- May 5, 2023
- 541
- 228
- 43
When she gets to her paws tonight, her limbs are thickened, roped with muscle, unwavering and taut as a soldier's. She greets the world with an open verdant eye, with a tired familiarity and a hard set to the line of her white - flecked muzzle. It's a place she knows well.
Stalks of gilded wheat kiss the ragged fur of her elbows, sparkling golden grass whipped around her face by the wind and crushed underpaw, releasing a sweetened fragrance into air that tastes of salt - spray, of distant landscapes, of unbridled opportunity. She can feel it again, that shining golden place at her back, sparkling gazes and color - brushed pelts standing there and waiting for someone; waiting for her.
And, as before, there is a place before her too. Grey, vacant, its grass withering and the pawsteps dug into it marked by deadened soot - black; white rocks bleached by the sun and by time as a skull laid to dry. The waves whip higher than ever, spattering dead - white spume across the forepaws of the silent figure, religious in his unmoving, starless body. Darkened, crusted crimson dribbles over his paws, spills from his gashed throat, puddles in the grass and seeps slowly towards her in tarry drops.
She takes a deep breath, and she addresses not - him for the last time.
" Hey, " she mrrows again, and this time she can admit it, maskless and bald in its false face: this is not him, this conjured figure with its vacant pelt and turned back. " I still miss you. Things are still different. " Her meow is brisk and clipped and as fast - moving as a fleeing animal, rushing forward over its own paws lest it slow and stop forever, sentiment spilling out of a white maw in flutters of deer - limbs.
" I said before that everyone else had moved on, " Doeblaze gazes into the dead - grey back of his head, fur whipping around her face, forepaws gathered close together. Her countenance is an unreadable one for a nonexistent observer, brow just creased, eye a hard chip of jade, her muzzle set into a grim line. " That I couldn't. But . . . "
Stars, it feels like a betrayal. She has held her grief, a squirming and desperate thing, between bared claws so hard it seeped blood; held it when she had nothing else to hold, when gold fur had slipped from her grasp and fled into the paws of death. It is a pale imitation, a cicada's husk, a foxed mirror . . . but it is all that remains, and she holds it close even as it sinks talons into her chest in its efforts to flee. No, she has to remind herself with teeth locked close. It is not all that is left; there is a whole Clan sprung from warm claws, three kits wearing masks of red flame, the very syllables of her own name.
" I love you, " she says, thinking all the while, or I love him, at least. For that is not him, she knows, but she says it anyways.
" I miss you. " She turns on weary paws, tilting back towards the light. The world is more splendid than she had known, in all that time feeling it at her back.
" I'm sorry. " Seaglass eye turns over a ragged shoulder, framed in gilded light. Only for a heartbeat does she glance back.
She steps forward.
