No, seriously. Shapes was freaking me out.

There was just this…silence between us as our group made our way through the snowploughs and whatever, but it wasn’t just silence. Like there were things charging around, a tension so thick you could slice the fucker into loaves. And I still didn’t like the way he had looked at me: a quick glance of blue all over me, like he was sizing me, feeling me out.

For what?

I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was gonna go down when we reached the end of the pass. Like I was walking straight into a trap, smooth as you please, and he was just itchin’ to get at me, sink his teeth in, whatever. But that didn’t make any sense, because he could’ve done that with Ulrik back at the place, right? What was the point of taking me somewhere else just to jump me?

I mean, fuck. If he wanted to fight, we could’ve already been fighting!

Just…aagh, something wasn’t feeling right. I fidgeted the entire way there, my eyes darting everywhere and my skin jumping and my movements stiff and jerky. Several times the impulsion to turn the fuck around and leave set itself on my legs, and every time it did I mastered it, and everytime I mastered it I wondered if it were the right thing to do. At least...the wind was gone, broken by the high walls of mountain that stretched on either side. Without the blistering chill whipping me incessantly, the cold wasn’t even that bad--in fact, I barely registered it anymore, since there was more pressing shit on my mind at that time.

Finally, we came upon an opening that seemed to be shrouded in shadow. But we got closer and as my blurry vision settled, it turned out not to be a shadow, but a thing. A huge, metal, horse-shaped thing that towered above us--a sentinel that smelled like it was soaked in oil and electricity. “Whoa…” I said, the breathless wonder escaping me before I could stop it; I slowed my steps, completely entranced by the shit, because I’m pretty sure it was the absolute most baller thing I’d ever laid eyes on. Like...my whole body just pulled a little looking at it, and I was in awe, and I wanted to touch it but something in me knew that was a stupid idea, but fuck me check out this rad shit, man. Just…look at the shit. Who even has shit like this? What even.

It took me a while to finally wrench my head and my eyes away from the sentinel; even when I kept walking forward, my neck still stretched and twisted to allow my eyes to stay glued to the incredible sight. But eventually, I had to look at the valley that spread out before us.

And when I did, I….I just looked.

I didn’t know what to feel. Something stole over me, something like peace or interest or pleasant surprise, because I guess I had expected something colder and snowy...er, but this was everything else. This was...someone’s home, something warm and cozy and protected and sheltered from everything else by the mountains that rose around it.

I licked my lips absently; I forgot Shapes for a moment. I was looking down at my Pa’s land.




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I almost fell in love with the place. I almost fell in love with the valleys and the mountains that lined it and the gleam of a spring over yonder there in the shade and the trees and the caves that I didn’t even know about the idea would have been ill as fuck if someone had told me about it. I would have fallen in love, too, what with the bitchin sentinel behind me and the crispness of the air and the aurora I didn’t even know about at that point but regularly ribbons up in the sky in this place, nothing but light and agonizing somethings that I couldn’t stand.

I almost fell in love.

Almost.

*”Roskuld."*

But everything just dropped.

My eyes focused on someone pale and graceful winding their way toward me, welcoming me to this place, and who could it be but my own Ma?

My Ma who I’d been so afraid of losing.

The Ma I hadn’t spoken to, who hadn’t spoken with me in the midst of all these murders.

Suddenly here she was, in my face--living in a place that I’d just now found, welcoming me in these halls after having lost myself in a blizzard and a frozen desert. Here she was, residing in the land of my Pa, my Pa’s place, his domain.

A place she never once told me about.

I…I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to feel. I didn’t know what I was feeling, because I was feeling something, but it was so jumbled. Maybe it was the shock of seeing her that was making my mouth drop, my eyes widen, my voice die in my throat; maybe it was because of the fact that what I was feeling wasn’t happiness at the unexpected sight of my Ma that made my reaction so empty, so trippy and confusing that I couldn’t get a handle on it.

I was flailing inside, even though I stood frozen, staring at Ma like she was a ghost, a poltergeist trying to trick me into doing some dumb shit. It wasn’t until her eyes left me—to look behind me, to look at Shapes, and I saw something stirring there behind her gaze, something I didn’t understand but hated to see anyway--that something finally broke through the constipation in my head and heart.

And it turned out to anger.

“Well FUCK ME,” I boomed, my voice breaking through the brittle ice of my Ma’s presence, the heavy snowdrift that was Shapes behind me, “Didn’t expect to see you here, Ma,” I was saying too loudly, my voice harsh and mocking, splintered with catastrophic things that were pouring out of me that I couldn’t control, that were slicing my cheeks as they left my throat, “What a pleasant fucking surprise!!”

I jerked my head away from her, to pace a few steps to my right; then I jerked left again, my tiny tail lashing and my breath furiously huffing through my nose and I couldn’t explain the violent heat rising inside me, suffocating me, drowning me, a flashflood from nowhere, but it was coming out in heaps and it makes my teeth ache just thinking about it and it makes my heart hurt to remember how I acted but there was a demon riding my back and it was—

--hurt.

“So what brings you here, Ma?” I said suddenly, stopping in my tracks to peer at her with a sharp eye and an even sharper brow, “When’d you decide to come here, Ma, to Pa’s herd?” I grit my teeth and I swear the fire rose so high up I could almost taste it in the back of my throat (or maybe it was just bile), “Pa’s herd, huh? Funny. Never heard of this place. Must be pretty cool to come here. Would have been nice to know. ” Irony was dripping from my mouth like leaking venom. “Would've been pretty bitchin’ to visit.”

The crust of my words were starting to flake, to the real hurt behind them that raged like fury inside as a shield; My Pa’s herd that I never knew about. My Pa’s herd that she had never told me of, a connection to a whole half of me tucked deeply into the mountains. All I had known about it was that it was a place where unicorns had paid for our services, but I was too young to care about that particular politics; never before had she told me that my Pa (my Pa! MY PA--) had had a whole land dedicated to him and his honor—

--but I also hadn't known I had a Pa until he had come to find me.

Circles, circles, going back in circles. I forgot about Shapes in that moment, consumed with this thing that Ma had unleashed by nothing but her presence. This thing that had been festering since I had told her I had finally met my Pa—and her eyes had gone cold.



@[Torleik]
@[Ophelia]



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I saw her swell a little towards me, standing her ground, staying stable and plucking some string of her authority. And maybe once it would’ve been enough; maybe before I would have backed the fuck up out of her space, chastised and shamed like every other time when I was a little girl throwing a pissing fit.

But no, not this time. She took a step towards me and I didn’t move; my ears remained plastered to my neck and my body jumped with a spark that shouted ”what nerve!”. Now she wanted to stand up like she had a reign on me; now she was bein’ a Ma, or something, but I was wildin’ out of even my control and there was no stopping the hurricane.

I let her talk, because she’d let me shout. I swallowed the impulse to cut across her words—which was harder than it sounded, because it felt like there was something wrong with every word that fell from her lips. I ground my teeth, biting my tongue, swallowing the lump that was ever growing in my throat, the wad of words that wanted to unleash themselves in a hailstorm.

She was talking about Mesec--another wad of pain that I had sort of swept under the rug, where it had lain, awkward and causing a lump in the carpet, gathering dust bunnies and dirt; a pain I’d never reconciled. I couldn’t look at her while she was talking about where Mesec came from—as she explained that he had come from here, which was a bigger mindfuck than I could deal with at that moment. My eyes were already spinning, and now my head was screwing loose, and it was hard keeping track of where the trails of hurt and anger wanted to twist—because it felt like there was a target everywhere.

*“I have not been here long – just long enough for your father to name me a leader, though I have no idea why.”*

Fucking leader. Made so by my Pa. There was something tragic in this that I couldn’t see: my vision was too blurred out with red.

*“You refuse me as a parent.”*

My eyes snapped back to her suddenly. Furious.

*“The last time we spoke, you denied my embrace. What do you want from me, Roskuld? I try to love you the way I know how and you run away, but now you blame me for not taking you around the world? Do you want me or not?”*

“Don’t you fucking flip the script!” I roared, and I felt my gut twist painfully—because the difference was marked, wasn’t it? I was an entirely different creature than my Ma, this composed, gorgeous creature of ice--while I was nothing but a boar with too much voice. “’Do I want you?’ The fuck kind of question is that? ‘I refuse you as a parent’--no, I refuse to play the nut-bucket role for you anymore!”

It exploded out of me—that lump of words that had been growing in my throat. It was unleashed and I couldn’t stop it and it was messy and awful and—“I don’t care about the goddamn world. What I care about is why I looked my Pa dead in his eye and you let him be a stranger to me!” The memory was hazy—but distinct and filled with dead crows and painful in its own way. "How the fuck can I refuse you as a parent? You’re my Ma, and he’s my Pa, and I ain’t had any choice in any of that.” My eyes flashed. “But that’s something you’d choose to do all over again, isn’t it?” Her words were thrown back at her, a challenge a challenge a challenge—

“What do I want from you? I wanna know why you go cold at the whisper of Pa’s name. I wanna know why there’s a whole place dedicated to him—regardless of who’s running it, or how, or why—and why I had to damn-near freeze my ass in half in the tundra tryin’ to find it when you was here anyway, snuggled and safe and keeping it to yourself. I wanna know why you kept me from my Pa. And don’t talk about no bulllshit like you was trying to protect me—from what? Like ignoring the shit was gonna make it disappear from my life? Like it was gonna make it less meaningful to me, like my destiny was gonna change if I was kept an idiot. I never thought you treated me like a child—“ My voice broke—because, for an instant, my eye was filled with memories, back when my Ma was so tall, and I was so short, and nothing was painful—“—and I guess I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

My breath shuddered—and so did my chest, and pretty soon, all of me was shaking. “You wanna know if I want you or not?” I said, and my voice was scratchy and so much lower—and even more dangerous because of it. “Nah, Ma, that ain’t the question. The question is if you really want me.” I paused—but I couldn’t stop it. “’Cuz if you did, you’d remember.”



@[Ophelia]



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Eternity hung and it was just me and my Ma, standing around not saying shit, listening to the blood spill from a gunshot. I breathed forcefully through my nose, my nerves and my muscles tensed and raging and ready for flight, for a fight--and there was Ma standing there, a statue of fine-spun ice, pieces of it flaking off her frame, like she was losing it, losing it, slipping from some glacial pedestal down into a pit that was lined with things just as sharp (where I was pulling her).

She finally spoke, after millennia. And I listened—not to the words, because she’d told me many of these things before, the Sun God who stole her heart memories from her, keeping me a shadow in her head. But what I was hearing was the story laced between them, the untold tale that she had kept so close to her breast, keeping me from it, arsenic in a sugar bowl. But I had tugged it out of her, hadn’t I? I had forced it, squeezed it, blackmailed something poisonous out of my Ma’s lips—yelled and screamed and tortured until she had no choice but to give in.

I had asked, hadn’t I?

And she was answering.

She was answering with things I’d never expected of her--pain, pain and confusion, pain and the need to keep me from it. And…I dunno. Maybe it shocked me so hard because it was things that I knew too well—and we were supposed to be two different creatures, weren’t we? In some backwards-ass way—I dunno, I guess I always figured my Ma was something more than mortal.

I had just wanted answers from her. I didn’t—I never, ever wanted her tears.

*“I avoided him and avoided telling you because if he can use me like that, what would he do to you? What would he put you through? What hell would he make you face knowing that you were just another tool for him to use?”*

It was deja-vu, and if I had a voice, I would have told her the same shit that had run through my head the first time she had told me that. Pa said that; the very first time we had set eyes on each other, chest to chest and ass to ass, he had told me the power I possessed, the choice I had in my life. But my words were ash and shit in my mouth, like the rest of me—and I guess\ maybe there was truth there too, the truth of a whole year of life lost holding my tongue back.

I didn’t know how hard I had been crushing her until she finally succumbed to the weight of it. Everything inside me twisted and ached as the tears continued to fall, as her voice broke around the hilt of the knife she pointed to her own heart.

*“I… I… don’t know how to love, Roskuld, but I tried and I failed you.”*

“No--” I blurted, and I was shaking my head without feeling the tendons move—but she kept talking and crying the tears I had made her cry with my presence:

*“You deserve better than myself. I have failed you, so completely. I am… I am sorry.”*

”No,” I said again, harder, trying to find my voice again. I had wanted answers. I had just wanted answers! I didn’t want her voice to break, her tears to shed, her—her mask to fall because I didn’t know how to shut it—

(I didn’t want her to be sorry. I wanted her to be there.)

(I wanted her to be my Ma.)

I took a step forward without realizing it—maybe so I could catch the pieces that kept falling from her face. “Ma—“ I said, my voice strangled, and I’m not even sure what I was gonna say—

--and I would never be sure—

--cuz suddenly—

*"YOU!"*

--I ‘bout lost my

e n t i r e

s h i t.

It was all the worse because I had completely forgotten Shapes was there in the first place. He had melted in the edges of my vision, someone pointless and useless, because this was a world between me and my Ma and there was shit that needed settling that should’ve been settled a long time ago. So imagine my immediate, absolute f u r y at someone--anyone--barging in our bubble, adding their voice where it wasn’t needed, regardless of whatever the fuck he thought he had to say.

It was instant. When motherfuckers say “snapped”, they mean that shit. My eyes fell on him and my brain—that thing that was being over-processed as it was, with all the twists and turns of these things between Ma and me—just stopped. Kaput. Dead and dull and gone. My eyes fell on him and I cocked my head and I stared at him with my lids wide open, my pupils contracted into tiny pinpricks of shocking blue, my mouth hanging open, stupefied, thrown by the audacity.

But it didn’t stop there—because the fury in my blood boils in so many more ways than one. My hair stood on end—mane, tail, everything standing straight up and out, as though a cover of static had slid over my frame (which it probably had). There was a buzz! and a snap! and a crackle! in the air and in the space above my back—one could see arcs of lightning there, brilliant blues and whites, bursting into existence in the vague outline of harsh wings. They flapped around me, and I didn’t see them—hell, even if I felt them I wouldn’t have cared. I had reached a point of anger that became madness.

Best part? This was all just because he had opened his mouth.

I was in no state to decipher his words at that moment; all that happened was that they became engraved in my brain, where they would haunt me there, later, when I was lucid and miserable and my wings disappeared under the veil of air and ignorance.

*"Are you happy to hear now that even though your mother was raped by a god, she still wants you?*

Yeah.

*”Your mother isn't sure what to do with you? That's your fault. You're awful.”*

Yeah.

*"Let me say this in a way you will understand: you need to learn your fucking place in this world."*

I’mma remember this shit.

At some point I became aware that he had fallen silent—and all I could do was stare at him, eyes wide with things lurking unhinged, as he took his place beside my Ma.

And touched her.

“…..Mama?” I asked, and if I had any of my senses left to deal with, I probably would have marveled at the softness of my voice, the ease of which it left me despite it being so dead, “Who’s this man to you, and why’s he talking to me?”

My eyes never left him; my lip twitched.



@[Ophelia]



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He…

is a friend.

And I can’t touch him.

It all falls away from me—the wild anger tearing at my insides, the fury of this stranger (who’s not a stranger, he isn’t, apparently he’s a friend--) butting into business he had no right to butt into he was invited to stick his nose in. This man I’ve never seen before; this man who had looked at me in such a funny way all the way back at the Arch, and that had been a clue, hadn’t it, that had been a little snippet of both past and future I’d been too dumb to notice at the time—

--and it didn’t matter how I felt about his words, or how I felt about his face, or if I wanted to claw out those eyes that wouldn’t stop looking at me like that—

--because he was a friend.

And it all fell away, all the anger and the nonsense—and before I had had wings sitting on my back but now they were fizzled into oblivion and obliviousness once again, and whatever lightning storm I had been cooking up around me suddenly fell away against the dark clouds of—

--of a friend.

I stood there, empty, everything empty. Because it had been the passion of fury that had been driving my mindless limbs—and without that, I was just mindless. I was dazed as my eyes fell back on my Ma, dizzy and punch-drunk with what she had said. So gentle compared to the roughness of Shapes’ voice; so sad, so forlorn and aching for a support and I guess that’s what he was to her.

He protects me and that… that is…good.

He protects her.

From me.

I just stared. I don’t even know if there was something stirring in my eyes at all—maybe they were like blank stones set in the face of a statue while my mind nibbled and tested and tossed around the words she had said, the meaning behind them, the feeling the clue the hint I had to--

”Your mother isn't sure what to do with you? That's your fault. You're awful—“

Unfettered honesty.

"Are you happy to hear now that even though your mother was raped by a god, she still wants you?”

A strength.

My mother’s rape.

”This is my daughter, my blood and my story.”

My mother’s rape.

If given the choice now, I would have had you again.

My mouth was ash; the mountains were ash. The sentinels I had fallen in love with, the skies and the glint of a lake down below—all of it was ash, ash on my tongue, ash in my eyes making them burn even though not a single tear dropped from them. The air inside me was ash, too; I had trouble speaking, trouble breathing, and a distant alarm in the back of my head told me that I had to leave. I had to leave. There was nothing to gain by staying here—except more pain, causing my Ma more pain by looking at me.

But words found themselves and tumbled from my ruined jaw, spilling in ashen monotone.

“’If given the choice now, I would have had you again’,” I spoke quietly—words I had remembered by heart, because I had drawn so much strength from them, so much reassurance that my Ma loved me, loved me, loved me--

I closed my eyes. “What a crock of shit.”

I turned to the entrance; my steps were dead, heavy weights as I left a valley of ashes.



[EEP THE END SORRY ABOUT THAT



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