as if death itself was undone; birthing, vulgaris

[leliana]

leliana

I could hear the thunder and see the lightning crack
and all around the world was waking, I never could go back

She can almost feel the waves of his despair washing over her.

It is a disconnected thing—just the pressure of it, the sonic boom of it. The thing that she mentally understands but doesn’t feel in her heart. It starts as an earthquake in him but it is nothing but a mere rumble when it reaches her shores. Some day, perhaps, she will look back at this moment and grieve over the loss of precious first hours. She will grieve for not treasuring them, for holding them close.

But how is she to cherish such delicate beginnings when she can also see the middle and the end?

That is not to say that she does not love her children. (She does, she does.) She looks upon them, scared and uncertain and there is a piece of her heart that goes to them. It is the piece that keeps her here when she is longing to go elsewhere. It is the piece that leaves her anchored, even when her thoughts soar high above them, taking her to the edges of Beqanna and then further—so much further than she thought.

She angles her head toward Vulgaris when he speaks, at the almost sharp edges in his voice. Once, she may have been cowed by it. She may have crumbled beneath his disapproval. Instead, she just looks at him with those glowing eyes, silent for a second. “I know.” She looks back to them, at the sleep that begins to climb up their spines. “You will nurture them. I will do what I can.”

She presses the sensation of calm into them—to whatever extent they will accept it.

It soothes Larke—but she is already so accepting anyway—and her daughter yawns wide, jaw cracking. Her velvety lips ruffle her brothers neck, and she smiles up into her dad’s tender kisses before she begins to fold herself back down. She merely coos softly when he speaks the name.

“They are good names,” Leliana says calmly. “There is balance in you naming them.” After all, she had named the last two—the two born during the depths of his absence. She doesn’t mention such things to be cruel, even now in the throes of her metamorphosis, she does not have the capacity for cruelty.

But honesty?

She has the capacity for such things now.

“I will need to leave soon,” another truth said simply. Pieces of her recognize that he wants her to change back. That he wants her to reverse the hands of time and spit up the magic that floods through her, but such things are impossible now. She is irreversibly changed. She is different. She feels the silver bells of it chiming in her veins, a golden light pulsing within her. “I will be back though. I won’t abandon them.”

[ no more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world ]

@[vulgaris]