[open] shattered into ash [ANY]

[Cress]

all that we have amassed sits before us, shattered into ash

She is worn out, so worn out.

Once she had thought herself like fire, but perhaps she is more like the ocean--coming in with the tide and out with the cycle of the moon. She is here one moment and gone the next much like the brush of the waves on the shoreline and only rarely does she bring anything useful to the surface. She had felt like a dragon once, with the flames in her chest in the fire on her tongue, but the fires died out and she has not found a way yet to revive them. So for now she is the ocean; she is blue and vast and changing with the hours.

She returns not with a bang but with a whisper, the dawn silent as she picks her way through the dense grass. Summer is turning to autumn and the morning holds the threat of a chill that she embraces fondly, brown eyes closing as she breathes in deeply. There are not many others about this early, but she knows they will come; they always do.

Rhaenyra is no longer attached to her side, and it is something that she feels oddly about, though the young mare has been gone for several years already. She'll be, what, four now? It is not so strange for a young filly to leave her mother's side, but she is the last piece of Cress's former life left. Even Flamebrand has vanished as well. Their father? She has not seen him since their last coupling, not even as a whisper on the wind. She is not wholly surprised--Flamevein had always been that way and had never truly been hers to lay a claim to.

She just misses the past.

She misses her flames; she misses having something to fight for. She longs for the time of dragons and shapeshifters and maybe, just maybe, a piece of her craves the war she once fought in.

cress

oxytocin x kindling