|
The snow continued to fall, its pace picking up as the minutes rolled by, creating a sheet of white upon the brow and sides of the indigo mare who continued to lay in stunned disbelieve. There was not even room for remorse in her mind, such was her shock; even as the heavy footsteps of the Dauntless reached her ears and he kneeled to embrace their lost angel, Circe could feel nothing but an alarming numbness spread across all four corners of her body. It was a sedation doomed to fail; regardless, the shadowmere was allowed a few minutes of grace before the shadow would envelope her vision and her world would shatter slowly, painfully, yet surely into complete and utter destruction.
Circe was unaware that she was crying; the shadowmere was blatantly ignorant of when tears had begun to fall from her staring eyes, or indeed, that they now fell thick and fast, forming heavy trails of sodden fur on each of her cheeks. It wasn’t until Circe listened to the bitter, piercing keen of Loretta’s howling that a sob wracked her body—and it was this motion of movement, this involuntary shudder and convulsion, that managed to break the brittle pane of glass that managed to hold back Circe’s despair. It was in that moment that the weight of all that transpired, of all that was lost, seemed to settle on her shoulders with the full of its impact. And it was just in that space of time that the Dauntless spoke with mirrored anguish.
Forgive me, he begged of her.
With his uttered words, Circe screwed up her eyes as a wave of grief and misery rolled over her; slowly she laid herself down, groaning as her head hit the snow-laden ground, her eyes closed and her breathing shallow as though the executioner suffered a fatal wound. This was not altogether untrue.
Her mind began to move again from its sluggish shock, but no conscious thought entered her brain. No, what Circe heard was voices, chanting, abhorrent ideas and terrible, terrible taunts. Memories flashed before her closed eyes, unbidden, unwelcome—the last of her mother Hera’s face flashed in front of her, those radiant blue eyes widening in fear as Hera realized they were caught in an ambush. The way those eyes looked at everywhere but Circe as they struggled for escape; the way her mother had found an opening and bolted, those eyes never even once looking back at the offspring they left behind. Your mother left you, those horrible voices contemplated, you don’t deserve a mother.
Circe knew she was not the only one in pain; she knew that Dauntless kneeled for no one, and she could see through the slits of her lids that his body shook with the force of his own despair. It came off of him in waves; the lament of his companion was a testament to that. She knew she should sit up, answer him, offer him a way out of his own dark tunnel—but Circe could not. She couldn’t look him in his golden eyes, for there she would break; she would crumble with the shame of her failure. There was no blame for him. It was Circe herself that was the broken vessel.
You deserve no mother, the voices chanted, and you don’t deserve to be one.
 |
.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
