"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 will love you until we run out of mornings. Then I will love you in the dark. ”
She stands motionless at the river’s edge, staring at the waters without much notice of the passing time. Has she been here all day? Maybe more than one day. Everything feels so hard to remember. Echis is only certain that she is suffering now and she was suffering then, too. Nothing else exists beyond this except the idea that she could throw herself into the current. Her body is so weak it would pull her under in seconds. She would have the release she thinks she craves.
But some golden thread keeps her tethered to the shore, waiting. It tugs her head down and commands her to eat and survive. Echis hates how hard it is to breathe around the pain of every movement, and yet she obeys this compelling force. She wheezes softly as she grazes and winces each time she bites at a few blades of grass. Was it always this hard to simply exist?
There is a snapping of twigs behind her and she lifts her head quickly despite the way her every nerve screams at her to be still. A feral sort of fear floods her veins and gives her the courage to shy backward as she impulsively begins to cry. The tears come in shaking sobs as she braces herself for whatever reveals itself from the underbrush.
“Please.. Not again..” she mumbles in breathless gasps. She isn’t even sure what she means by the words but they come tumbling from her lips before she can even think of what else to say. Pleading for mercy has become a new kind of normalcy for her, somehow. Little scales push themselves up from her glistening muscles but they flake to the ground a few seconds after. Her body is too exhausted to even try and protect itself, now.
09-11-2020, 12:34 AM (This post was last modified: 09-11-2020, 12:35 AM by Ryatah.)
── and i was never sure whether you were the lighthouse or the storm ──
She would never claim to be a good mother. She loves her children as much as she can, as much as she is capable of loving anything, but not even they are immune to all the toxic ways her brokenness chooses to manifest itself. She is at her best when they are small, when she knows they need her; she is at her best when their father – whoever that might be – is still fresh and bright in her mind; when she cannot cling to them and so she clings instead to the child they created.
But, there is always another man, and then another child, and some other distraction to pull her apart.
And yet Echis, somehow, remains at the forefront of her mind. Despite her series of tumultuous romances, the youngest twins, and the rocks – currently amethyst stones – that filled the recently hollowed out sockets, it was Echis that often invaded her thoughts in the quiet hours of dawn in Hyaline. It wasn’t like her to be away for so long, and when the worry had become relentless, unforgiving, she finally slips away to the river – to where she had told her daughter to wait for her.
By some strange force, she finds her, like some invisible thread has tied them together.
She cannot see her, of course, but she can hear her. She can hear the sobs that shake inside of her chest, the tears that stream down her face, but mostly, she can hear the fear – bitter and tangible – that trembles in her voice. “Echis?” Her own voice is a hushed, almost whisper, and she reaches for her.
When her nose touches the exposed muscle, she chokes down a gasp, and she fights to keep the alarm from her face and her voice when she asks her, “What happened to you? Where have you been?”
“ I will love you until we run out of mornings. Then I will love you in the dark. ”
Echis has always thought the world of her mother, of the surrogate father who always tells her goodnight. Even now, with nothing left but a few droplets of her soul, seeing Ryatah provides a sense of calm to her. It doesn’t stop the heaving sobs from bubbling up, but it quells the fear. The soft glow of her keeps the girl in place when the angel draws closer to her child. But her name is strange against her ears.
“Echis?” she parrots, and then she is thrown into the depths of agony when her mother touches that raw skin. She stumbles back with a desperate yelp of pain. What happened to her? Where has she been? Echis hardly hears the questions as her pulse throbs wildly in her ears. How could she even begin to answer? She takes in gasping breaths as she tries to bring her focus back to the conversation.
“I.. I’m lost,” she chokes out. “I woke up.. on a beach. Then I came here. I don’t know.. I don’t know..”
And then she’s crying again. She wants to remember, to feel something other than this frantic terror. Every time she reaches for whatever came before, though, it feels like remembering being born. Echis stares into the glimmering amethysts embedded in Ryatah’s face, but they only make her feel a different shade of sorrow. It feels like failure and shame, she thinks.
09-14-2020, 11:59 PM (This post was last modified: 09-15-2020, 12:00 AM by Ryatah.)
── and i was never sure whether you were the lighthouse or the storm ──
The cry that her touch elicits is enough to break her clean in half, but the way that Echis repeats her own name like she doesn’t recognize it is enough to crumble her.
It makes her wonder how many times a child of hers has been broken and afraid, how many times they have needed her and she wasn’t there, because she never is. She is so used to being alone that she makes them learn to be alone, too, and she has never had to feel the weight of that guilt until this very moment. “Echis,” she repeats her name, softer this time, every syllable laced with sorrow and she tells her, “You aren’t lost anymore. You’re with me, and after this, we’ll go home, okay?”
She reaches for her again, but this time, it is with her healing. She is not as fast at it as some – not like Carnage; if he chooses to heal, at least – since she rarely heals anyone other than herself. She floods Echis with everything warm and golden, and eventually she reaches forward and is met with skin instead of muscle. She can feel a sigh of relief breathe from her chest, but there is still an unease gnawing at her because she wants to know why she ended up like this. “You have nothing to apologize for,” she murmurs as she steps closer, longing to draw her daughter tight to her chest but afraid of startling her or otherwise hurting her.
There is a brief moment of silence that she lets linger between them, before she touches her nose again to her neck, and asks her gently, cautiously, “Do you remember anything about the beach you were at?”
“ I will love you until we run out of mornings. Then I will love you in the dark. ”
Echis has never asked anything of Ryatah. Her love has always been more than enough to keep her daughter happy. She recognizes her face now like someone she might have seen in passing the day before, though she can’t be entirely sure. She seems so hurt by the confusion in Echis’s voice. And so she repeats it once more.
You’re with me.
Her brow furrows but she nods anyway because going home sounds like something good when it’s spoken in Ryatah’s voice. She sucks in a gasp when the healing first touches her like a cool balm that spreads over her tired, broken body. Her skin weaves its way across her face and down her spine, extending down her shoulders and hips. It feels so strange as it cloaks her from the burning pain that had been her existence just minutes prior. The midnight black of her coat springs up to warm her against the winter chill but her white mane is made of fluff, much like it had been when she was born.
Scars the shape of teeth riddle her skin now - across her shoulders and down her belly. They seem faded, as though she earned them a decade before. A bright pink line across her throat - fresh, new - marks the injury that took her life.
She blinks, and she is overcome with a flood of relief that it no longer hurts just to do this. Fat tears come rolling down her cheeks and the salt of them does not ignite the agony anymore. Her mother eaches out to touch her, and she flinches at first, terrified of what being touched may bring. But there is only a gentle warmth beneath her affections. She says there is nothing to apologize for, but it does not clear the storm of emotions still roaring in her breast - the confusion, the fear, the sorrow.
Echis takes a cautious step forward. Her body still warns her that to be held may be hell. But that brief brush of Ryatah touching her neck had felt good - the first good feeling she can remember. She eases into an embrace at the rate of glaciers migrating, until at last she is pressed close to the angel’s chest. She exhales a breath that she hadn’t realized she was holding.
“There were others. Everyone looked confused, and tired,” she whispers, biting her lip to keep the choking sobs at bay. “I didn’t know any of them. I just know we all went somewhere very far away.”
── and i was never sure whether you were the lighthouse or the storm ──
She is relieved when Echis at last relaxes into her touch, and she lowers a haloed head to press her pale lips to her daughter’s brow. She is not always a very good mother because she is selfish; easily distracted. She can remember finding a young Cassian and Casimira that had gone looking for her when they felt she was gone for too long. She remembers how Evenstar had gone from delighting at her returns, to building walls instead to prepare for her sure departures. She has seen disappointment on her children’s faces countless times, and never is it enough to make her stay.
She is not always a good mother, but she loved her children infinitely, in all the broken ways that she knows how.
She can feel the way Echis’s coat grows beneath her healing touch and though this brings some relief, she is not entirely satisfied. She can feel that there are parts of her that her touch cannot reach, the parts that only time can heal, and the parts that might never heal.
Mindlessly, she traces her nose down her neck, and then her shoulder, frowning at the feel of the scratches that were left rough and ragged across her skin. The marks feel foreign, and even without her eyes she recognizes that they are strange, but she does not ask Echis about them.
It is not until she feels the mark across her throat that she stops.
She cannot explain the warmth that jumps to meet her lips, nor the way the mark tastes of familiarity. She does not know why his face flashes instantly across her mind, and her expression transforms from concerned to thoughtful, her lips still tracing the length of it, mindful enough to at least be gentle at the newness of it. It feels almost fresh, and it makes her own throat burn at the memory it evokes. This cut felt clean, almost methodical; nothing like the way he had ripped her own throat, and she does not know why there is an echo of a smile on her lips. “Carnage,” she says his name on a whisper, mostly to herself. “That’s who you were with,” and her chest tightens in that strange way she doesn’t have a name for, the way it does when she thinks of him.
But when she finally pulls away from her daughter it is like she wakes from her dream-like state, her voice anchored back to the present when she tells her gently, “If you ever hear him call for you again, don’t go.” Another soft touch to her cheek, the sunlight glinting off the gemstones that have settled into her hollowed sockets. “You are replaceable to him, but not to me.”
“ I will love you until we run out of mornings. Then I will love you in the dark. ”
Echoes of screams - some belonging to her, some to others - flash across her mind as she allows Ryatah to trace the new scars ravaging her young body. She stands perfectly still and holds her breath without ever meaning to. Somewhere in the haze of her memory, she knows that her mother would never harm her, even if she can’t recognize her. But the pressure against her healed wounds taps into the core of her fear. She had thought herself safe in the palm of a god and still she was nearly destroyed.
She exhales sharply when the angel touches her throat and she wants to shy away. But Echis steels herself against the urge to flee. The serpent child only allows herself to tremble.
“Carnage,” she repeats, more a lesson than a recollection. Her tone is flat as his name does not inspire any emotion or imagery for her. Echis stares into the stones embedded in Ryatah’s face as she searches for meaning in her words. Why would he call on her again? Her brow furrows. Something awful stirs in her gut and makes her wince in pain until she pushes it down.
Tears threaten to spill down her cheeks when her mother speaks again. Ryatah had been the constant in her life, even if she does not remember this. She always came to the river and she always dried her daughter’s tears. It made her leaving mean nothing at the end of the day. Echis could anchor herself to the hope of the angel’s return and weather any storm this way.
