the weight of it. She is an orphan now, at almost two years old. She isn’t sure what's worse, to be orphaned now, when she's had two years to spend with her father and mother, two years to grow to love them, or to be orphaned at birth, to never know who they are or what they thought of her.

At the moment, the pain she feels makes the answer an easy one.

She stumbles over the vines and branches, falling across fallen trees, scraping her knees and sides as the jungle tries to grab her as she passes, uncaring. She doesn't even notice the way her body responds with a surge as the injuries pile up. She doesn't notice, she doesn't know, she is simply consumed with grief.

Reaching a clearing beneath an impossibly large jungle tree, she leans up against it and finally allows herself to cry.

valkerine

sad tomboy daughter of covet & librette

Image credit MultiCurious