lepis, comtesse of taiga
RUN AND TELL ALL OF THE ANGELS; THIS COULD TAKE ALL NIGHT
i think i need a devil to help me get things right
She’s not purposefully avoiding him. Or so Lepis tells herself as she bids Noah farewell with the excuse that she needs to wrangle her own children, and as she smooths a blue mane and then a golden one despite having long-ago rid them of tangles, and as she recounts the story of the foal who cried Carnage in far more detail than usual. She’s not avoiding him. She’s not. Deep fissures crease her dun face, but Celina is old enough to not ask why, and Elio young enough to believe her answer that everything is fine when he inquires. After that she tries to smile better, and is still wearing the expression as she ducks beneath mouth of the hollow.
The smile flees at the sound of splintering wood, and a glance back the children assures her the sound had been too distant to disturb them.
The trees of Taiga sometimes crack in the bitter heart of winter, but that is not what she looks for in the darkness. Her eyes, a striking shade of blue-grey, can see nothing in the dim light of the half moon. Her ears are still turned in the direction of the sound though, and she has taken a few dozen steps toward it when something looms out of the darkness ahead. It speaks her name – she thinks – and what she had only recognized as a tawny creature that morphs into a face that she knows.
That she had known?
The dichotomy confounds her, and the flood of emotions that his appearance have elicited make it no easier. They flurry within her still, and are made ever more lively as she traces the brow and the nose and the cheeks that she has so often seen only in her imagination. She wants to kiss him, and to knock him head over tail. To scream with rage and to apologize. All at once, with none stronger than the other.
She had not been avoiding him, but if she had been, this would be why. This turmoil, this uncertainty. Only once before has she felt like this, and those tentative emotions are paltry things next to what fills her chest and colors her eyes. It is like standing on a ledge, and neither standing still or leaping off seems a better option. She doesn’t know how long she might have been still, her mouth half open, if he’d hadn’t spoken up.
The questions startles her. Startles an answer out of her even, one that she doesn’t even consider before voicing aloud.
“I didn’t know if you’d want me to stay.” The words are softer than his, and no less intense. “and I didn’t know if I wanted to.”
Lepis has admitted her wrongs to others, and yet the words are far away as she stands in front of him. She wants to tell him she is sorry, that she had said things she regrets, done things that she should have never dared, taken risks without thinking of the consequences. Starsin had told her that was the way to making things right again. That is how to mend the cracks, to relay the foundation that has shattered. And yet…
The ledge she balances grows narrower, she has to choose; she cannot stay here forever.
“I didn’t really want you to go,” she says to the snow that glistens around her fetlocks. "I just didn't want to keep fighting."
The words sound overloud in the still night, like rocks clattering down a slope. There are more coming - words or emotions she is not certain - these feel like the first rolling bits that precede a landslide.
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