"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
I've seen crazy things - out in the forest, I've seen monsters chasing dreams
Vox is eliminated for failure to respond to Round 2. This will be nothing but a bad dream – but if he’s currently alive, he will have nightmares about his losses for one BQ year (2 RL) months after waking, and he cannot wake until the rest of these questers have succeeded or failed (AKA the end of this quest).
In order to make sense of her new world order, the grulla mare needs them to succeed. It’s an impossible task, even for them, the dead; all the determination in the world is not enough to rewrite the rules of life and death. But they have more than determination – they have Nikkai, and whatever strange powers she’s been sent back into Life with. Some others might have simply fled into a new life, taking advantage of the power she never had the first time around, but that’s just not the way of the mare whose entire life had been devoted to serving others; lack of loyalty had not been one of her faults (though she had many faults). So she reaches out to help them, immersing herself in their struggles.
The buckskin mare is from time before time; like herself. Nikkai can feel the age here, the deep need to reach a lost love. The Gates was not ever a place she loved, but the older mare’s connection to the tree is as strong as her connection to the waterfall. It’s easy to bouy her up with roots and branches, as she strikes out across the water.
The bay stallion is another older than she – much, much older. He seems fueled more by irritation than by love, but determined he is. Determined enough to brave the help of the monster in the water, anyways. She pulls it from his knowledge, and he trusts its deep voice and steps off into the unknown.
This gray face, she knows. Her eyes hold Dillan’s longer than most of the others; Nikkai, too, wishes there was more time to connect. But she is being pulled in a million directions, and she can’t lose focus. Dillan’s child is not her grandchild – that was not fated to be, though it had looked likely, for a time – but she yearns to help her old friend anyway. But each item that freezes on the surface of the river is a drop of power that she can’t extend another direction.
The blood-red colt (no – not a colt? But his soul feels young to her) can’t be motivated by any of his internal feelings, standing frozen, and so she is forced to motivate him, rather than help him. She needs all of them to participate. The wolves are the shape of his fear, sending him surging forward.
The youngest of the dead so far, this one takes the challenge head on and dives into the river. It even steals Nikkai’s breath for a moment, the way she rushes headfirst into the danger for the one she loved. With this, Nikkai can identify. A lack of fear had gotten her murdered, after all. But thankfully the young are imaginative and resilient, and the guiding light is not hard to magick along.
She is one of the most reluctant. Perhaps it is something that happened to her in life – Nikkai can see that, if she tries, but it’s blurry and confusing; there’s too much going on to hone in on finding the answers. But in the end, she tries to swim across, and her temporary setback leaves them both breathless. Thankfully, the motivation wells from deep after that, and when the coin bounces across the river a way become clear.
The nearly white mare has the same passion as Dillan – a mother whose child is stuck here, in this not-life. Nikkai, a mother, finds her own passion reflected in the stranger, and her heart and strength are lifted by the mare’s strong song. It helps to keep her balancing all of their efforts as this mare sets across the riverbed.
The smallest of those who have been called into this strange afterlife experience with her is a practical creature – he does not value the same things as she; his heart does not sing with the chance to save his mother. But he is certainly innovative, and she wants all of them to succeed. She helps the vine to make it to his mother’s grasp, and hopes it will hold his weight.
This stranger’s imagination is like running in circles – the most confusing of their dreamlike states. It is all Nikkai can do to keep up, and she throws an inordinate amount of magic at sustaining the mare’s solutions. It makes sense to the mare that the water can’t hurt her because she’s dead, but making that real is more than a little challenging.
Two parents, two children; it hurts almost as much to see Larva and Dillan’s life falling apart in death as her own did. Nikkai had no daughters, but she was a mother of three and would have died for her sons, had she not been murdered before having the chance. Thankfully, creating a bunch of Larva’s is one of the easier tasks she is managing, and she doesn’t have to give him much of her full attention to help.
It had definitely hurt, to fall from the top of the waterfall in life. She might not have asked the question out loud, but Nikkai can offer an answer anyway. But the blue mare is another who draws upon the strength of their old homes, trying to send herself across on the memory of a home that no longer exists, and the loyalties they engendered. Is there no one who feels this connected to the new lands? The mist she is maintain for this mare’s walk is leaving her almost as breathless as some of them, brushed under the water. (She’s not sure how many of them she can help).
This one, at last, feels strongly connected to the now, or at least, the recent past. And less inclined to foolishly diving into a battle against the waves she can’t hope to win – she waits for a better opportunity, and Nikkai must dig deep to present one. In the end she just moves some of the fog and mist upriver to help, digging deep into her own endurance.
Most of those who have been dragged into this dream (nightmare?) have something to strive for. But there’s always a margin of error – and this chestnut is the one here. She wants to be dead. But if they don’t succeed, death will mean nothing. She needs her to participate. Nikkai has to show her something she can’t refuse – herself. It rubs her the wrong way, but she needs ever soul to work together.
He is one of the most defeatist; his outlook almost as black as his coat. He’s not going to fight for this chance, and she’s tired and angry about it, her temper starting to boil under her own strain. She sends image after image from his past, until something changes. Maybe it’s too late, as he nears the waterfall; but there is bravery in forgiveness, and maybe that will be enough?
The strain is affecting her. She can’t force herself to manipulate this scenario into something she’s more comfortable with – she doesn’t know if she could sacrifice a child for a lover, but she does feel the resonation of loving something (or someone) so single-mindedly. Frostreaver steps onto the backs of her own children and Nikkai’s threads to all of them start to unravel.
She’s losing her grip, for real this time. Her help is less helpful. This mother’s desperation isn’t any less powerful than the others, but Nikkai is stretched too thin. She tries to prevent things from crashing into Cress, but things are slipping out of her grasp.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps it out, pain in every syllable, even as she loses all of them. Water crashes over, under, around; the current increases and even the shores flood, sweeping the living and dead along in its icy grasp. She had lived through all of their deaths, and now they all get to live through hers. For Nikkai, it’s the feeling of Core’s hooves smashing into her once, twice, sending her tumbling over the edge of the waterfall. For each of them, it will be Core overlaid with their own nightmares, for a confusing mash of memories. She remembers the feeling of being unable to draw breath, water rushing into her ears and eyes, and the pain of her body being dashed against the rocks underneath the waterfall. They will know this too, in a way she never intended for them.
But of course they can’t die again, as they’re all already dead. But somehow they can be dashes against these rocks in another layer of death, and though they are reunited with their person they were trying to reach, fate says they can’t all go home. Nikkai wasn’t strong enough to send them all. Her regret and helplessness washes over all of them, a nearly cloying feeling. A current of anger runs through it, that even now at her most powerful, she can’t do this. She can’t heal them, and send them onward. The warrior tries, reaching for the magic, but she’s drained it to a mere trickle. There’s not an endless supply, after all. “I’m so sorry, I can’t fix it all. But there is so much to fix…” she trails off, looking around at the broken people around her, bleeding into the shallow water, and doesn’t even realize she looks the way she had the day she died, standing before them bleeding out slowly. “I can send half of you back. Everyone will have to choose – I can heal your person, and send them back to life; or you can let them go peacefully back to death, and go back to help fix the world yourselves.”
& I wanna be by your side when we light up the sky for the world to see
Nikkai
html by devin | lyrics by The National Parks
Final Entry
->Oops, everyone fell over the waterfall. (You had to see that one coming though, right??). They experienced Nikkai’s murder but overlaid with one of their own nightmares or experiences. The person they were trying to reach also go swept over.
->It’s death so nobody died but nobody is in great shape at this point. #sorrynotsorry
->You character has to choose – send their person back to life to help fix everything, and stay dead; or go back to life to help fix things themselves, and let their person go back to a peaceful death (obviously this doesn’t mean you have to play this character for a long time if you don’t want to, you’re not committing to anything for you or another character!); for the purpose of this quest, the character who doesn't go back to life wouldn't just be able to cross over like everyone else can at the moment, they'd be for-real dead
->They can communicate directly with Nikkai with their reasoning or it can be in the head
->Deadline for final posts is Monday, November 18th at 12:00 AM EST.
Fear slid coolly around her shoulders as the mist of the water coated her tawny skin, draping across her brown and tangling in her dark mane. The willow grew as she willed it as her blossomed in return. For the first in so long, there was a small warmth of hope in her breast. There was a chance and it drove her own as she was able to make out the dark eyes of Sariel.
Small, hard hooves push on as she feels the thickness of the willow’s roots beneath her. There are sure and they are real. She trusts the willow and her face seems to morph into an image of radiant beauty as a smile breaks the grey mask of her brokenness. ”Sariel?”, her voice lifts, it rings as clear as a bell, full with emotion.
But something is happened…her throat thickens with the mist and her lungs heave despite her undead existence. Her body soon begins to sink with each passing foot fall…she was so close! Sariel titters nervously for a moment before rushing headlong into the river after the mustang mare but it is too late. The lasting image she has before the water slips over her head is the tall stallion, panicked and calling out, as he plunges into the water.
The water was deafening and peaceful as she is spun beneath the water’s surface and dragged against rocks. It was painful but not devastating…like a callus on well-worn hands. She should feel panic but perhaps the waking knowledge of her knowing death was a buffering shield where fear had once crept in. Over and over, for what feels like a century passes, and she is flung upward and sputtering as the roar of the waterfall drifts behind her.
October, small but strong, is fighting for this gift was in her death. Surely it is not life but it is a gift nonetheless. Honey brown eyes are wide and searching as she searched for the familiar bay over stallion. Sariel? SARIEL?!” He emerges looking bruised and nearly drowned as she but it does not stop the momentum as she crashes against him and wrapping herself around him. ”My love…my love…” the coo is muffled against his skin as she tastes blood and the salt of her tears but her heart is BEATING and it is strong.
-----
Nikkai’s voice trails gently and it wakes her from the embrace she held so tightly. It was unfair! So, so devastatingly unfair! Must she sacrifice the love she fought so hard for? Must she give up the one thing that made her so happy? Dark eyes glisten as the flurry of emotions rage through her mind. Never in her life had the meek and timid mare every felt a fury of unjust. The dark eyes simmer and burn as she looks to Nikkai for a reason…a justification…but in her heart, she knows it is what it must be.
With softening features, October returns her attention to Sariel as he whispers gently to her before she nods in agreement then pressed a loving kiss before leaving his side. She walks with squared shoulders, her chin lifted as she approaches the taller mare. ”Sariel has lived his life, made his glory, he will never be forgotten. He has urged me to do the same…to not squander this gift that has been given to me to allow me to return.” She draws a breath, huffing gently, trembling slight but proud of herself as she swells with warmth of Sariel’s love.
One dark eye is cast for a last time to gaze upon the stallion’s beautiful face as he smiles broadly at the buckskin mare, beaming with pride at her strength.
Darkness again, he feels nothing as the water sweeps over him, his eyes closed and his body limp, almost tolerating the sudden current of the river. And then nothing, he feels as if he is flying, sudden weightlessness he has never felt before as he bounds over the waterfall. The sensation of nothing almost comforting.
To his surprise, he does not land violently, instead, he falls like a feather, landing standing up next to his mother.
His eyes shoot open again, the place he is in is still dark, though the atmosphere is not dull or ominous, it has more of a lulling and comforting feel to it.
Satan only catches the ending of what Nikkai has to say, but his mother fills him in rather quickly, informing him that they would have to make a decision on who to send back to the living.
Suddenly his feelings toward his mother shift, he feels a sudden apathy toward his own interests and diverges more toward hers which is something he would have never expected.
"I will stay here, you should be the one to go" he says rashly, his mother rather surpised by the sudden break of silence, Satan's voice piercing the hum of the waterfall nearby.
Though his mother does not agree, she shakes her head and speaks to him in his mind, telling him that she was not fit to change the world and that she deserved to stay in the land of the dead.
Eventhough he felt what his mother had said was right, it still felt wrong to keep his mother here, away from the land of the living, even if she had done so many wrongs during her life, though despite his feelings toward his mother, he decides to agree with her.
"Fine. Though before I go I need to tell you that I forgive you for what you did" he manages a faint smile before turning toward Nikkai "I will go, my mother will stay here" he says, afraid to look back toward his mother who stands patiently behind him.
The pain that comes next is not his own, but it is visceral enough that it feels like it is.
He can feel the hooves pounding him—can feel the way that they collide with his body, can feel his eyes roll back into his head and the blood that begins to flood up onto his mouth. The copper of it is bitter and yet rich and he swallows it, feels the water rush in to flush it out, even though it fills to match it. At the same time, he can feel the jaws of the wolves around his throat. The way they tear and shred him apart.
His mind nearly splits apart trying to hold the two realities and, were he awake, surely he would pass out from the sheer force of the pain that slams into his chest—the physical pain of it that takes his breath away. But he isn’t asleep. He isn’t alive. He is trapped in the amber of this moment, suspended in his own pain and his own agony, and he is forced to feel every minute detail of it, every last fiber of the pain.
When the ground beneath him gives way, and he crashes into the water, he knows what to expect.
He knows what to expect even though he has never lived this before.
So it is not surprise that explodes as he falls over the edge the waterfall but a dull kind of acceptance. He goes lax as his body slips down the treacherous edge and then goes crashing into the shallow pool that waits for him at the bottom of it. A piece of his antler snaps and his leg fractures and he grits his teeth as he cries out—the sound that of a young boy. He calls for his mother and she comes to him. She, too, is broken and battered, bleeding and bruised, but she stumbles to where he lay underneath the pounding of the water and kneels by his head. “Brigade,” she whispers between the sobs, dropping her head to press kisses to his bleeding skull, her lips trying to wipe the blood but only smearing it across his blaze.
“My beautiful, stubborn boy,” she cries, her body trembling with the emotions that roar in him.
He looks up at her, the whites of his eyes showing.
“Am I dying? Can I die if I am already dead?”
She shakes her head, silently mouthing ‘I don’t know’ although nothing comes out.
They both jerk when they hear the words of the Nikkai, but Brigade cannot find it in him to life himself. He can’t find anything except the exhaustion that races through every corner of his soul.
“You have to go back,” Pyxis cries, brushing her forelock back. “You’re so young still,” but Brigade is already shaking his head. “I am so tired,” he says, his chest expanding and then falling. He wonders if his lungs have somehow collapsed, if it even matters when he’s already in the afterlife. “I’m so tired,” he repeats and there are tears that run down his red cheeks as he thinks about what he’s left behind.
“Dad needs you,” he says, cutting off her protests. “Wonder needs you. May and Phesque do too.” He gives her a sad smile, that acceptance creeping into his voice again, into his light grey eyes.
“You have to go back for them. There’s no one who needs me on the other side.”
She opens her mouth again but he cuts her off again.
“Let me go, mom. Just let me go.”
And, sobbing, she does. She leans over and kisses her boy goodbye.
Mourns for the pain she knows is to come.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
Perhaps she had known it, perhaps she hadn't believed the truth or the lie of it strongly enough. Perhaps it was the Magic of the scarred mare that had intercepted her belief. Two Red Mares steps forward into the water confident that they will cross, and two Red Mares are swept away and under simultaneously into the fever dream of this mpossible river, carried along by the current towards the falls.
Red Mare does not gasp, she is too resolute for that. There is no pang in her lungs, her lungs do not seek to breathe, they are no more than dust somewhere far away. It has been decades since her cracked hooves settled against solid ground, decades of dreamless black slumber. When the crushing water barrels her against rocks and debris scattered across the river bottom, the pain is like in a dream, a strange stiff twinge, an itch, even these things should be impossible but though the impact makes her grunt, makes her think she is hurt, when her body rolls away from each obstacle, the dream of pain is already something else.
Memory is funny like that. She remembers dreaming such dreams, cats on her back, wolves at her haunches, pain that had made her awaken with a shout, yet was already gone when her eyes flickered open. This is what the battering ram of water is like. There is a sense of fear, the stomach she does not have dropping when she teeters for as much time as it takes for her to say Oh! before hurtling over the precipice. There is a feeling of weightlessness, of drifting, and then she disappears, dashed against jagged rocks shaped by an eternity of water falling down upon them. She is wedged there, with her memories of bruises and her dreams of bones broken, crushed beneath the weight of so much water falling from so high, destroyed by the debris and the non-bodies of the horses that follow her because, try as they might, none could cross no matter their imagination.
And now, she cries, the salt of her tears diluted and washed away, but more real than anything else about her. Emotion crosses all borders, and Red Mare cannot stop the breathless wail that comes of finding herself stuck, trapped, wedged between rocks and incapable of escape. The crash of water, the press of it, she can remind herself it is less than real, but the fear of being trapped incites panic and she squeals and struggles and feels the grey stone grow more solid with every frenzied tug of her limbs. There is a sharpness to the pain in her leg and her eyes roll as the bone she doesn't have fractures. The falling water from above suddenly seems to grip her, to pull and twist and with a shudder she knows the limb is broken, with a gasp, she knows that this is the end, forgets that she had already faced it. Water rushes is and the world turns to smoke.
Stupid
She is weak, but the voice makes her eyes fly open. Peering through the swirling bubbles, a flash of red, her other self drifting, one rear leg snagged under rock, twisting in a way that makes her stomach turn. Is that what she looks like?
Yes. You look stupid.
That isn't what she mean--
You forget yourself. There are no rocks, there is no you. You cannot break in this way.
Their dark eyes meet across the distance and the little chestnut remembers. Dreams and memory. Her leg is not caught - it cannot be caught - it is not broken - impossible - her lungs are not full of water - it would not matter if they were, she does not need breath. She blinks and both mares are walking up the riverbank, favoring their right hinds as though injured, but obviously whole.
It is hard to remember right away. They cannot help but limp until they reach the side of the grullo mare and press twin muzzles to hers, blowing soft breath into her nostrils. The memory of breath. Both mares speak in unison.
"What are we to do? We are the same, there is no decision to be made." The decision to help, perhaps. She could simply refuse to return at all, to let the World crumble beneath the weight of the Living and the Returned.
"It isn't right, that the Dead are returning. They will overwhelm the whole world. I will go, I will help if I can."
Only one bright chestnut remains on the sandy shore.
Just as he is nearly across, the chain breaks and the copies all wither to dust. Darling tumbles into the river as she reaches for him and together they plummet. Each time his head rises above the water’s surface, there is another face waiting to smash him back down. First, it is Samael returned to finish his work. Then, it is Nikkai’s murderer Core come to relive her death. They are followed by Dillan, Shiya, Bible, and Cobain. Larva finds himself gnashing his teeth as that immortal rage builds within him until he is certain he is prepared to fight the next enemy to greet him.
But when he surfaces for the final time, there is only Darling coughing and openly weeping as she shivers. He bites back his anger and edges closer to his daughter as she hurries to him. Comforting her has never been his strong suit, but he curls his neck over hers as he pulls her into an embrace. They are both bleeding and shaking as they try to come to terms with where their journey has taken them. The serpent kisses her temple gently and sucks in a sharp breath as he realizes how badly bruised he is.
When Nikkai speaks, they turn gingerly to face her, leaning on one another for support. Larva feels his jaws clench tightly at the news while Darling stiffens only briefly beside him. The girl buries her face against her father’s neck before pulling back to look up at him with a smile that doesn’t quite shine the way it should. Before she can speak, though, he is already shaking his head.
“I will not take the life that could be yours, Darling. You have so much more light to give the world,” he says with a tinge of desperation to each word. But she only laughs, gently and without any kind of mockery to the sound.
“I’m not a warrior. I couldn’t protect my brothers and sisters from a mouse,” she mumbles softly. “They need someone strong. The world needs someone angry enough to do something.. It needs you.”
And for a while, they only stare at each other in the hopes the other will back down. Larva swallows hard and wishes she hadn’t inherited both of her parents' stubborn mindset. With a long, slow sigh, he rests his cheek against her.
“You are powerful in ways that I never could be. When the world wants you to crumble, you become a monument of strength. You have always been my pride and joy, Darling,” he says before turning to Nikkai. “But you have made your choice and I will concede to it. I will return to you when my work is done.”
His breaths shudder as they leave him both from the pain and the weight of the decision they have made. When he blinks, she is already gone, and the realization blurs the edges of his vision with tears. It will be so long before he earns a place beside her in the land of the dead again.
“Nikkai, I will live once more. My daughter has earned her rest,” he says with a feigned sort of confidence to his voice and a stern nod of his head. He tells himself that this is the way things must be, that her gentle heart should not face the storm. She shouldn’t know a second death.
She can’t help it. She could never help herself, not when it came to Tatter. Her mother had once described Frost’s love for Tatter as an echo, in comparing it to her love for their father, Set. But, the phoenix-mare had been wrong; it is not an echo, a fading duplicate of the real thing, no. Inexplicably intertwined, he is the only piece of her that was ever worth something, that ever meant something. At least, that is the conclusion she has come to over an amount of time she has no count of, lost somewhere between drownings. She had denied it, when he had betrayed her, broken the ice queen down not systematically but with one fell blow. And still, her soul cries out for him. Her skin yearns for another brush of his shoulder at her hip, the press of his muzzle to her ear. She could not exist without him, she knows. She tried.
The girls cut through the riotous water with ease. Frostreaver’s eyes do not waver from Tatter’s smile, as if it is her will alone that keeps flesh to bone. As if she has any say at all in this bizarre reality that is death. She had sunk beneath the waves so many times, resigned to her eternal fate. Here, now, she does not even question this disorienting turn of events. Her children are here. Tatter is here.
Embedded in this stranger-than-fiction, she does not notice the disturbance when Nikkai begins to lose hold of them all. They are nearly halfway across the river now. It is only when Tatter’s wide grin falters that she notices something feels different. She chances a look down. Rather than the smooth backs of her daughters, two crocodiles surge beneath her. Confusion is a flash of cold down her spine, a churn in her belly that morphs to trembling anger. Her head whips around, seeking out the mare in the center of the river, but all she finds is a gasp, and all she hears is the roar of the water as it devours them all.
It envelops the sin-licked mare like a violent lover. The crocodiles she had imagined to be her daughters have disappeared, Tatter has disappeared … she succumbs to the frigid embrace. It roars in her ears and pummels her lungs. She forces her gray eyes open, though all that she sees is turbulent waters and … with a CRACK, her body slams into a boulder and she cannot stem the cry of pain. Her knees burn from the fall. Her chest is going to suffocate with the anguish. The water sweeps her along downstream, dragging her body along the rocky bed. One of the last to enter the river, she is one of the first to go over the edge.
He is coming after her, sweet murmured apologies on his mouth, curling into her. She free-falls into bliss and he turns on her. Flashing hooves, clacking teeth. They render untouched flesh from bone and she opens her mouth to cry out … The bottom of the waterfall reaches for her plummeting body with greedy arms and her skin burns with the impact, splitting open in a dozen places.
She does not remember closing her eyes again but she had at some point, and now she slowly opens them. Everything hurts, but it is the suffocating sense of grief and powerlessness that overwhelms it all. Squinting, she finds the source of the apologetic voice – the mare who had started them all on this hopeless journey. Frost struggles to her feet, bleeding profusely from a large wound across her ribs and various other lacerations. It seeps into the quiet shallows, mingling with Nikkai’s and the others’. She cannot put weight on her right foreleg and she knows something is broken but she is distracted from it by the enigma’s final address. She or Tatter.
She surges forward, stumbles, regains. “You said, you said -,” she starts, eyes rolling wildly, searching the broken and battered around her for Tatter’s dear face. “I can’t …” She chokes, biting her tongue on a sob. She could not live without Tatter. She had tried, and she had failed. In her absence, he had flourished. Every breath is agony, snapped ribs and watery lungs. “Tatter,” she says to the magic-mare quietly, ashamedly, the first selfless act she has ever committed. “It should be Tatter,” she whispers again. “It was always Tatter.”
be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
The anger of the river swells upwards while she is in mid-air. Wishbone catches a glimpse of her father’s eyes watching her with sheer terror before the darkness of the water swallows her vision. The heavy pain of hooves push firmly into her back once and then twice… Then an odd weightless sensation accompanied by the warmth of the Ischian sea. The taste of river-water floods her mouth and with it comes the panic of reliving nightmares. How often had she seen the depths of a gray ocean in the land of the Dead and felt her spine shiver with fear? The weightless sensation is followed by the feeling of skin and muscle shredding on her throat; she sees a stream of deep red blood float past her vision.
The harsh memories stop with a bang.
When her mind swims back into reality (or whatever form of reality this might be), Wishbone knows that this is Death a second time. This one is much worse because she feels everything and the pain brings a sob so heavy that it gets stuck in the back of her throat. It is every type of pain that roars at the forefront of her mind — aching, bone-shattering, pinpricking, sharp, throbbing — and it coats her entire body as though she were a canvas for an avid painter. The lingering sensations from the memories are the most prominent; the stretch of her lungs unnaturally filled with water, the blossoming bruising of the hooves placed into her back, the unbearable ripped feeling of her throat and the subsequent weakness from such blood loss.
Wishbone rises onto her shaky mahogany legs, leaving a puddle of slippery blood where her body had just been wrecked against the rocks. Her father has already risen, though his right wing is bent at an angle that suggests he will never fly again and there is heavy bruising spreading across his cheeks. “Fuck, this isn’t good.” She’s had the mouth of a sailor since her young years, but that doesn’t stop Warrick’s look of warning. Before the mahogany has time to make a comment, the grullo who had started it all (or so Wishbone thinks) begins to speak.
Everyone will have to choose.
And quieter now, so he doesn’t hear her, “Fuck, this isn’t good.” It seems Warrick has already decided for her, his nose pressed into the curve of her shoulder. The nerves flare with pain there, but the comfort of her father’s touch makes it easier to bear. “Daughter, you should be the one to go.” She knew he would say that, just as she knew that ocean-water tasted like salt and lava was hot and the smell of her father would be sun and wind. Even now, in this strange place between the line of Life and Death, he smelled like the updraft of wind currents and the warmth of the summer sun.
“Are you sure?”
Wishbone can’t deny the fact that she wants to go back. Her daughters are in the land of the Living. Her spirit aches with the desire for Life and no one in her vicinity can deny that. Even through the shadows of pain in her amber eyes, there is fire. The soft touch of a kiss greets the bend of her withers, Warrick’s silent acceptance of his daughter’s revival and his subsequent Death (or what this reality saw it as). “I love you,” she whispers in that honey-whiskey voice. She needed to say it just one last time.
With a shaky breath and a limping gait, Wishbone steps forward. “I will return to Life.”
( i'm just here to fight the fire
oh, a man ain't a man unless he has desire )
He should have known it wouldn’t work.
But, as with everything else in his life, he refuses to accept responsibility as the great beast loses his footing. The monster should have known its limits, Antidote thinks, as he mutters some dark, displeased thing. The monster should have told him that it would never work, the current was too much even for him so close to the falls. Alas, here they are and Antidote is at the mercy of the great beast and the river itself.
“Son of a bitch,” he yelps as he loses his balance, scrambling for purchase on the beast’s slick back before surrendering himself to gravity and plunging into the river. He kicks for the surface, gasping and sputtering, his irritation at an all-time high.
“Good thing we’re already dead, huh?” he shouts across the river’s roar to the beast. But the beast does not hear him or merely chooses not to respond as the pair of them move faster toward the edge of the fall.
They are dead and he has not felt pain in centuries. He has not gasped for air. He has not closed his eyes tight against the heat of panic. But he does now. Instinct, perhaps, long-buried. He reasons that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been dead, you will never steel yourself against the stomach-turning sensation of falling.
And fall they do. All of them. He does not think about the falling, though. He thinks about a death he had nothing to do with, a murder that he neither witness nor partook in. And there is his own death, too. The peace of his own surrender to the afterlife a stark contrast to the violence of the murder that frankly comes out of left field and leaves him shaken.
Had he murdered someone?
He’s had a lot of time to think about how brains work and he wonders, as his shoulder collides with a rather large boulder, if this is a memory he has kept buried. He wonders if he’s capable of murdering again as he drags himself, drenched and exhausted. He sucks in a sharp, world-swallowing breath. More in an effort to regain his bearings than anything.
All around him, the dead are reuniting with their loved ones. Crying a lot, too, it seems. He scans the sea of faces around him until he lands eyes on Cuerva Lista. Looking all innocent over there. Like she doesn’t recognize him. It doesn’t occur to him that maybe she really doesn’t. It’s been centuries since they last landed eyes on each other but he refuses to allow himself to feel stupid enough to believe he still recognizes her and she doesn’t recognize him. He staggers through the shallow pool, nursing the shoulder that had been obliterated against the boulder. He grits his teeth against the phantom pain – and that’s all it is, really. It’s not real. But he still knows what it means to hurt.
“Hey!” he calls and she looks up sharply, evenly meets his eye, does not look away. Which almost feels like a taunt as he limps toward her. “How long have you been here?” he demands.
But before she can open her mouth to answer – undoubtedly a long time, he’s certain – the grulla mare who’d cloned herself in the river calls out to them. It is only then that the gravity of the situation hits him. He’d been too fixated on his rage to hear what she’d said to them on riverbanks above.
What was this about helping to fix the world? His confusion passed across his face like a storm cloud. He can feel Cuerva Lista step toward the grulla mare, undoubtedly prepared to take all of the glory for herself.
Antidote has no interest in being alive. But he has no real interest in being dead either, if he was being honest. It made no difference to him one way or the other. It is spite that drives him forward. And love, too, maybe. Though he would never admit it.
He would never admit that the reason for his irritation, his frustration, the anger that made his vision strobe along its edges was the fact that he had loved her once. He had loved her fiercely. She was a fine woman and she had been a fine mate and, even more than that, he had genuinely enjoyed her company. There is some small part of him still that cannot stomach the idea of willingly allowing her to thrust herself into danger. If there is danger to be found, he thinks, he will find it. Despite the fact that he has never been brave or noble.
As far as he is concerned, the only reason he surges forward is to beat Cuerva Lista to the punch. To keep her from the glory of it. It has nothing to do with love.
“I’ll go,” he barks, agitated. All of this is wildly inconvenient.
‘Antidote,’ she says and he does not allow himself to analyze what it is in her tone that gives him pause. Because it only lasts an instant.
“I’ll go fix the world or whatever,” he continues, stopping just short of rolling his eyes.
‘Antidote, you don’t...’
He glances sharply in her direction and something in him softens.
‘You don’t have to go,’ she says, her tenderness just as uncharacteristic as his when he says, “let me do this.”
For a moment, the plan works - she expects it to work, but there is something not quite right. A small glance to the side and she notices that the mare in the water looks extremely strained, as Ozzie and several others all take a route that they think will work.
All of them together, a the same time, it doesn’t work.
She realizes it only a fraction of a heartbeat before Odd does, he yells something at her, but she doesn’t hear what exactly he is saying in that fraction of time, that eternal fraction that seems to stretch and stretch until she can’t see the end of it -
Then, she slips on ice, and he does too, and time catches up to her as if to compensate with the slow-down from before. Landing on something hard, once, twice, like being beaten and falling on hard ice - and then they’re toppling over a waterfall. She’s falling, falling, no unlike last time, not unlike thousands of times before.
But this time they fall together.
The realization that this is for real, that this is definite, comes crashing on her much harder than the crash she makes below the waterfall. Tons of water crash onto her and she cannot breathe, but she is dead - she is dead and he is too, and this time she has failed to save him. This time she’s failed to save the world.
All things must end, a familiar voice hums against her ear, and she sighs, knows it is true. But I don’t want it to end yet, she tells him - and Odd shakes his head and then nods to the mare who came with them. Ozzie follows his gaze; indeed, the black mare speaks now. She tells them she cannot save them all - half of them can go back, the others must stay here.
She’s torn. She doesn’t want to go, but she doesn’t want to stay either. Yet it is only her decision - Odd looks at her, his eyes sparkling, I know your decision is the right one. Whatever she chooses… will it be okay? She knows the cycle, their endless cycle - she always knows that he is worth saving, that he is the savior of her tiny little world as it is then; there’s no denying it. And always she is there to do so, to help him survive long enough to do what he must do. She is the pawn that needs to be sacrificed for the king to win the game.
What if he didn’t go back? What would happen then? Would she take his place or would the world die? Their balance would be off…
What is she didn’t go back? What could happen then? Would he die like in all those instances in which she intervened, would evil then triumph? The balance would be off…
She shakes her head. ”It’s impossible.” she says to no-one in particular.
”Yes,” comes the voice next to her. ”But you’re the impossible girl.”
He’s gauding her into leaving, but she smiles. ”Yes, I am. Now run, you clever boy. And remember.”
And she will stay, like she had a thousand times before, and will do so for a million times more.
October
