if all this falls apart, he will never know what you are
Oops.
Unknowingly, as their world was accelerating towards disaster and disease, Djinni and Walter made a kid.
He’s sandwiched between them now as they wander through new territory, his red nose alternating between sniffing the sky and the earth, a curious creature already despite his newness. So curious, in fact, that he trips on a rock while trying to smell an early flower poking up through the late winter ground. Walter has been bemusedly watching his son out of the corner of one honey-brown eye and catches the boy’s chest with his muzzle just before he crashes into the ground. Catastrophe averted. Well, this catastrophe anyway. This one he can manage. “Easy does it Cor,” he chides gently, looking over his back to catch Djinni’s gaze with raised brows as if to say, what have we got ourselves into with this one?
Their autumnal dress has long since been shed, but it appears to have cloaked the colt in a constant reminder of what they’d done. Unknowingly. Well, kind of. The genie had been downright luminous and in her element in Sylva. Once she’d shown him the bluebells and made the forest come alive (and once they lost the pesky interloper), it had all been over. He couldn’t stop touching her, couldn’t let any distance come between their sun-bleached skin. He relished being able to touch her all he wanted to, finally, with no bars between them built by him alone.
He certainly enjoyed his tour of the kingdom that made her a queen.
Now though, the little family is stranded in a place they know nothing about. It is safe, at least, or it’s what they’d picked up on. Safer than almost anywhere else, safer than Nerine, where their daughter is stranded, alone. Guilt claws at Walter for that one; it had been his decision to go on their spontaneous trip, after all. Is Rivka sick and dying back on the sea-soaked shores of the Leviathans?
“Mamma?” The palomino looks over to see Cor watching his mother expectantly. The kid looks tired, so he pulls up, moves closer to both of them. There’s no reason to be moving fast towards anything, he supposes – there’s nowhere safe to go besides. But the urge to outrun this sickness is hard to resist. All he wants to do is keep his family safe. This is not a world he would ever have wanted to bring a child into. “I love you,” he says, to the both of them. Then to Djinni, once Cor has curled up at her feet, “what are we going to do?”
and he will never know why the sun in my eyes burns like her
@[Djinni]