Her voice was familiar but impossible as it stumbled across the water and the waves she ushered towards him. Then again, feeling as if she were real, wasn't her voice always like that? So soft and kind, with the sense you'd known it all your life: that you'd found it in the sea and sky every time you'd lifted your head to watch the sunset over the water.

Ashamin wasn't sure, anymore. When she appeared he wanted to laugh, and in a way he sort of did--if laughter was short coughing bursts and plunging his face into quickly bloodying water just to try and stop the pressure of its pain. It was an attempt. A failed one, at best.

Given that just moments ago he had convinced himself that Tiamat was merely a figment of the deluded mind, seeing her was surprising, to say the least. His lips tumbled open, unsure; his long tail slapped the water, splashing himself with blood, and his large ears were pinned back to his head. It wasn't fear, exactly, but uncertainty was just as dangerous as that.

The paint felt his hooves sinking into the sandy muck beneath him. His whole body would slowly become covered in it, he thought. If he died here or if he somehow stood and walked away alive with aid, he would forever be stained in this black soil of frostfall waters.

"Tiamat..." It was all he could say. Her name. He knew it, and he knew her and the delicate arabian curve of her blue skin, and he didn't know how. Her being here and him seeing her was impossible. It meant some of that dream had been real, maybe. Well, that or he could tell the future. Perhaps he really was meant to be Haruspex, someday. He wanted to laugh again but a shooting pain made its way through his leg and up his body, insistent that he not forget his condition. Remember, the wound seemed to say, I've got a hold on your heart and a slippery grip on your life.

Ashamin found his teeth grinding and his face plunging back towards the cold. His uninjured leg kicked, but that motion alone was too much. His black eyes looked for Tiamat's white ones: he was pleading, hoping there was something in her that would help him. He felt her cheek touch his when he lifted his ebony features and he felt, for a moment, the comfort of bliss. He let his eyes close, he let warmth seep into his being. Was this how his father had felt, so long ago now, upon dying? And his mother, too, had she felt this same wash of comfort at the end in spite of her birthing pains? Tiamat was saying so many things, asking so many things, and he didn't know how to answer other than this with a groan, shift, and heave of his body and heart: "Don't ask me that, don't make me say it out loud."

It was a faint whisper of truth. Even now, he was ashamed. And yet, too, now he felt it all to be inconsequential. How strange, the effects of pain on the mind. "Will you help me, Tiamat?" he asked, his heart feeling heavy and slow in his breast, his breath catching. He was so cold, the water such an icy tomb, and yet he couldn't feel a drop of its frigidity. He didn't know what help meant. Maybe it was just staying there, with him, as his blood flowed red into the waters of the grove. Maybe it was letting him know it was ok to die.

How long had he been here? His eyes opened in bare slits and he caught sight of his fur and hair, matted, tangled, and mixed up with muck and blood. Were it not for the water, he was certain he would be dry and flaking red. It had been so long... it must have been so long. But how was he still bleeding, then? How was he still alive?

Ashamin's voice came out in a whisper, cracked and barely audible but undeniably spoken. He parroted, in an attempt to comfort her as if she were the wounded. His eyes fluttered, the patterns in Tiamat's horn became a shifting maze he could get lost in. "I’m here, my friend. You will be all right," was the murmured reply and repeat of the blue mare's gentle speech. It echoed on, his voice growing softer with each cycle of the words. "You will be all right," he said again, soft and aching as his heart wondered who this creature was and how her breath, so beautiful and lovely in its delicate exhalations, had come to cross with his. "Darling," he sighed, quiet, content, drawing closer to death, and not knowing even what the word meant, "you will be all right,".

"" ""
[[@[Tiamat] -feels all the feels-]]

ASHAMIN

Darling,
You will be all right.
We will be all right.