09-12-2016, 10:17 AM
One. Three.
She is only Two, always in the middle of them.
Happiness slithered through her like a snake, scaly and cool, then it slithered away and right out of her --
Storms churned in the sky;
The earth started to shake underfoot;
One and Three were sundered from her, again!
She screamed her anger and her hurt to the stormy sky.
Stamped her hard little feet on the quaking ground until she nearly toppled over from the imbalances rolling her up and down.
Not again!
This birth was like the first, black and dizzying as she felt awful pressure on her to go down then up and at last, out.
She is dumped unceremoniously on familiar ground but it seems less familiar now; - there is no One, Witching and no Three, Reap. Her nostrils flare in search of their scents but all she smells is meadow, and she loathes it. Her loathing is a claw that snags in her gut, snarls it up and makes her roar in a small equine way, all the hurt in her at their loss - One and Three, gone again!
There is a scent that reaches her; teases out a thread of remembrance from amidst the fire and smoke of a terrible war, and such useless burning. Why all the burning? She remembers the scorch of earth underneath their newborn skins, their bed one of ash and broken birth sacs rife with fluid, and then she remembers Him - Rodrik, not to be trusted said someone that dances out of memory’s reach, black and white, intoning a warning to the three of them as they lay there new and together out as they had been in. This smell pulls her forward, first a tiny step, then quicker - quicker now! She does not know why there is haste hurrying her along but maybe, it is a kernel of hope too that flings her faster forward and right into the meat of his broad red side.
“Have you seen them?” she asks breathlessly.
“One and Three.” she amends just as quickly, as if he could not have possibly known who she referred to as them.
He is fleshy, solid - was he always like so?
Memory darts like a minnow in and out of her mind; red - yes, fleshy - not always and she frowns up at him, considering the old warning that tolled like a bell in her head. But this was father, Rodrik and he ought to be trusted… right?