A peaceful sound, without menace - Woodrow; birthing

[Longear]

To the mountain.

It calls like a summons, from Her. From the Mother. From the All-Goddess. From the Earth and the Seeds; Harvests and Deaths. All. It calls. She gasps for breath, bumping against trees and bodies, jolted from their sleep and back into groggy aimlessness. They lash out with angry grunts and moans; with teeth and cocked back legs, primed. 

She stumbles onward without a sorry uttered.

(Darkness masks the roots that now mean to trip her up. Things she had considered friend, turned against her. Their new world is an unkind one.)

She had been born in the evening, after the Mother had made Vineine her vessel. Her carrier of misplaced life – Her gift, the meaning of which had been strange, passed along in ancient and unknown tongues; in the electricity that had snapped against mother’s nose like a small spark when she touched the pink and hairless wretch, it had been much more for her rolling filly, something like a great storm’s mighty exhale – lightening. It had been her first taste of pain, though she cannot remember it fully, now, only as phantoms – as She sowed them together, stitching the fabrics of the souls to one cloth. One body with two shapes.

Mother had been proud. It had been a revelation. She had swollen, not just with the product of her earthly love, but with the makings of divine intervention.

(After the war, Mother had shook loose everything she once knew. Of nature and seed and the soil; of fertilization and quickening and labour. 

She displaced those things with the faint and eerie calls of sea-creatures, black-skinned and wry-toothed demons. And so when Fang was born and she left the other behind in their den, covered in dirt and the yearning to forget, she had blamed the loss on all those things. The Mother had stopped talking to her, and so she had left.

The Mother gives. And, by gods, the Mother takes, with equal fury.)

As day begins to break, she falls to her knees. Surrender. The mountain looms, jeers and taunts, purple, in the distance. They had meant to do this together, the two of them. They had laboured together. Grew fat and fuzzy. I’m sorry. She moans, gently letting herself to her side. She can do naught by push, it comes to her in primal waves that she both agonizes with as is glad for. 

She need not understand it.

The first slides from her, with a wet and heavy sound, she has time to glance around her belly, to consider the writhe in the membranous sac before the next begins her journey. So she pushes. The second comes no easier, but for the wave of relief that follows her. Longear knows this like the alphabet, somehow – seed and soil and harvests. She places a front hoof on the ground, shaky but sure, hoisting her body up to tend to the babes. I’m sorry.

She licks noses clean, kisses the whorls on their foreheads. Whiffing along the dark stripe down one’s back, “Gardenia,” and the jolly rabbit’s tail on the other, “Mauve.” 

I’ll climb with them, soon.

@[woodrow]

[woodrow]

Worry is the thing that woke him; that clouds his eyes and his mind.

Worry for the coyote that he cannot call out of his skin.

Worry for the babies that she carries in her belly.

It is this last worry that pulls him to his feet from his bower of grass and dust; he sleeps now, more than ever. He sleeps just to dream of that other self that has paws and sharp ears, and a keener sense of smell then he does now as he puts his nose up into the air and starts to siphon her scent from it in noisy sniffs. It does not surprise him that her trail leads to the mountain…

He follows her, finds her, thanks Coyote that the birth had been a swift one for all that she looks exhausted for having just pushed out twins from between her sweating, heaving loins.

Woodrow hangs back; partly out of instinct whispering to be wary of a new mother but also partly out of the loveliness of all three of them, mother and her daughters. He watches as she licks their noses clean, kisses the whorls on their heads, and names them -- he begrudges her none of this. What he is though, is a little unsure as he approaches slowly with his nose low to the ground. He asks her with his eyes if he can come closer, telling her with his horse’s mouth - "They are lovely. You are lovely.” because she has never looked any more beautiful to him then she does now, as a mother rich and ripe even after their birth and the way it has left her tired, he can see it in the lines of her face. He has never loved her less, even as a coyote and her, a rabbit and he has never loved her more to stand there between their daughters, proud and nothing more than a horse.

[Longear]

“Woodrow,” she invites him in, soft-tongued and damp, reaching her nose out to touch his shoulder – the hard muscles and woody scent; buried somewhere deep below, the agouti fur she finds so frightening and lovely all at once. It is as much his fold as it is theirs, even as something possessive and rankled creeps up her spine, asks her to step in front of them and halt his approach. ‘Nature’, her mother’s voice whispers, and she knows it is so.

The harvest.

(In the same way she did not let Longear come to her when Fang was born and the other was left unceremoniously to the tigers.

The rabbit would have left them – dug them a hollow in the earth and covered them with hair plucked from the fold of skin on her neck and dead grass – coming back only to feed them. So as not to lead predators…)

Nature.

Longear was borne of a ransacked nest. It is written into her like the jungle and the plains; the sowing and the reaping. Even without the second soul, she knows all too intimately the fragile nature of their existences. Their long legs and knobbly knees, wavering like whip-thin saplings in a gale as they try and take their stands; the unclean and fleshy scent of their delivery, even as she had made a meal of the afterbirth with sharp precision.

(To the mountain.)

“Woodrow,” she whispers softly, ears tucking back into the wild mop of grey mane, anxiety wresting the soft maternity from her eyes and muscles. (If she could, she would thump. She would dig them a hollow in the earth.) “...we have to bring them to the Mountain.” (‘We have to get them somewhere safe,’ she means to say, but something mad and clawed has made it’s way in.)

She is as fit to climb that rock as the day she was forced down it. Then, she had been heavy and overripe. Now, she is shaky and bleary-eyed – they are just standing, splay-legged, thinking next of milk and then of sleep. And yet, panic finds her again, feverish and strong as it had before she was forced to surrender to her body. “They need to know who they are,” behind and below, they bump her stomach and groin, and then latch on. “I could feel it, Woodrow. They are trapped up there, too.” She thought tears would come, but frustration had run them dry.

Hopelessness can be an arid land, especially when mated with exhaustion.

(@[Kristin] - this took way too long.. but lie.. I always knew HOW I was going to respond, I just couldn't write. To here it the partial mental breakdown. It needed to be written. I was DETERMINED.)