I fell asleep a filly, and when I woke up, the world had changed.

Bro was already on top of things, I noticed. I had watched him in the shroud of darkness that had fallen, the dark that lingered even if my body, my bones, my blood screamed that it was daytime. I stood on an outcropping of rock and meadow, watching him gather some Grey members, healers, my own Ma, and leading them with is words, some power I knew he had even though he could never take a hit; he was a beacon in the not-night-darkness, glowing and in his element, a piece of the black that engulfed us all, and it was right for him to be a leader. It was right, the mantle fit perfectly on his shoulders, and he knew what he was doing. Older looking, deeper in his chest, oh so sure of himself. It was just as well they followed him and the words that came out of his mouth, better him than me, because—

-- well—

--I was just a wreck.

They were saying my name a few times down there, I heard them. Just little whisperings from where I was, but I walked away from them just the same, shaking my head, my eyes clenched tight from the sound of my name. Because I didn’t know what it meant anymore—my name was an empty title. Do you know what that feels like? To hear your own name and not know what it means? To be completely lost and disconnected from yourself, your identity, and to feel fear and shame and anger (anger), oh so much anger, just by hearing your own name?

Because that’s what was happening and it was ripping me up inside because how can that even happen, how can you feel so much discord just by thinking about yourself, but then I remember I don’t even know what that was anymore. Myself. Roskuld. What even did that mean? Yesterday it described some hard-headed filly girl that had the misfortune of sticking her own horn in a tree that one time. Ros was the big cousinsisterfriend of Jiji, that girl who was now so tiny that every time I set eyes on her something clenched painfully, searing in my stomach, and then I would know that Ros was gone somewhere, that the child I knew myself to be was dead and gone and so was something in this world and I could feel it, the grind of it in my bones, the wrongness of it in the heat of my blood and I knew the sickness of the world and What does that mean Daddy?

Come on, Daddy!

You obviously had some sort of plan or idea about me and what I needed to do because that voice (that voice, that voice) wasn’t leaving me any time soon. That voice in my head that I dreamed of in that familiar dream of mine, that heartachingly beautiful thing where I could fly and I knew myself and my skin and bones weren’t strange and deformed and right and wrong at the same time and I heard him speak ROSKULD, YOU ARE THE TIME KEEPER. DAYS WILL NOT CYCLE. THE SUN WILL NOT RISE, BUT YOU WILL KNOW THE SEASONS AND FEEL THE PATTERN OF THE SPIN OF TH EARTH. WATCH AFTER THEM and it was the cue for the end of the world and something to shrivel up inside me and crumble and die.

But he wasn’t lying because I knew things that I didn’t know, felt things that didn’t make sense but that explained the nature of the warped universe. Daddy dearest was gone (he wasn’t my Pa. I didn’t know one, didn’t need one). Something else essential was gone too, a vibrancy in a whole other dimension that was just finished, like it was the beat of the heart of this world it had flatlined. The only life I truly felt came from deep within this body (that wasn’t mine, but I knew it anyway) and from Mesec—there, I said it, his true and proper name, because that beat and buzz made me realize that he was a brother to me in many more intimate, intricate ways than one. I still didn’t know what a god was, or what it meant to be one—but I was getting terrible ideas.

I was ashamed. There, I said it. I was ashamed because I knew things that didn’t make sense, and I knew they should, but they didn’t. I was ashamed because I knew I wasn’t a child anymore, that I grew up and developed and I should have matured—but I didn’t. I was still the filly afraid of the vastness of the world, safe in this cocoon of foothills, knowing I was pathetic but being okay with it because I was nothing, nothing, nothing in the wide plain of existence. I still felt that I should be Roskuld, this empty title that meant nothing, not a damn thing, because Roskuld was a different sort of creature than I was, what I ought to be, what I was turning into.

There’s nothing good to be gained from a pathetic demi god.

I turned away from Mesec, walking away from the assembly, climbing and cresting the hill and willing myself to disappear into the shadow. He was a leader now, and I didn’t want him to see me like this.

A wreck.

~.~.~

[Slight continuation of THIS thread.]