“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies,
and whenever they catch you, they will kill you.
But first they must catch you,
digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning.
Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
****
She is the spring after a conflagration. She is not innocent nor untouched – she is not the spring is the sense of being newborn but, reborn. Something different. Something from the singes of burns and the nutrients of blackened trees. Something that looks better and greener from some angles – but the price paid for this transformation, this rebirth and growth, had been dear.
Had been exacted so forcibly.
It had not just been the war – that hell of acrid smoke and fire; that fleet-footed panic – but all the ash that settled around after it. Mother had buried the boy in dirt and the longing to forget, and had never regained herself.
The girl had never loved or created, so it had been hard to grasp the enormity of it at the time. (It has only gotten marginally easier as a woman. She still has not loved or created.) She had let her father feel it. There was little more she could do. Now they rotate around each other – father, Fang and she; she is the loosest of them all, her rotation caries her farther away because Fang needs Fiero much more than she. Like three lost planets, held together by a strange kind of gravity. Strange, only because of her absence. Lacking in some essential molecular component. Weakened by its removal from their atmosphere.
Years ago, she had gasped and sputtered, as if it did not agree with her lungs.
But over time, she adapted.
Perhaps, just not in the way Fiero would have liked to see. Longear settled into the bones of that other body and kept to them more often than not. But she had found her voice there, and at night she cried small cries, her voice but diminutive – because she had not been held in a quiet, otherworldly, place but had fled fire, keeping pace with the race of her small heart – then, she let that other-voice ease her sentiment with the baseness of instinct.
She takes lazy, loping steps. She tends to be less neurotic when father is nearby. (Too open…) It makes ignoring her other half easier, though she can feel the pressure of its agitation – neither likes being ignored. For a time she nibbles grass and loses track of how far she has wandered. Then she sits up on her hind end and cranes around to check. When sees that they are not alone this time, she pivots and watches with ever-alert ears, her nose in constant motion. They touch. And speak. With a smooth, quick readjustment of bones and skin, she shifts into her bigger body and moves to them with light, hesitant steps.
She had looked just like them once, but mother’s grey had blotted out the yellow. Her odd, cotton-tail shifts side to side as she falls still in front of them, some distance away. (Wariness lives in her like a heartbeat.) She catches the name, ‘Magnus’, and she knows it. She looks to her father, with wide, dark eyes and searches his face for the feeling she yearns for herself. “I’m Longear,” she speaks softly, it is the same voice – full of earth and lilac – that carried her mother’s bedtime songs.
and whenever they catch you, they will kill you.
But first they must catch you,
digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning.
Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
She is the spring after a conflagration. She is not innocent nor untouched – she is not the spring is the sense of being newborn but, reborn. Something different. Something from the singes of burns and the nutrients of blackened trees. Something that looks better and greener from some angles – but the price paid for this transformation, this rebirth and growth, had been dear.
Had been exacted so forcibly.
It had not just been the war – that hell of acrid smoke and fire; that fleet-footed panic – but all the ash that settled around after it. Mother had buried the boy in dirt and the longing to forget, and had never regained herself.
The girl had never loved or created, so it had been hard to grasp the enormity of it at the time. (It has only gotten marginally easier as a woman. She still has not loved or created.) She had let her father feel it. There was little more she could do. Now they rotate around each other – father, Fang and she; she is the loosest of them all, her rotation caries her farther away because Fang needs Fiero much more than she. Like three lost planets, held together by a strange kind of gravity. Strange, only because of her absence. Lacking in some essential molecular component. Weakened by its removal from their atmosphere.
Years ago, she had gasped and sputtered, as if it did not agree with her lungs.
But over time, she adapted.
Perhaps, just not in the way Fiero would have liked to see. Longear settled into the bones of that other body and kept to them more often than not. But she had found her voice there, and at night she cried small cries, her voice but diminutive – because she had not been held in a quiet, otherworldly, place but had fled fire, keeping pace with the race of her small heart – then, she let that other-voice ease her sentiment with the baseness of instinct.
She takes lazy, loping steps. She tends to be less neurotic when father is nearby. (Too open…) It makes ignoring her other half easier, though she can feel the pressure of its agitation – neither likes being ignored. For a time she nibbles grass and loses track of how far she has wandered. Then she sits up on her hind end and cranes around to check. When sees that they are not alone this time, she pivots and watches with ever-alert ears, her nose in constant motion. They touch. And speak. With a smooth, quick readjustment of bones and skin, she shifts into her bigger body and moves to them with light, hesitant steps.
She had looked just like them once, but mother’s grey had blotted out the yellow. Her odd, cotton-tail shifts side to side as she falls still in front of them, some distance away. (Wariness lives in her like a heartbeat.) She catches the name, ‘Magnus’, and she knows it. She looks to her father, with wide, dark eyes and searches his face for the feeling she yearns for herself. “I’m Longear,” she speaks softly, it is the same voice – full of earth and lilac – that carried her mother’s bedtime songs.
@[Laura] Revived! Hope you don't mind. @[madie] and I figured it would make some sense to throw her in? Also, I've been considering her choice of home, and the Gates is a front runner, so why not meet now.
“My heart has joined the Thousand,
for my friend stopped running today.”