[private] i hear the voice of rage and ruin; wolfbane

[Lepis]

Tall and thin, her shadow stretches out on the yellow-gray sand ahead of her. It nearly reaches the water’s edge now, but when she had arrived it was half the size and the tide much farther out. The day is fading and the cool autumn night is drawing near. Her mane is tugged every which way by the breeze, a tangle of bicolored hair in every shade from blue to white. It often obscures her line of sight, but her storm colored eyes do not move from the distant shadowy rise that she knows are the cliffs of Nerine.

The mare that looks out to sea is little like her elongated shadow. She is not tall, and her sturdy physique is far from waif-like. Her long hair (even snarled and full of knots) is her one vanity, waving locks that reach past her belly and brush the ground behind her. As richly navy as the rest of her dun points, the swept back mane reveals her bare neck and shoulders and the multitude of scars across them. They have softened in the years since their infliction; all are smaller and thinner; some have even disappeared entirely. Still, they are stark and blue against her pale cream hide, and the reason she keeps her hair so ridiculously long.

A movement behind her pulls her gaze from the breaking waves. It hadn’t sounded quite like hoofbeats, yet somehow that makes her all the more certain that it is her husband she will find when she turns about. Lepis is right, and she smiles without thinking, smiles just enough that when she remembers and freezes, that the hopefulness is visible for far longer than it ever existed in her mind.

It is her husband’s green gaze that she meets, yet as her blue-grey eyes meet his she seems to look deeper, maintaining eye contact even as her navy mouth slides back to stillness. Then she scrutinizes the rest of him, inch by inch. The mask across his face, the high crest of his well-muscled neck and the bristling mane that accentuates it. The pattern of the blue stripes on his coat as they slash through the golden hair that is the precise shade of her happiness.

Her voice catches in her throat as she begins to speak, but she tries again, just three words.

“Fly with me?” She asks, and steps back. Her wings flare, low and wide, her pinions nearly touching the damp sand. Lepis knows this is not what he expects – and is quite likely not what he wants. But her Wolfbane has never been able to resist  an invitation to take to the skies, and she is nearly certain that she can see him there, hidden behind those eerily unfamiliar green eyes.

@[Wolfbane]

[Wolfbane]

The world yielded to his whims, now. In the beginning the sense of tenuous existence he lived in, one where he was constantly fighting himself to maintain shape or color, overwhelmed him completely. Wolfbane found he couldn’t remain in the company of other horses for extended periods of time, couldn’t trust himself not to react when he felt anything less than relaxed. He was constantly tired and constantly trailing Lepis, using her and her magic like a crutch when he needed it. But now… now it was simply a matter of what he wanted and the shape of his body would shift to suit his needs.

Did he wish to stay quiet, undetected? Then his hooves would split into soft, padded paws and he would glide like death through the fog and heavy ferns. Did he want to feel true speed? Then he could arch his back and mold his bones into a haunches-heavy creature, one that supported itself on thick forelegs and ran with blinding speed. He could fly faster, swim deeper and farther, smell and taste and see more than any one creature ever could.

The world rose up to meet him and every step he took was one perfectly placed. Wolfbane no longer blinked or breathed without purpose; he was a wholly new animal designed to be the apex of every other animal known in this world. He even garnered from Eyas (right before she’d disappeared) that Wyrm had unlocked the ability to take on the body types of animals long since extinct.

With more practice, Wolfbane could resurrect what even fate itself longed to bury in the earth.

And yet, he’s still surprised by the eagerness haunting his wife’s gaze. Lepis seemed hungry to have her old husband back - the Wolfbane who’d chosen love over duty and honor. She wanted something that no longer existed and like Gale, she wasn’t ready to let the old Bane die. Her nest-mate stared back into that waiting expression, a small part of himself lamenting that he was losing the ability to even want to care, and answered her request with a flat, “If you wish.”

The heavy sounds of his tread as he came alongside her thudded to a stop. Wolfbane glanced once at the way his partner stood waiting and flicked his ears: the motion traveled through his body like a tsunami of cramping muscle and skin, causing him to groan softly while a faint popping noise inside his fleshy core signaled that he was shape-shifting.

Bane leaned back, clenching his jaw through the pain while a blank expression of otherworldly concentration overcame him. His chest thickened, causing his forelegs to spread apart from another. Both of the blue-and-gold appendages shrank and melted into the bony, top curve of each wing, leaving him balancing in a half-rear and flapping to keep himself upright. The semi-horse took flight immediately, bobbing slowly into the air above while the rest of his transformation took place.

In the end, Wolfbane turned himself to a near-bird. He was still gigantic, with the fully-plumed breast, hind talons, and even feathered tail of some exotic jungle bird, while his neck and head remained nearly the same, save a different color. He looked like an unnatural melding of peacock and stallion, going as far to narrow his facial features and round his eyes to mimic that of an avian creature. This was more Wolfbane than the horse-skin he wore to make others feel comfortable around him. This was Lepis’ husband, the one who experienced the world in ways she couldn’t. Perhaps, he reasoned as he circled slowly, seeing him like this would make it all the more clear to her.

“You went to visit Heartfire, didn’t you?” The sound of his question broke the ice, higher and more … screechy than usual.

@[Lepis]

[Lepis]

With her wings flared, the autumn wind chills her once-warm sides, and the dun mare shivers as he answers.

He’d been slipping away even before he’d vanished, and though Lepis had let the shock of their initial reunion disguise it in front of their son, she cannot do the same now that they are alone. She knows those eyes - she’s looked into them countless times – but she does not recognize what is behind them. At first, she’d told herself that it was just his way of coping with Gale’s loss. She had clung tighter, unwilling to lose more than she had to, brushing away his uncharacteristic behavior and absences as symptoms of grief. But then the changes had become visible even to the naked eye, and Lepis came to realize that it was something more. Exactly what, she had not asked, but he still came each night to their nest and surely if he thought it worth telling he’d have told her.

But then he really had vanished, and when he had come back it had been with bitter words that she might have expected from an enemy, but never from him. She has always trusted him, first as a king, then a friend and lover, but as his body contorts itself in front of her, she feels a shadow of doubt. Doubt and distrust, with an edge of uncertainty, of fear. It is fortunate for Wolfbane (and perhaps for them both) that she is not more afraid. Lepis does not handle fear well.

What ever she’d been hoping for – an apology? a second chance at a happier reunion? – she is suddenly sure is not coming. His question confirms that – nothing about her, about them. He wants to know if she’d been to see his grandmother. Lepis scowls, as much for the memory of the meeting as for it being asked at all, and channels the energy into a leap forward.

“I did.” She answers as her wings catch the air, and then is silent as she gains altitude beside him. “She called me an arrogant infant, and told me that I could either give up Taiga or be destroyed.”Lepis had done neither, and yet Heartfire had still left the conversation considering herself the victor. Lepis considers it more a draw, but given that she had not gone to Nerine expecting much, she had also not left entirely disappointed.

Lowering her left wing, Lepis banks sharply to come up beside the avian creature with her husband’s coloration. 

“Would you like to hear more about how the Taiga’s political ties have changed while you were away? The pegasus mare finally asks, and the uncharacteristic saccharine tone is more than indicative of the query that soon follows. “Or are you going to fucking apologize for what you said to me earlier?”

Her voice doesn't quake (or at least not any more than it might if she were only angry), and Lepis is proud of that. She is less proud of the inexplicable trepidation that she feels as she waits for an answer, waits to see if he'd meant what he'd said, if he'd meant to stab at the only scars that still pain her after all these years.

@[Wolfbane]

[Wolfbane]

Lepis had always been a graceful flyer, each wingstroke crisp yet quiet. Watching her lift and join him above the earth, Wolfbane admired how each muscle and tendon jumped out underneath her shoulders. Both of them had been born for the air, born with wings and meant to fly, and both had their own style, but Wolfbane wanted to mimic the smooth strokes of Lepis’ wings as they levelled out and found the sweet spot beside each other during their journey to nowhere. Together they cut a nearly silent, somewhat disturbing sight from below: his form that of a large, pseudo-mythical bird while hers hovered close by.

The wind blew a steady white noise into their ears, and Wolfbane scoffed at her one-sided storytelling. Arrogant infant and threats of total destruction sounded exactly like Heartfire. Lepis must’ve made good on her threat to ally Taiga with Loess. Even better, the horse-bird stifled a sigh.

Not for the first time Bane feels confused. When had the vision gotten so blurry? When did he go from shirking responsibilities just because his title had changed, or the territory around them? The melding of two creatures saw Lepis adjust her flight and tilted his head accordingly, peering out at her from the wide, glossy saucer of a sharp eye. “I apologize.” He croaked steadily, not yet above admitting mistakes when he’d made them. “I covered you late in the season. Your initial ‘shock’ at seeing me so alive and well drove me to make asinine accusations.”

Lepis could’ve bit her tongue at that moment too instead of mocking him - but of course he wouldn’t go as far as to make her see the error of her own transgressions during his homecoming. Lepis had an uncanny way of spinning the light in her favor, on this matter. For now he was content to let her see things her way.

“Now,” He cawed, turning the pupil forward again “you may continue filling me in about our political ties.”

Underneath his lofted body, Bane clenched his talons and grit his teeth. “If Heartfire threatened war then how has nearly a year passed and you’re still here? How did you even get back from Nerine at all?”

And what of Castile? He wondered, feeling the sudden weight behind his acceptance of championing Loess after Vulgaris had gone away. What about Aten and the rest? Our Children? Through the ringing concern in his thoughts those voices they’d sworn to protect screamed out the loudest. Lilliana… He thought last of all, and his throat tightened shut.

@[Lepis]

[Lepis]

Below them, the redwood forest stretches like an emerald carpet. Far in the distance, she can see the changes in color that indicate the borders of the rest of Beqanna. There are the peaks of Hyaline’s mountans, then the hazy hills of Loess. She looks most briefly at the autumnal edge of Sylva, moving her gaze toward the smoking sky of Tephra. Then there is the wide stretch of sea, and just before she knows she will see the edges of the Isle, her husband apologizes.

Lepis does’nt look at him – instead rolling her wings so she might move higher above the feathered creature beside her – and squints her eyes against the bright glare of the sun. Though it will soon be gone behind too-distant sea, it is far brighter at this altitude than it had been on the beach, shielded by layers of fog and cloud. He apologizes, and though she is satisfied by it, that satisfaction is mingled as much with guilt as it is relief.

Admitting that she is wrong is an almost tangible pain for the pegasus mare. The symptom of a lavish childhood, most likely, compounded by her ability, her history, and an inherited sense of general superiority. The dun mare has admitted mistakes fewer times than she has borne children, and there is no question in her mind which were the worst experiences.

Some things are worth the pain though. Wolfbane has always been one of them.

“I’m sorry too.” The words are clipped, but there is no doubt that she means them, not with how rare they are. “I shouldn’t have said what I did, about this being my home, and not ours.” There. That’s over. They’re even again – at least regarding the topic of their personal lives.

Covering the topic of politics takes some time, but as the mismatched-but-winged creatures climb ever higher, Lepis tells him of the changes. First of the envoys that have been sent – Aten and Izora Lethia to the Island Resort, her own meeting with Jesper, the fresh agreement with Ischia, and her conversation with Castile before meeting with Heartfire. She tells him of the newcomers to the Taiga, both children born and adults recruited, and of Celina’s recent habit of waking her baby brother up by sending lightning bugs up his nose.

“She didn’t threaten war. Her threat was personal. She lectured me about not asking her permission before taking Taiga, about how I couldn’t really want peace, about how our violent deposition of Aten meant I couldn’t be trusted.” Lepis lists off her transgressions (according to Heartfire, though the scorn in her voice is all but dripping by the time she mentions the champagne Champion, who walked away with a new title and nary a scratch). “And then she threatened me.”

The dun mare halts her ascent then, turns back in the sky on agile wings till she can look at the creature in front of her with unblinking eyes that seems as steely as the sea below, and finishes: “It turns out that you and your grandmother share the same delusion: that there is no me without you, that I have only made it this far because of you.” The world at large seems to think she is incapable of novel action, they think that she is here because Castile sent her, or because Wolfbane suggested they move, or because anyone but Lepis herself made a decision and followed through.

“I’ve not got a pair of horns, or fire-breathing, or the ability to pop out a pair of talons at will,” she tells him, the examples of physical strength that are so vital in the jockeying for power and influence. “But I’ll not have you forget that I am perfectly capable of defending myself.” Fear, just strong and brief enough for him to be certain it’s her; an emotion so very different than any she more frequently wields.

“I will always want you beside me, husband of mine.” She says. “But I won’t have anyone, least of you, ever doubt that I’ll win any war that I deign enter. I showed you, once, when Arthas first made you king, what my abilities were.” Years its been now, the much better part of a decade. “Did you think you were the only one who might grow more skilled with time?” Lepis cannot grow herself a peacock’s tail or a cape of feathers, but there is no need for her to demonstrate physical prowess, not when she can slam an intangible wave of desperationhopelessnessinferiorityterror at him strong enough to flip him head over tailfeathers and send him hurtling toward the ground as fast as he can to literally bash the thoughts out of his head.

She lets off after a count of five, knowing that they’ve climbed high enough that any loss of altitude would be easily recovered. Lepis remains still, borne by rising thermals and her outstretched wings. The Comtesse watches the creature below her with a determined set of her navy mouth that says now they are even on the topic of their political life as well.

@[Wolfbane]

[Wolfbane]

Wolfbane’s nearly certain that her apology is one of a kind, in the literal sense. As in: this might’ve been the only time he’d ever heard her apologize about anything. Ever. So rare that hearing it, along with the not-so-brief “debriefing”, gave him a strong sense of déjà vu. The hazy memories about them leaving Loess together and Pteron behind… years have passed since then, Bane is, well would (really more like should) be eleven now. Eleven years in the face of what? He thought. An eternity?

Eleven years, six and a half spent together, and this is the best apology they can muster for one another.

But he accepted their reality for what it was; smiled and frowned anyway, hearing Lepis talk about the moving board pieces of their allies and enemies, then Celina and Elio. The scenery below was a numbing blur, swaths of evergreen rolling under and away from them while their disjointed shadows danced along too. The Comtesse soared above Bane’s parrot-curved head and keenly out of sight, and he could still hear the distinct shift in her tone when the answer about Heartfire came. The things he could pick up on these days, subtle things, sounded like noisy shouts - and those were common noises. The sound of a woman’s voice he knew as well as Lepis?

Exceptional hearing notwithstanding, the drake had heard his lover’s voice plenty of times and in plenty of ranges to understand where this conversation was headed. He could feel the enmity behind every word, yet didn’t alter his course or react when she spoke Aten’s name like a vulgar slur. Instantly, the treeline stopped and the ground fell out underneath them, taking Bane’s stomach with it and leaving a brittle, sad smile pinned in place of any other expression. They flew suddenly over boulders piled up near the shore, taking a lashing from the iron-blue sea.

All along the top of his feathers he could feel the gentle movement of Lepis ahead, the way the wind and even the spectrum of light warped like faint ripples when she twisted and pulled in front. Bane ducked his chin and dipped, curving back up with a wide, sweeping motion of his forewings to face her glare, his own expression a mirror of glassy disinterest while he hovered.

Lepis denied the foundational truth of their marriage - that either of them had made it anywhere without the other was the most delusional thing he’d ever heard, and the more she talked the further he withdrew into himself. The bluish dun mare’s rage grew paramount, filling the air like a crackling stormsurge. Her anger pushed out and his tempered within, slipping almost happily through the voided places where old Bane had gone away and left hollow, empty pockets to be filled. New Bane swept his strange wings, keeping himself aloft at first and stared, unflinching for as many seconds as he could manage, against the broad-handed slap of his wife’s brand of fear.

This kind - the kind of fear she shoved through those empty pockets inside of him like a serrated blade - reminded him of the way his father Longclaw would maul him during a wild flash of temper. He felt sick and horrified, recoiling away from the presence that had transformed into an utter nightmare. And Lepis seemed to know how he’d react, understanding the life she’d spent six and a half years with better than anyone else. She knew his soft points and she hit them hard, leaving the shape-shifter twisting and reeling away from her blows as if each fabricated emotion was a physical punch. His shoulders jerked and his stomach curled; the urge to resist her advances reared up to step in and save him, (so many years of their children’s emotions, knowing how these feelings were different from the true thing) he could’ve fought or at the very least tried.

But he didn’t. Wolfbane wanted to feel every little sensation burning white-hot inside of him, and he wanted to remind himself, tumbling head-first with his wings useless on either side and fresh tears of agony blurring his vision, that all of this was the Comtesse’s doing. That what he was feeling now: the hopelessness, the anguish, dark waves of terror - these were her ideas of compromise.

Lepis released him, taking away her projections as quickly and expertly as she’d given them, looking down onto her husband like a faraway star mid-implosion and Wolfbane turned belly-up so that they could see each other clearly in the moment. He kept falling, changing his skin and growing correct forelegs again during the plummeting descent, molding the feathers and talons back to a streaming tail and legs.

He changed himself into Gale, shrunken down and perfectly replicated from the last time they’d both seen him as a colt: gangly, spotted over with patches of blue and white just like the clouds, shimmering faintly when the light struck Bane’s coat just right.

As he slammed into the craggy rocks below, his body splintering apart inside when the audible smack of his weight against the sea stones echoed up for Lepis to hear, Wolfbane gasped at the feeling of horrible, unendurable pain from the impact. He relished the sensation anyways because it was real and so very, very true compared to the fabrication, and he looked up to where his dark star waited in the sky.

He would heal and change back later, but right now he wanted to remember the finite details of seaspray against his face and the numbness of his lower limbs before the bones and nerves knit themselves whole again. “Husband of yours?” He questioned himself and Lepis too, if she’d come close enough to hear, “No.” He decided for them both. Not anymore.

Gale shuddered and felt the final cracks and tears heal; his innards and outer shell had mended. Wolfbane gathered himself together, slow-moving as he rose and shifted skins simultaneously, turning into something black and oily that made no sense or took no immediate shape. His body wriggled and bubbled, and without any indication it shot with unnatural grace and liquid speed towards wherever Lepis waited. Hardly time to blink and he was there, upon her, with odd fingers and claws that grasped her at the throat and wrapped around the crest of her neck, while his haunches balanced themselves on her shoulder and his tail flicked like a cat’s between her wings. 
The primate-type hand under her jaw grasped tightly and Bane shook the Comtesse’s head with a low, animalistic hiss, as if daring her to try and resist via emotional manipulation. One good jerk, the pressure of his nails on her skin promised. “You’re arrogant and prideful,” He named her sins, aware of them since the moment they’d first coupled, “and if you choose to fight a war you can’t win, you’ll lose more than my waning respect Lepis.” The creature spat her name exactly how she’d spat out Aten’s. A near-perfect mimic of her tone and anger.

“I’ll take our children first and then Taiga, by force if I have to. Somehow you and Castile share a similar delusion of grandeur: that this world is yours for the taking.” He gripped harder, “But this is our world Lepis, and Heartfire’s world, and Aten’s and so many more.”

My world, he didn’t say. He breathed gently against the poll of her crest and then let go, pushing away from her shoulder with his hind paws and sprouting wings for flight. “Your way of doing things failed.” Bane flapped, “You can refuse to admit it all you like, try and place the blame elsewhere." He frowned, "Give up the illusion Lepis; the North doesn’t love us and you can’t force them to.”

They should’ve never tried. Not when there were so many different routes they could’ve taken. Not when the final routes remaining could salvage what was broken, if only she’d stuff her vindictive desires away. “There’s still hope that they could… but not with you at the helm.”

@[Lepis] ok this was literally getting way too long so I just stopped writing and posted

[Lepis]

She’d meant only to remind him that she is not defenseless, that she will not cave to pressure. He is just as strong, just as resilient, and she expected nothing less than for him to right himself and return to her, to admit that he’d been wrong, that the world was wrong to have ever doubted her. Or even perhaps to right himself and return and tell her she was wrong, which would have been infinitely harder to swallow. But she could have choked it down, however bitter, because she loves him for his own strong mind and the counterbalance he has always provided when she goes too far. Lepis might bemoan his stubbornness to herself, but she is as acutely aware of flaws as her husband (even if she will never admit to them).

Lepis had known it for a lie when she’d said it - that she does not need him - but it had felt so good when she’d said it. It had felt like getting back at Heartfire, like making Wolfbane feel what she’d felt when he’d whispered to her so coldly.  It had felt like proving to the whole world that it was wrong about her and it had felt good.

But this?
This is not good.

This is her baby falling and falling and breaking and while she knows in her mind that Wolfbane will be fine, it is not her mind with which she feels. She gasps his name as he falls away, plummets down after him with her wings tight at her sides, but it is not fast enough.  She is too late, always too late.

He breaks below her, and she doesn’t feel her own tears. She does not feel the sharp pain of her wings as she halts her sudden descent, as the broken body of her little son becomes something dark and slick and wrong. She doesn’t register the sharp prick of claws along her throat or the weight on her back or even the listing of her flaws.

Not until he mentions her children, not until he says he’ll take them, does she react at all. Even then, it’s just a shuddering gasp to accompany the tears that have not stopped, though she blinks them away as best she can when he finally faces her.

He’s still talking about the North, about power, about things that don’t matter and will never matter if she loses them.

Gale’s loss had been filtered through her own ability, absorbed in small doses over the years, grieved in bits and pieces. It had been enough - could have been enough. It might have continued to be enough had she not seen him bleeding and battered below her, had she not accepted fault moments earlier, had she not been taken to task for failing to carry out a task meant for two entirely by herself.

”Go away, Bane.” She says firmly. Or rather, she means to say firmly. It comes out instead as something else entirely, as something choked and broken and weak. There are surely better emotions in reach, but she cannot find them, not as her eyes remain on the beach a hundred yards below. ”Just...go away.”

@[Wolfbane]

[Wolfbane]

This is what becomes of you when reason cedes to power. You hardly recognize yourself; you hardly look recognizable. Wolfbane feared he was nearly there, looking down and seeing outstretched digits that could grasp instead of hooves that could gallop. He panted through serrated teeth and sensed that the sky around him was whirling, Lepis herself had become a muddy blur. He hadn’t noticed before that she was crying. His lips straightened out and he lowered both paws to hang beside his hips, the wings at his back flapping and keeping him aloft, bobbing gently.

All of this: her projections, his manipulative use of Gale… all of it was sick.

Wolfbane shuddered, groaning in one long exclamation of brief pain as his skin stretched. The bones rolled and pressed up through the skin keeping them contained, making it seem like the Commandant was nothing more than a writhing sack full of snakes. His shifting felt uncomfortable and it made Bane tired, now that he’d changed back and forth and had to keep himself airborne. The emotional exhaustion was taking a toll as well on the both of them.

Perhaps she was right, he thought (finally settling down on the rocks he’d smashed himself into minutes ago) Maybe he should go. South then North… a week’s worth of travel at the least. He’s only just returned but…

“Lepis.” Bane tried, his throat constricting. He would apologize a second time if it didn’t feel like a cheap excuse. At this point everything felt like it was beyond apologies. “I don’t want -”

to, the word stuck fast. He swallowed it down then bit his tongue, glancing up to her. He’d always looked up to her for guidance. I don’t want this - I don’t know what I want anymore, he thought desperately. Wolfbane’s only thought was to reach out for her and he did, raising the smart line of his handsome mouth where the wind and crash of the sea was. Up and out towards his broken love, he reached and felt nothing but empty space between them. A void that felt impossibly wide.

“I’ll come back. No more than two weeks.” He promised while his head dropped. Whatever desire remained was fading; the hard edges and cold indifference came back. He’d done this to her after all… Lepis no more wanted his comfort than he wanted her emotional crutch right now. “I do love you, Lepis.” The shapeshifter threw at her, snapping his hooves on the stone as he twisted away. The haunted look of her deflated pride and the trauma shadowing her golden face stuck to the back of his mind anyway.

He could’ve stayed, tried to fix things beyond repair.
Instead Wolfbane unfurled his tired wings and left, just like she’d asked him to.

@[Lepis]

[Lepis]

She lets herself drift down, down, down toward the beach until her hooves reach the rocky shore. There is nothing here but sea and stone, no sign that this granite had been red a moment before, that this boulder had held up a broken blue body. Lepis cannot hear her own breathing - too loud, too heavy, hyperventilation - and the sound of rending flesh is surely her own imagination.

No, she sees as a shadow drifts across and she glances up without thinking (instinct, however well she might quell it), it was not her own mind. The feathered furred beaked clawed thing becomes a shape she knows, the sight and sound is nauseating. Or perhaps it is her crying that sours her stomach, or her guilt, or any of the other dozen nameless emotions that she cannot seem to stifle. She cannot find her magic.

Good. She doesn't deserve it anymore, not after what she has done. She hopes it stays gone, that this flood of regret and pain and anxiety never fades, that it reminds her forever of this day.

He says her name but Lepis can't look at him, can't bear to face what she knows she will see in his eyes. She cannot bring herself to look at what she has done, to see the way Wolfbane will look at her  he knows what she truly is, what she is capable of. Words are not enough for an apology, not one of this magnitude, and the bile in her throat chokes back anything she might have said.

'I'll come back' he says, and she looks up only in time to see him look down, and the breath that had caught in her throat is choked back down. He means for the children, she realizes; she is not fit to raise them. Lepis nods, the motion stiff, and only one tear escapes to slide down her golden cheek after he turns away. It's easy to imagine he tells her goodbye, tells her that he loves her the way he always had when he's left her side before.

She's always had a good imagination, after all.

Quietly, so quietly no horse might hear, she tells the shrinking golden shape: "I love you more."

@[Wolfbane]