Summer is a time of love, or warmth: of peace in the world. Greenery and flowers, the fireflies and cricket-songs at night. Cloudless stars colored like dark oceans with a myriad of stars spattered across the vast expanse. Trail and rocks alike are wet from the passing rain and moss and loamy earth are heavy on the wind.
Briella stands before the Fairies: calling out and begging; but hers is not always a favor or fortune had- no, she like any is subject to the whim and will of the creatures who she pleads to. The anger and frustration: the bitterness that they possess and all the vast reaches of their knowledges.
Fae creatures are things without morality truly, without anything more than motive and purpose that only they know- and she faces them in a way she is unfamiliar with. Before her the bubbled mass of magic is formless and strange, it is at times a shape she recognizes and other so incomprehensible that her mind must force itself to try and recognize such a thing.
She grieves for the agony it causes her to look upon it: for the feeling of absence it creates in her, and for the breath of magic torn from her throat.
“No! I wanted to help them!” she screams- agonized and in pain, so entrenched in her fury and rue that she ignores the rattling and piercing shriek leaving her throat: the jealousy and confusion. “You gave me that power to help! Demanded I complete quests to keep it so I could continue helping and you take it back when I come seeking a way to continue?! Why! I don’t understand!”
She is rage and fury, hurt and shame: a thousand faces that she cannot understand, nor that she has experienced before. “I am still going to help- I am still going to try! Take away everything from me, go ahead. Take away strength and try to worsen this plague and I will still crawl on my belly if it means I can save anyone. If I die so be it.”
Her fury is forged into spite and perseverance: her pale eyes narrowing and the blonde hair of her mane and tail blow in the wind. “I don’t need powers to fix this.”
She sturned, Briella turns- her head lowered and faux-chocolate body sliding through the trails and pathways: weaving quietly down the mountain as she spits and chokes on the bitterness and venom in her own mouth. She no longer tastes the blood from her symptoms; but ultimate she know the disease still lives in her body and Briella stares hard at the ground- thinks about the events leading to the plague.
She can hear the rocks of the mountain cracking, the fall and roll- collapses that come and go; but most of all Briella hears the whisper and shriek of the wind: feels the crunch of ice in her hair and the lingering frost coating her body from the failure she endure in the Isle. As if on queue the shimmering ice begins to melt but slowly refreezes at the pulse of what magic remains lingers upon her.
Pangea is a short walk away, a place where the dirt and stone fade to sand and rock: to a brilliant rusty orange and gray. Red and yellow, limestone and shale- plateaus so tall and vast she is unsure how any could live here. But Briella notices something about Pangea immediately…
The smell.
Brine has crusted the surface of the earth and trees, and flecks of salt lay everywhere like jagged stone and glass. It crunches beneath her hooves and with it she can smell the stale air and faint traces of rancor and rot: fetid breaths that sicken her as she walks into the terrain.
Sweet and grotesque, the sickly stench of rotting fat and flesh hits her and she sees carcass after carcass of rotting fish and mollusk: of jellies and squids and sea-krait alike all decomposing across the land. The black mold and hungry scavengers consume: and in the worst moment of all she sees a vibrating whale’s corpse shudder in a bloated state. The popping sound is so loud it echoes through every crevice and cavern and she watches as offal and viscera are spilt upon the soil.
Blue and red, green and yellow- bile and blood, gore are spattered into the air.
Like a macabre balloon it deflates and Briella watches as the skin sinks onto the bones and looks little more than stretched cloth upon them. She chokes back vomit and disgust: screams as she charges away and forward- her long legs pounding the ground as she races through passages and stretches of land. Her eyes narrow, the pale blue watching as her nostrils flare and she tries to race beyond the ruinous land.
In the end she wishes the corpses were the worst part about this place.
Instead she sees creatures so horrible and twisted that she can not comprehend shape or form: manner or make, she can only see the dribbling blue slime coating their wolfish teeth and the oily-smoke on their burned and rotting bodies. They bark and yip: excitedly chase and feast upon the birds.
The trees are blackened and briney, barnacle ridden and stretched out in a way that makes them look like surrealist monoliths of impossible make and conception. She feels the shells and stoney branches scratch her once and they cut into her flesh like jagged knives. Blood drips along the faux-chocolate and smutty body, down the curves of her moves and drips onto the soil.
She is forced to stop: Briella’s eyes fixating on a horrendous form that lurches through the darkness and scuttles towards her on hoof and tentacle. She feels a barbed appendage raking her flesh and panics: screams and runs as the mad creature cackles behind her. “Tag!” it cries, running off into the places it had come from.
Ceasing only beyond the border: she stares at the world she has left behind. The grotesque mockery of a kingdom where the thick air tasted of ruin and disease; but here in the Cove she watches as a sickly shadow lurks. Young and flimsy, wobbling on bruised legs and with a body as weak as hers had been once: it walks to her. Diseased and ruined the foal chatters and prattles, shivers and pants.
A spray of blood shoots from its nose and Briella listens to the choking in its lungs: the rattle and heaviness. It looks up at her and the gray-child is barely able to break a whisper: “Help me.” it pleads.
Her mind reels and she thinks of the Fairies and their cruelties- their ways.
Briella clenches her teeth- sighs and looks away, unable to face the child at first but soon staring down at it with all the stoic might she can have. “I am helping you, but in a way you cannot comprehend right now, I could try the ease sickness but it doesn’t cure the plague. I’m sorry; but one day you’ll understand why I have to go and why I can’t do what you ask of me now.”
Sage in some manner and cruel in another she turns away and stares into the Cove: beyond the border, her ears pressing back as Briella ignores the child. ‘Greater good, it has to be for the greater good. Sacrifice some to save the rest... ‘