"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Time has been a strange thing for the past year, something Beyza has not been able to follow very well, but not anymore. Her body is tracking the time with the changes that occur to it and though she had been excited at first - the pale mare cannot help but wonder if she should be happier. She’d gotten what she wanted, hadn’t she? The attention of someone who had spurned her?
But should the creation of new life have been inspired by more than a chance to flex her magic and see what would happen when she and Jamie combined?
She had been created in much the same way, she tries to reason with herself as she leaves Pangea. Though she had been loved by Agetta and Plume as their daughter she had just been an experiment in magic. Pieced together from two friends without their consent and incubated beside a sister who had always seemed so much more real. Beyza always had thought Caledonia burned brighter and maybe that had something to do with how her twin had been created.
Would her children feel the same way? Would they walk through life thinking they were something separate, something not quite right? Just shadows of the other foals who are brimming with life?
It is so tempting to claw the three of them out. To craft a way for them to finish growing somewhere outside of her body. She’s no longer finding it easy to box away her emotions, to seal them somewhere that they cannot bother her until she is ready to deal with them. It is easy to blame these troubling thoughts on the little lives growing inside of her
Yet, if she would let herself think about it, she’d know it started before. Know it began a year ago when she had claimed the second sacrifice and felt her heart break instead of feeling righteous power. How the pain was fostered further when she met Ryatah and Este and saw the way the eclipse had weakened that newest sister.
If she allowed herself to think about it, she wouldn’t feel so sure that bringing darkness and death for the sake of one being was the right thing to do.
Without consciously planning it, Beyza finds herself standing in the same spot where that filly had died. There is no sunlight now to brush against the forest floor where the bones no longer rest. The light that flickers across the trees comes from the pale mare who stares at the needle and leaf covered ground. Though her gaze is fixed and unblinking, her glow is anything but stable - it shifts and changes like white firelight in the consuming darkness.
