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The earth beneath the shrines began to shake.
It was only slightly at first, a dull murmur - as if somewhere, very far below, someone was turning over in a bed. The particles of dust and dirt and dying leaves began to dance slightly, covering and obscuring the tokens that Cirrus had deposited, and then revealing them again.
"What have you done?"
The voice was a whisper on the breeze, but it sounded damp and heavy and full of the musky scent of earthworms and wet dirt. It sounded confused and wounded and disappointed. It sounded the way a Father might when a child explains that rather than cleaning a fish tank, they have simply dumped the fish into the toilet.
But this was not a fish.
This was more than a handful of lives.
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE" The God of the Earth's voice was now a resounding boom. It was as shaky as a sapling in a storm, and just as nearly-broken. Thunderclouds formed overhead as his massive form hauled itself from the earth. Bits of grasses and roots clung to his heavily tangled mane, while clods of dirt fell from his wings. Yet all of this was inconsequential, for his eyes blazed with sadness and the paternal desire to take it back. To take back whatever it was that made Cirrus think he had wanted her to kill. He, the God of life and prosperity and growth. He who merely asked her to sit with the dead and dying, to give them water or other water-based comfort, and to wait with them until their time passed. To stroke their hair (or blubber as the case might be), to sing them songs, to tell them of the heaven that they were headed to. All these things he had wanted Cirrus to do - to understand that water was already a source of healing, as was Cirrus, so that she might properly understand that the magic she had asked for to be an extension of herself.
He had wanted her to help them through the pain that would end their lives.
Not be the cause of it.
The God moved towards the discarded remnants of lives - some of which left the world naturally, others who were ushered through by Cirrus herself. His nose lowered to them and he inhaled deeply. He could smell their lives, their pasts, their memories. Closing his rustic gaze, a single tear fell as he exhaled an incoherent prayer onto the body parts.
Without raising his voice, he raised his head and regarded Cirrus. The storm overhead had slowed and was beginning to break, for his wrath had already been tempered by his want to understand. To mend whatever it was that was so broken within the winged mare, that she had thought murder was the task she had been saddled with.
"Cirrus. What did you do?"
And then he fell silent, all the while thinking, this is going to hurt me, more than it has hurt you.
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[O] breaking me, completing me
