"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
Rile makes it look so easy. Of course he does, he came out bold and daring, somehow believing he's a gift to the world and not a burden. He is black as the dead of night, all but his legs. He looks like he leapt into a puddle of starlight and it stuck to his lower legs, nebulae swirling and shining and clinging to him like he really is a gift from the whatever gods watch over this strange new world. He walked right up to the first person he saw here and charmed his way into her heart and her home. But me? I'm no night sky dipped in starlight. I'm dull earth-tinged shadows and smoke, soot and ash and cinders. There is nothing shining about me, no celestial bodies twinkling from my dirt-brown eyes. I am not about to hold him back, so I let those shadows claim me, sinking backward into the darkness and fading away.
I wonder how long he'll even remember he ever had a twin. Maybe I will be nothing more than the imaginary friend he had once upon a time, only a distant memory of bodies entwined in darkness, cushioned from the world by warmth and water and the thudding of heartbeats. Maybe I will be a story he tells himself as he falls asleep, or a pleasant dream that visits him now and then. But one mare can only produce so much milk, and I will not deprive him of his best chance at survival. And besides, the colt already at her side means he will have a new brother. Bigger, stronger, so much better than I would have been.
So much better than I could ever be.
As quietly as I can, I skulk through the shadows at the edges of this strange clearing where it seems customary for mothers to dispose of their young, and others to come and pick through the rejected to find those worth saving. That's not me. I'll save the lot of them the trouble. I wonder how long it takes a newborn to die of starvation. Not long, I imagine. Maybe I won't even die, maybe I'll just slowly come undone, breathing out the solid parts of me until I am a wisp, shadows and smoke in truth instead of just the colors of my body. I can still hear Rile charming his new mother and brother, though his voice is fading as they walk away, a happy new family off to their home somewhere far away from here.
I hope it lasts. I hope they love him, and take good care of him, and he grows up big and strong. Well, as big as we can be anyhow. His new mother is much larger than the one who left us here, and his new brother is much larger than either of us. Larger than we would even be if we could take both our masses and combine them into one colt. That's good. Probably it means they'll be better able to protect him, right?
Hiding is hard work, and I soon grow weary. I try first to rest in the shelter of a shrub, but it is prickly with thorns and the branches poke me, and the discomfort is not worth the cover it would grant. Instead, I curl up against the trunk of a large tree, with lovely rough bark that scratches an itchy spot on my side as I lower myself to the ground. There are shadows still, cast by its thick foliage, and after all I am much more soot than ash. I doubt anyone will see me. And even if they do, it won't take them long to see I am not one of the rare gems worth saving from this refuse pile. Unconcerned, I close my eyes and try to sleep.
hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Isle had slipped from the Tundra one morning as dawn painted the kingdom in subtle shades of pink and gold. There was restlessness in her bones and wander in her heart as she disappeared through the narrow gate with a full, swaying belly and her family on her mind. It had been awhile since she had last seen mother so it was to the trees of the forests buried at the bottom of the mountain just outside the Chamber that she went. There was anxiety knit into the restlessness she felt, worry woven with the joy at the idea of being a mother, of having a family of her own. It wasn’t something she ever thought she would have or deserve, and therefore it was nothing she had ever spoken of with Oksana. Now there were so many questions fluttering like bird-wings in her belly, concerns that although Offspring did his best to appease, it just wasn’t the same as talking to a mother.
So while Offspring was preoccupied with organizing his kingdom and solidifying alliances, she slipped away for a few days. She doubted very much that he would have let her leave the safety of the enormous ice walls this close to birth. He was stoic, yes, but over-protective of her and she loved him for it. It was strange to feel so important to someone, stranger still to be important to someone like him. So she left quietly, feeling slightly guilty in the event that he might notice her absence and worry, and after a slow day of travel spent the next day curled like a child again inside the warmth of her mother’s wings. On the return trip back to the Tundra the following day it was with a much lighter heart, and even some of the anxiety had been soothed in her belly. There was something contagious about the love with which Oksana had spoken about each of her children, something that only deepened the longing in Isle’s swaying belly.
But as she returned home she found herself remembering Thaniel and Maribel and how Offspring loved them, remembering the way Oksana glowed with all the love she had for her children, and found that her feet had chosen a different route back. It was one that carried her past the place where mothers and fathers chose to abandon the young as though leaving them behind would erase the burden altogether. Would erase a memory better forgotten, a life better unlived. She goes far enough in to find an open clearing, and relief swells in her chest because it is empty. There is no one here. But as she turns to go, there is a new smell tangled in the breeze that sweeps idly, lazily past her. It is a smell she doesn’t recognize- birth, but it is mixed with the scent of fur and dust, an entirely equine scent. Her delicate face turns urgently in the direction from which the breeze had come, but the wind is gone and with it that strange, faint smell. She can see nothing in the grass, no crumpled body which is both relieving and disconcerting because she can smell him stale in her nose.
The noise that comes from her is strange and guttural, a low urgent sound that belies the hormonal-fed distress bubbling in her swollen belly. It isn’t until she drifts closer to the shadows cast at the edge of the tree-line, her attention drawn there when a rather perturbed squirrel scurried away from a small mound at the base of the foliage to claim another, emptier tree that she finally notices him. Isle swept forward cautiously, slowly, slowly as she only ever was these days with the child in her swollen belly ready to arrive any day now. She exhaled loudly, her breath a huff of warm air as she drew gentle lips across the deep chocolate color of his delicate skin. His tiny rib cage rose and fell beneath her whiskered mouth and only then did the distress blossoming like a bloodstain in her chest retreat. Again she touches him, gentle, always gentle, with nuzzling lips across his neck and the tufts of his flaxen mane, reflexive kisses against the soft place behind his ears. “Wake up, little love.” She tells him in a voice that is only just barely above a whisper, her dark eyes soft and kind where they traced the angles of an impossibly small, perfect face.
As I fall asleep, the world around me fades away. No more am I alone in the shadows, left behind by a mother who didn't want me and a brother who was better off without me. No, my dream is of warmth and darkness, cushioned from the world by a sea of water, tangled up in my brother and wrapped in our mother's endless embrace. She was safety, in that time before this brief life began, a time marked only by the intermingling drumbeats of three hearts. That safety was fleeting, lasting only as long as her body could hold us. Now it's just a sweet memory, a comfort in my weariness.
In my dream, I feel the gentle rocking motion as she walks, her belly swaying and soothing the ever-restless Rile. If she was still too long, he would kick, demanding movement, demanding more of that rhythmic rocking. I always tried to let her rest, to embrace the stillness and the subtle waves of her breathing. It must be hard work, after all, growing two new people. But Rile knew what he wanted even then, and was never shy about taking it.
It is my shining light memory, this dream, the only place the starlight touches me. So when I feel warm breath against my skin, it fits. She is safety, of course she is watching over me, running her oh so gentle muzzle over the downy fuzz of my neck, playing with the scruffy strands of my ashen mane. “Momma?” I murmur, stirring to wakefulness as she presses her lips to a sensitive spot behind my ears.
Her voice, almost imperceptible in its gentleness, is the dissonant note that breaks the reverie of my dream. “Wake up, little love,” she says to me, her voice barely above a whisper. So gentle. And as I wake, I remember. Not Momma, with her dark coat and vibrant mane and tail. Momma was not gentle, and would never have called me love. I blink my eyes open, ashen lashes fluttering through my field of vision once, twice, thrice before I can focus in on her face. Her eyes are a rich, dark brown, wide and endlessly deep, and an ache starts deep in my chest. Something new, something I don't have a name for yet. A quiet yearning for...for home. Like my heart is stretching itself in my chest, reaching toward her and begging her to reach back.
But I am not meant to be loved, or to be cuddled or crooned to or rocked to sleep. I almost forgot it for a moment, but it comes crashing back down on me. “That's not my name,” I whisper, looking away from those endless eyes. Don't see me, that glance says, as I shrink in on myself and stare at the ground, not letting myself want the impossible. “You must be looking for someone else. I'm not little love, I'm...Nnneverwas.”
Why does it hurt so much more to say it to her? When mother named me, it was just a fact, just an inevitability. I was the smaller twin, whisper-thin and barely there and destined to fade into oblivion. It was a truth, nothing more and nothing less. Now, though, the word cracks something in my chest, maybe the heart that still reaches for home even as I fight it and hide it and try to breathe like I'm not breaking. I am Neverwas, meant to never be, and when she knows it she will leave me to come undone in peace.
hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Momma? He asks in a sweet, drowsy voice and her heart skips a beat in her chest. It is in this moment that she realizes she must be, that she will be, that the idea of leaving him behind feels like a blade in her chest and she cannot breathe around it. She responds wordlessly, lipping gently at the curved points of small ears, swallowing back the swelling outrage she felt that anyone could create something so important as this and leave him to the grass and dirt as though he were nothing more than unwanted waste.
She drifts closer still, gentle when her nose brushes his cheek and his eyes flutter open, framed soft and brown by sooty lashes that tickle her chin when she presses a quick kiss to his small forehead. He whispers his uncertainty, places his name in the hands of her waiting heart, a heart that reaches back to his, and it takes everything she has not to flinch at the lonely way his name speaks to her. “Neverwas.” She repeats, she hums, she sings, changing the heavy notes with a smile that slips hesitantly across her lips. “No,” she says and her smile deepens until it has touched her eyes and they gleam with warm notes of honey flecked into the wild brown, “no I came for you, Nevi, won’t you be my little love?”
His shyness breaks her in half and she wishes she knew a million ways to show him how important he is, hates like she has hated nothing before that he doesn’t already know, that no one ever told him. Instead he was given a name meant to rend him in half, a name that would carve him hollow and haunt him like a ghost so that he might always remember that from which he came. She touches her nose to his withers, willing him to stand so that she might pull him close to her chest and promise him the world he deserved but had never been given.
Her nose hangs close to his delicate face, her eyes soft and warm when they reach out to capture his fluttering gaze. There is an unwelcomed thread of doubt worming its way through her tumultuous thoughts and for a moment she is convinced that if she blinks he will disappear and she will never see him again. He is such a shy little thing, all tremulous words and wide eyes, ephemeral in the way her heart already aches to love him. Instead she sighs, and it is a quiet sound, like snowflakes cast against the ice wall surrounding her home. She wants to tell him that someone let him down, that she never would, but when she settles in those uncertain eyes all she can manage is another kiss to his forehead and her whispered name. “I am Isle.”
If I could collapse in on myself and dissolve into nothing I would. I'd crush the shattering glass inside my chest into fine powder and let the wind carry it away, carry all of me away and scatter me into oblivion and just let it be done instead of taking so long. It didn't hurt at first, not my name, not my mother's unceremonious goodbye, not even really letting Rile go because it was supposed to be that way, the stronger twin surviving and the weaker one failing to thrive.
But I can't will myself to come undone faster no matter how hard I try. For the tiniest instant I forgot that I shouldn't exist, and in that fraction of a heartbeat I learned what it is to yearn. But she knows now. She knows, and she's going to leave too, and when she does I think I really will die because no heart could possibly keep beating when it's in so many jagged pieces. Especially one that was never meant to beat in the first place.
She speaks my name, and it makes my breaking heart skip a beat. See? It's already starting to fail. She hasn't even turned away yet and I'm dying one faltering beat at a time. Go, go, go, please, I can't take it much longer, but she doesn't listen. “No,” she says, and I wonder for a moment if she's read my mind. My body starts to tremble, the whole world hanging on her next words. And when they come, I think I must have missed it, must have missed the part where I die, because an angel stands in front of me offering me all of heaven with one little sentence.
But no, my body's still trembling and my heart's still beating. I can't quite make myself move, can barely breathe while I try to understand. I'm not dreaming. Life couldn't be that cruel, to give me a dream like this and then make me wake up all alone. Could it? She touches me gently, as if she can feel how fragile my insides are, and my body moves to stand of its own accord, my mind still frozen with terror that I'll wake up if I'm not careful. And then I'm suddenly curled up against her chest and sobbing out my heartache against her skin. I don't know how long the tears last; it feels like forever. But when they are gone and my chest feels a little less jagged inside, I take a deep, shaky breath and nod.
