Crap.

Something sunk low in my stomach, hearing my brother’s voice cutting through the silence of fake night. I cringed and I hoped that he wasn’t talking to me, that he hadn’t seen me slip over the hill. Maybe if I trotted a little faster, he would miss me? But then his voice came back, louder this time, suddenly right behind me, and I whirled around and backed away and cried out at his sudden appearance—he was there, suddenly there, and I backed away from him. I still didn’t want him seeing me piss poor and groveling.

*"Are you alright, Ros? Where are you going? I... I was worried for you."*

His appearance was already working its own kind of chaos on me; like I said before, he seemed built much more sturdily, a little older, a little bit more pep in his chest. But my eyes found him quite easily without me having to crane my neck; from my perspective, he had seemed to have shrunk a little, even though I knew that it was me who had gotten taller—which circled back to the confusion that ached within me, the need to refuse this bigger, older body even though I was perfectly attuned to it, to every impulse and reflex (the Gods weren’t so cruel as to grant me a body that I couldn’t use, I guess). But the impulses and reflexes brought implications of things I didn’t understand, deeper things, subtle things that never mattered to me before and still didn’t’ matter to me but now I knew about them anyway so my disregard was something a lot less innocent, a little more sinister and selfish on my part.

I just stood there for some time, kind of gawking at him with my mouth open like a trout gaping for water-air, because I wanted to say everything and nothing all at once and it was causing a blockage in my brain that made me dumb and mute. I wanted to tell him how terrified I was; I wanted to tell him how much I began to understand; I wanted to tell him how proud I was of him, and how different this world was now, and what I expected the emptiness meant and why it was crushing me in its own way. I wanted to tell him how much I’ve figured out about myself, how much I never knew, because no one told me, not even Ma, and that more than anything was creating a rift so wide in my heart I expected to fall in at any moment. All these things were clamoring in my brain, these things and even more things and impossibly even more things, some that made sense, some that were just brainless warblings and shrill screams of frustration and somewhere, somehow, I plucked a thing from the torrent of stuff that I decided was the most important thing to say for some reason.

“He’s my Dad,” I blurted at Bro, my eyes going wide right along with the realization. “He—that guy I saw with Ma. He’s my Dad. That creepy guy that killed all those crows. And he’s a GOD.” I didn't even know if Bro knew who or what I was talking about, but I was blurting it mindlessly, thoughtlessly. It was one of those intimate things I realized with this body and this new intuition of mine; the idea that I needed a sire, and dammit what other sire could I possibly have? The memory of his voice haunted my thoughts, because I remembered him saying almost the exact things I had said, in almost the exact cadence, and it could’ve been hilarious but it wasn’t, it wasn’t. I searched Bro’s face, looking for a reaction to what I said, wondering if he was feeling like I was and hoping to g—well. Hoping that he wasn’t.

“…Mesec?” I asked, my voice full of other tones and notes screaming help me, help me, “ What…what’s a god? And how come no one told me about them? Why didn’t Ma tell me?” I admitted to my ignorance this one time, not skirting around it but facing it head on; Bro had told me he had worried about me, and it was this care that made me trust him to help me somehow and first and foremost, I needed knowledge. “What am I doing? What…what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go? I don’t know what I’m doing,”I confessed, my speech breaking and breathless with a growing panic. I backed away from him some more, a couple of steps into the darkness that should not be; I didn’t want to leave him, but staying meant possibly facing something that I wasn’t ready for, even though leaving meant certainly facing the world that needed me. Even if I didn’t know how to save it.

Bro apologized for scaring me, and I could’ve laughed, because this fear wasn’t from him. Bro wasn’t a thing worthy of fear, never had been, never will be. No, this fear, this blind panic, was a different thing all together. It was its own mind with its own needs and wants, and I wasn’t man enough to satisfy it apparently, because my nerves were jumping and thumping and zig-zagging all over the place. When Bro told me to calm down, I snorted hard, a loud, rumbling sound through huge nostrils I never had before; I threw my head forcefully, pawed the ground in agitation, and marveled on how much of an effect it was. My hooves were huge things of granite; my head was adorned with a great, sharp, jagged crown of a horn that was as dangerous as it was I-guess-kind-of-sorta-maybe beautiful; my anger was worthy of notice now, and no longer an admittedly adorable antic of a foaling. I was not adorable. I paced back and forth, tail swishing the air, chest heaving, breath heavy, my ears cocked to Bro to listen to the rest of his explanations. The thing was, as I moved, I could feel my mind clear and the tension ease a little from my shoulders; I was following his advice I guess, calming down after all, but instead of standing there and letting my steam build I let it gush out and give myself a chance to breathe again.

A supreme being, he was saying. This elicited another snort. Somebody who created the world and everything within it. It was a mind-numbing prospect, this god thing. The creator of all things, everything I knew and didn’t know and didn’t care about. And I had personally come from them nuts of his.

I stopped in my tracks suddenly, hooves crunching in the frozen grass. I was the daughter of someone so powerful and capable, a kind of power and capability that I couldn’t even wrap my head around. What….did that mean? For me? What was I, the pinnacle of millennia of experimentation? Or was I…the beginning of a new one? Hearing Bro explain that his mother was a Goddess—no, that wasn’t right. He was just making me snort things again, making me start the pace again. It was a trick, he was tricking me, it wasn’t true. It…wasn’t. We came from the same mother, me and Bro, she gave gross birth to him and then waited a year and had me too and I…she wasn’t…?

“Is Ma…Is she a….a…?” I asked, coming to a sudden stop again. I looked hard at Bro—Mesec--, my eyes boring into him, no longer childish eyes. Because deep down I knew, I really knew, and it was a dumb question to ask. Ma wasn’t a Goddess. She just wasn’t. But the reasoning unraveling in my head wasn’t stopping my innards from crushing in on themselves, possibly the last remnants of whatever kind of existence I had known to be true, my precious world where everything was right and happy and made sense imploding on itself and blistering into oblivion. Because Mesec wasn’t my brother. He wasn’t my Bro.

He...

I looked at him, simply looked at him, and there were tears there. Yeah, I’ll admit that. I had started to cry.

Then I threw my head again, and I felt my mane shake, and I turned heel and walked off. There was nothing from me here. My father was a GOD and my Bro wasn’t my brother, and I didn’t know what to do and I was just a waste of confused space and Bro—HMMPH!-- Mesec already told me he didn’t know what I needed to do, so there was no point in staying. No, there was this shit about “staying strong” and warning somebody and there was nothing for me, nothing at all. The world was dark and something was dead, I had a daddy and he was a God, I had no childhood left for me and a thing for me to do dangling away from me in the shadows, and he wasn’t my brother.

He asked me something though. Br—Mesec asked me if I heard something in my sleep last night. I stopped in my tracks, but I couldn’t face him because—well. See, I didn’t hate him, I wasn’t hurt by him, please understand that, but he….yeah. There was just hurt. “Did he come last night?” I repeated, my voice lowered, controlled, and I heard the strange timbre of it, the oldness of it and the pain I tried and failed to hide. But yeah, there was no forgetting dad’s voice. It was here, in the pit of my chest, a clear instruction for me that still meant jack shit. “Yeah, he came,” I said gruffly“He told me I was the Time Keeper. He said….the days will not cycle, and the sun would no rise, but that I’d know the seasons and know the patter of the spin of the earth…” My tone had gone awfully quiet, almost trancelike as I spoke the words I knew by heart, “He told me to watch out for them.”

Something inside me was closing in on itself, becoming a vault situated in the pit of my person where everything had crumbled to nothing. I was closing myself from Mesec, from the world and its evil darkness; I was closing myself, because I didn’t know me or whatever I was venturing into. I didn’t know how to handle myself, but I was going to do it myself, and figure this out somehow. Myself.

But there was one more thing. “Can…can you tell Jiji I said goodbye?” My words were so quiet by now, but it was the only way I could control the warble threatening to break through. “Just tell her that I—well—tell her I suck, yeah, for not saying it myself. But I’ll see her again. Tell Ma, too. I’ll see them again. I’ll…I’ll see you again too. One day.” I didn’t turn around to say this to him; I didn’t face him and look him in his eye. I said what I needed, and continued to walk off into the darkness, then trot, then bolt like a bat out of hell, all without a backwards glance.

I was crying too hard. I didn’t want him to see.