One. Two. Three.
Heartbeat after heartbeat.
Three. Two. One.
Only one; the middle one.
Their smells have begun to fade from the air as if neither of them had ever been. As if from the beginning it had always been just her, the one in the middle of their tripled existence. She cannot scent them as quick and easily as she once had, though the brother’s scent had been more prevalent than the sister’s. Reap came around more and more, but no more - Reap was gone, like ghosts and shadows, here then not. That left only her, only and only and oh so lonely!
Witching and Reap.
She recites their names in the dark of the woods. Recites them until her throat is hoarse from the continued incantations as if she can call them back from wherever it is that they are. Recites them until she is out of breath and starved for the things that her flesh requires to survive, breaks only then to partake of what she needs and resumes her strange intonations until she falls asleep with the impression of their names on her lips - Witching and Reap, One and Three.
Gravely is lost.
She usually is. Little makes sense to her unless she is part of them, the middle to their beginning and their end. Without them, she is a thing adrift, like a boat spinning and spinning without an anchor to hold it still. She can see others, but she is not like them nor are they like those that she misses. Pale replacements that hold no candle to the light of Witching and Reap. She aches for them, an ache that hurts her bones and her brain and most of all, her heart in its weak stupid muscle that she does not want to ache any more.
For a moment,
Her nose lifts to the air - there is a scent, something familiar about it that is neither Witching nor Reap but is somehow part of them and thus, part of her. She had seen him but twice; once in the beginning as they lay upon the scorched earth in the aftermath of war, birth-damp and new to everything but each other. Once later, here and he’d been too much flesh and life and then gone as quick as he had come. Her brain recognized him as the progenitor of them - One, Two, and Three. But at the same time, the smell is different and not identified as him. If not him - Father, then who could it be?
For once,
Gravely is curious.
For once,
She is driven by purpose.
Blood beckons blood.
Sons and daughters of the same father. This is unbeknownst to her but there is that tendril of scent that tugs at a thing that goes deeper than thought or memory, as deep as instinct and the blood that travels through her veins. She hunts him out, calls to him as her cinnamon eyes try to pick apart the gloom of wood and night in search of that which haunts her - family. The wind plays with the pale froth that is her hair, blows it about her silver bay head as she looks around then calls out again in a soft demanding bellow of breath and noise that might that have been nothing more than a snort.
@[Sinner]