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08-30-2014, 11:47 PM
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CIRCE Something told her to move away; that she must leave this place, that it wasn’t right to be present in this land. Alas, her hooves refused to move; she stood rooted to the spot as though the very earth itself bound her there, gripping her tightly, cruelly, clamping the manacle on her fetlock and stealing the breath of her lungs with the same evil strokes of disbelief; the shadowmere felt herself grow dizzy. The months passed, confused and draining amid the cloud of some drunken night, long ago in the snow; with the poison of the apple, there rotted something intrinsic to the shadowmere’s soul, some fruit of her body and spirit that had overly ripened, falling from her tree of life, withering before it had the chance to seed. That crucial vitality of hers, that spark in her bone and marrow—it had left her, failing her as everything else had, leaving something small and broken, withered and fragile, trying to breathe through the same nose and mouth as a once mighty warrior and finding the task weighted with difficulty, for every breath wracked her chest with the pain of shattered class, an empty husk of horseflesh. To Helovia she returned; indeed, she wasn’t so sure she had left the land in the first place. Sometimes she even wondered if she had visited this place at all; if she had ever suffered the tragedy of the Grey; if she had ever experienced the magic that was Archibald’s touch, the weight of his shadow looming above her, loving, protective, comforting; the despair of her lost daughter, Callisto, a loss that still continued to ache within the innermost depths of her body; the triumph of her sons, her sons, Abraham and Reginald, and their special heartbreak of their wanderlust from her side. Dazed and misty-eyed, with the ever-growing emptiness threatening to breach some invisible barrier somewhere in her mind, Circe wandered in ignorance; where was her General and her lover? Where have her sons wandered to, so eager to be away from her side and her strong, quivering, tender love for them? She longed to see them; their faces, their eyes, were a balm to whatever vague storm that raged within her, indefinite and inarticulate, yet still so painful. She did not know where to go, however; in her vapid desperation, Circe turned her hooves toward the first of her homes in this harsh and twisted land—and though she traveled through what seemed to be strange lands and territories, Circe continued to travel steadily, her broken spirit allowing nothing faster than a slow and awkward sort of shuffle. It was some time before she realized that she must have arrived there by then, and it was then that some panic began to flower fully in her breast. These were not her Foothills—there weren’t even any foothills in this strange place—even the scent of the territory seemed completely different. The panic continued to fester as some idea tried to penetrate Circe’s dazed train of thought—and with a spike of horror and despair, she remembered her darling Callisto and the grave she had dug for her daughters bones, how she wanted to visit once again to assuage some of the aching, horrid uncertainty that was coursing through her veins. My daughters bones are gone, she thought, her head swimming, her breathing shallow, her grave has been broken; she’s…she’s gone. |
