11-17-2019, 07:51 PM
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. <i>Tatter</i> 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. <i>Her knees burn from the fall. Her chest is going to suffocate with the anguish.</i> 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.
<i>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 …</i> 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. <b>“You said, you said -,”</b> she starts, eyes rolling wildly, searching the broken and battered around her for Tatter’s dear face. <b>“I can’t …”</b> 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. <b>“Tatter,”</b> she says to the magic-mare quietly, ashamedly, the first selfless act she has ever committed. <b>“It should be Tatter,”</b> she whispers again. <b>“It was always Tatter.”</b>