I'd skidded to a halt at the eerie feeling of my hair standing on end— spine tingling and brain whirling as I comprehend the feeling of being watched. It's strange, a knotting of my gut and overdrive of my senses, I feel it before I can begin to understand it. Eyes, red and dangerous, watching, waiting. There's something familiar, yet so foreign to me, the way these eyes bore into me like I'm something infectious. I can almost feel the negativity oozing from my watcher, spilling from their pores like sweat (not a pleasant thought), it was something that tainted even I. 

Finally the presence is known, voice a hushed but firm tone, feminine and chilling— yet I recognize it. In a hazy mash of reds, golds, greens and black— of blood and displacement, I recall this voice. And along with it glaring red eyes and a face like mine. Aunt Nymeria. My eyes shift to the moon soaked figure of the taller woman, face to face (haha) with the woman who shares blood with Volterra. She was lithe, tall and less compact than Mother. She is agility, delicacy and fragility with poisonous words and a shadow in the night. A whisper carried on a summer day, an unnoticed specter in the crowd— she was nothing like Mother. 

Mother was a rampant tornado, taking up everything and anything. She was grey storm clouds and bellowing thunder— the lioness who prowled among the men like she'd always belonged. She was the simmering smoke of an overheated gun, a deadly explosive impatiently awaiting its turn to go off. She was dangerous in all the physical ways (as I've come to learn), in all the brutish ways that made her a well muscled emperor of a pitiful empire. 

Why am I running? That's— that's a good question. I don't know. I just wanted needed to get away from Mother for awhile— from the forest. It was dark and isolating, filled with too many memories and too many battles. From the sparkling ruby pool and its strange fruit tree, to the endless winding paths that crisscrossed and overlapped, that ended abruptly or didn't at all. In each tree there's some story, some scratch along the bark— some animal tracks wandering aimlessly through the shadows. There was no thrill, no mystery behind the tall pines or the wispy bushes, nothing at all. Once you'd been there long enough, you found that there was little entertainment provided among the undergrowth. Where Mother had been keeping us was stained red at her hands, tainted with harsh memories I had every intention of forgetting. 

"I'm not running away— I'm just— running. Do I have to be running from something?" In truth perhaps I was running away, but that didn't mean I was going to immediately admit to it (really I don't think I ever will). It felt shameful, like I shouldn't be. Maybe my gut was right, maybe it was cowardly to flee for all but a fleeting moment from the nightmare that is my reality. But I needed this— this time to breathe in a place where Mother will not punish me for merely breathing without purpose, without reason.