"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
The child is weary.
She is tired of all the walking.
Even more than that, she is tired of her mother telling her that it’s important.
The child loves her mother but she hates the walking. Even when her mother lets her lie down to sleep. Even when her mother tenderly kisses her head and says it’ll be all right in the morning. She’ll feel better after she rests.
She hates the walking and she’s beginning to confuse her hate for the walking with a hate for her mother. But the child is good and kind and decent, just like her parents, and she knows that hating her mother is wrong. So she never says it out loud. She just walks and walks and walks and cries sometimes. And her mother always kisses her head and says it’ll be all right. Not much further, it’ll be all right.
And it breaks Prayer’s heart, the crying. The way her child hates the walking. And still, she refuses to heal her because it is important and she wants the child to know how important it is. Just as all the walking they’d done to find Thorn had been important.
“I don’t want to meet anyone else,” the child says at one point and Prayer frowns but tries not to let the child see it. She shakes her head and says, “don’t say that.”
It is near Tephra that the child stops walking and shouts at the sky how much she hates it. The sky, the walking, her mother for making her do the walking, how much it hurts, how tired she is. But Prayer is patient and she kisses the child’s head and does not let it make her angry, too. She kisses the child’s head and says, “we’re almost there.”
And she tells the quiet soul who meets them at the border that they’re looking for Sabbath. They are given direction on where to find her and the two of them go, just a little bit further. And the child’s tears have dried by the time they find Sabbath and Prayer’s heartbeat gets to skittering as she surges forward. Because she, too, is a child who loves her mother.
“Mother!” she cries, beaming, all flooded with relief. And the child follows close behind and feels a sharp pang of jealousy because her mother loves someone else, too. Loves someone else like she loves her.
Watching her firstborn child fade before her eyes had changed something at the core of her. She began that day as a fortress, proud and strong with impenetrable iron walls. Nothing ever got to that feather-soft core of her except those she allowed in. But watching Prayer bleed out had turned her to little more than dried straw and brittle bird bones. Sabbath crumpled at the sight of it and let loose all that rage and hatred she’d been swallowing down for years. God, she wanted Adna to know what it was like to find her baby cold and lifeless.
But at the last second, she recoiled from it. She looked over the edge and found herself stepping back. Somewhere, in the depths of her anger and her ink-black despair, she would always love Adna and her children. Losing Gospel would be losing Prayer all over again. And then she would watch her sister cry as she had.
When Prayer finds her way to Tephra, then, it feels like a reversal of those same emotions - the shock, the disbelief, all the stages of grief unraveling within her. The anger comes undone and so does she. Sabbath rushes forward and pulls her daughter close to her chest to make sure she’s real and this isn’t some cruel dream. Her mind does not register the baby at her side for some time as tears stream down her pale face.
“Prayer, my sweet baby,” she mumbles into her child’s mane. When she opens those sage green eyes, she finally notices the filly that has accompanied her. She’s beautiful just like Prayer is. Sabbath takes a step back and lowers her head to the girl’s level as she takes her in.
“Hello. I’m Sabbath,” she whispers softly, afraid the normal volume of her voice will shatter this moment. She is careful not to come too close to the child. Sabbath knows her fangs and her scales frighten some children, and her brows furrow in worry as she watches her granddaughter closely. “So much has happened. I don’t even know where to begin.”
And then she laughs. It almost hurts to smile, like a muscle that has fallen into disuse and atrophied, but it’s a good kind of hurt.
Prayer is oblivious to all the pain dammed up in her mother’s chest.
Oblivious to how quickly she cycles through all of those emotions.
She suspects nothing when her mother draws her into a tight embrace.
She knows only her mother’s love and she does not try to stifle her smile, does nothing to try and dampen all the relief that floods through her. She could have come back to Tephra at any time, she knows. She had certainly missed her mother, she’d had plenty reason to come back, but the timing had never been right. But she remembers – has always remembered – how her mother had introduced her to her grandmother, how sweetly they had each murmured her name, called her beautiful, filled her with love. And she has returned so that her own daughter might feel that same love.
And when her mother untangles herself from her, Prayer shuffles back to allow her space to take in her granddaughter. Prayer’s smile remains as she watches her daughter blink boldly back at her mother, her lips pulling tight in a grin that looks like a grimace. Smiling at her granddaughter the same way she’d smiled at her father, nervous. Because the child is jealous but she is kind, too, and she doesn’t want this stranger to know she’s jealous.
The stranger’s name is Sabbath and the child nods but can’t find her voice to speak. Just goes on grin-grimacing, uncertain. “This is Basilica,” Prayer says. And Prayer thinks of the child’s father, how fiercely she loves him, but can’t find it in her heart to mention him.
Prayer shifts closer to her mother when she speaks, tucks her head up under the mare’s neck, lays her head across her chest. “Tell me everything,” she murmurs as Basilica teeters closer, glues herself to Prayer’s hip. “I’ve missed you terribly,” Prayer adds and then exhales a contented sigh.
She could stare at Basilica for hours, she thinks silently. Sabbath adores her bright eyes and the vibrant splashes of white across the stark black of her tiny body. Her uncomfortable smile draws a laugh from the serpent woman’s mouth and she gingerly places a kiss atop her forehead. Her first grandchild. Is this how Leliana felt when Sabbath came home to birth Prayer so many years ago? It softens all her coarse edges and melt the frost from her heart so easily, as if it were never there.
“She’s beautiful. I’m so proud of you,” she says, lifting her sage green eyes to look at Prayer. Her firstborn has always been gentle and good, that precious kind of thing that keeps Sabbath from thinking the world is truly an awful place. The other children have inherited their mother’s sharp tongue and callous ways, but somehow her eldest daughter had not.
“Dacre is grown now. You should see how gorgeous he is – tall and strong, just like your grandfather. He missed you an awful lot,” she says, her voice bordering on crying again. “You have two brothers and a sister, now. I never let them leave Tephra after you… left.”
And this time the tears do spill down her cheeks. Her child is home and safe in her arms, but the memory remains vivid, slicing through her heart. But she takes a deep breath and steadies herself. Sabbath presses her lips to Prayer’s temple to remind herself that this moment is real and it’s alright to feel these things again. It feels so dangerous to allow herself any comfort when everything seemed to fall apart at times like these.
06-29-2020, 06:02 PM (This post was last modified: 06-29-2020, 06:02 PM by prayer.)
She does not want to take credit for her daughter’s beauty.
Not when she looks so much like her father.
And the child stays as still as she can when her grandmother kisses her head. And the child feels her first bitter pang of guilt when she thinks about how she’d yelped and squirmed and shrieked at her mother that she would not go on walking any further. Because her grandmother is kind and her breath is warm where it falls heavy across her forehead. The child decides that she likes her, that she’s glad to have met her.
“She looks like her father, Thorn,” Prayer murmurs. And she tries not to think of the betrayal she’d seen in his eyes when he’d looked at her, when he’d asked why they’d come. But she cannot allow her grief to sully this moment, not when she is so relieved to see her mother. So content to press herself close and breathe her in. She has never been gladder, she thinks.
She listens, quite intently, while her daughter loiters at her hip. Dacre. She thinks of him and smiles, nodding quietly against Sabbath’s shoulder. And she can hear all that emotion in her mother’s voice, but chooses to mistake it for pride. Because she had awoken from some awful dream all full of panic, bleeding from two small holes in her neck, but had no reason to believe it real.
“I’m sorry, mother,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry I left.” She lifts her head then, summons a watery smile, presses her forehead flush against Sabbath’s. “I’m here now,” she says, gentle, “tell me their names. The new children. I can’t wait to meet them.”
