"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Wysteria had instructed her to find strength without her magic, but Dawn had pursued a separate path. Instead she had found contentment, a small burst of happiness in the saddened wreck that is her life, and she had used that contentment to build strong familial bonds with her tightened family unit. It isn’t much, just Rhaegor and Sunset and herself, but their bonds are stronger than any other ties she has felt in her life. As the lovers mature and settle into a comfortable rhythm, their son grows and spreads his (metaphorical) wings for the first time.
She knew that it was coming - he’s two now, and the darkness has been gone for half a year or longer - but it doesn’t hurt any less when Sunset reaches in for one last embrace before turning away from his parents and setting off. He has promised them he’ll visit often, but it doesn’t stop the tears that prick the corners of her eyes and threaten to drown her. They have built a home within Tephra, but the child needs to see the world and explore on his own and Dawn doesn’t want to be the one to stop him from doing that. Her own mother had encouraged her, and Dawn wants to live a life that Cress can be proud of.
It has been several days now that he has left, and early morning brings Dawn to the outskirts of the Meadow, a light breeze playing at her mane. Her mother has been on her mind a lot lately, and the quest that the lovely fairy had given her whilst simultaneously stripping her of her magicks. Cress had learned to be strong without her gifts at one time - Dawn is all too familiar with the story. The fairies had stripped all of Beqanna of their gifts, thinking them selfish and too unappreciative of the magicks bestowed upon them, either by birth or by quests or by the Alliance. Back then, they had all had to fight for their powers; Cress had despised her fire in the beginning, but when it was stripped from her she was an empty shell. She’d had to earn it back.
Dawn isn’t so sure that she wants her shifting back, which is why she had appealed to the Mountain in the first place.
As her mind wanders, her dark eyes fall on a scarred, golden stallion. Mother had told her stories of her father, a golden stallion with scars like hers, but deep down Dawn knows that there is no way this is Ledger. The man her shifting had come from, if she were to believe that. Slowly, unsure of herself like in so many other instances, she makes her way towards him, calling out a soft greeting as she approaches. If it is Ledger, will he recognize her, or think she is her mother? Cress and her middle child were always so similar in build and features, though Cress was missing ears and Dawn was missing her mother’s thick blaze.
“Hello,” she greets once the distance between them has closed, words failing her as she wonders if this one-eyed stallion could be her long-lost sire.
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
There were two of them, perfect twins. A boy and a girl. She was the spitting image of his father, Magnus. The other looking more like himself. They were little beacons of hope, a sign of a life that was just within his grasp. And he, the starved man, greedily drank in their love, their open acceptance. It hadn’t been enough time. He hadn’t gotten enough time.
Life had once again chosen to be cruel.
In the deepest part of his chaotic rage after returning from the Mountain, reeling from Ellyse’s betrayal and unable to escape the snare of his mind, was when he had found Cress again. Carnage had begun to break him but it was Ellyse that had driven the final nail home, hammering his fate and hers as well. He had been left in a dark cage of madness. Desperate to escape but lacking the will to do so with the vapid glass heart that hung strangely in his chest.
Cress had understood that pain, that torture. She had endured a round in Carnage’s lair. She knew the icy bite of steel bars, of the putrid stink of the shadowed cave, the nightmares they were forced to play out for a Dark God’s amusement. In a moment of need, a moment of craving some sort of touch that remind him that he was real even though the ghosts around him declared him not.. Cress. She had deserved better than him. Better then a tortured soul that sought to forget in the pleasure from her skin but only found himself emptier than before.
He had no idea that she had become pregnant. That a third perfect child existed. Another child he ultimately had failed in life. Another failure to add to the ones already burdened on his sharply jutted shoulders.
He can also recall the time when he had lost his shifting. He had been sure the bear was a curse, a plague on his life to torture him with forever. The brand mockingly etched on his flank like a warning label. He had hated what he had become. But when he couldn’t reach the Bear, that spark of power, it had been harder to let go than he had realized. The bear was he and he was the bear. Their fates intertwined, fused, made one. There was no living without the beast afterwards, when magic had returned. It’s the guilt that eats at him the most, would things have been different if he had given it up? Would anything play out differently if he had been stripped of the bear? Or was this the punishment of his selfishness, his unwillingness to let go of the power the bear gave him.
Loess has become home, she has become home, but he still finds himself making trips back to the Meadow. Old habits die hard and he still likes to spend evenings watching the others, hearing the snippets of conversation that make this place so popular. Getting lost in a crowd. A face appears amongst the others and he is quick to do a double take, his one dark eye brightening with recognition. She calls out a greeting and he murmurs to himself, “Cress?”
No, it can’t be. There were many familiar features to this mare, he realizes as she comes closer, but it’s not Cress. The blaze is missing, the ears are whole. How eerily similar she seems to her though. He can’t help the confusion that lingers on his face although he still gives a smile in return to her greeting. “I’m sorry, you look a lot like someone I use to know.” He pauses for a moment, trying to regain his senses. “I should have started with hello.” He laughs softly in his rough voice. “Let me start again. Hello, I’m Ledger. Who are you?”
it must be about as hard as forgetting your best friend
Dawn doesn’t know everything about how her parents met, but she knows that it involved being stolen away to Carnage’s lair and being kept there and tortured for an indeterminate amount of time. Her mother had chosen the path of fire, and her father had chosen ice. They were tortured simultaneously yet separated, the dark god pushing a number of horses to their very limits and even further - just for fun. Some of them had made it out fine, but others, like her parents, had been permanently traumatized.
Cress had told her that Ledger had been locked in a cell near hers, and it was the pain in his screams that had emboldened her to seek him out years later. Years later. Not days, or weeks, or months, but years. Cress had wanted to speak to another who had gone through the things she experienced, but it took her years to gather the strength to find him. And to think, in Dawn’s eyes, Cress was the mightiest of warriors - the most fearless golden woman. Cress was a dragoness lacking only in physical armor.
Back in the present, she sees the flicker of recognition in the stranger’s eyes as he turns towards her and her words fail as her mother’s name crosses his lips.
Does she look so much like her mother?
His confusion is quickly replaced by kindness, but Dawn still finds herself unable to speak. Ledger. This is her father - the man that Cress had told warm stories about. She had spoken highly of his kindness and his old soul, and though the pair had not spent a long time together - he had never even known she had been pregnant - Cress had never forgotten her one-time lover. Maybe, in a different universe, they would have been happy together. Maybe.
She wonders if he feels the same way about his shifting that she does - that she is different in that form, and that the bear seems to take over pieces of her that she has a hard time regaining control of. A part of her misses that loss of control, and the feeling of digging sharp claws into the beaches of the Cove, but yet another part of her knows that she gave it up for good reason - to learn to be strong without it. But she never learned to be strong again after Cress’s death; no, she had taken the stripping of her magicks and returned home to Tephra and didn’t look back.
Will he be able to give her insight?
Finally she speaks, tears in her eyes as she thinks of her mother. “My mother’s name was Cress,” she offers in return to his awkward greeting, her smile beginning to fade. “My name is Dawn.” Knowing that the best thing to do is just get on with it, she surges forward, praying to not trip over the words: “I think you’re my father.”
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
Cress has raised him on a pedestal that he had never deserved to sit on. Had he been kind when he had raged as the bear? When he had attacked Ellyse and Dahmer’s child in a fit of madness and tore at the flesh of his own chest, after being broken in Carnage’s lair for a second time? Was he an old soul or just a destroyed soul now? Perhaps he would have been happy with Cress just as perhaps he might have been happy with the girl of glass, Adaline. He had chosen Ellyse though. He had chosen a toxic broken relationship with a mare that held her heart for another and that was his cross to bear.
If only he had known about Dawn.
Maybe it would have been different.
The tears in her eyes catch him off guard and he wonders if he had offended her in some way. Before he can manage another apology, she speaks and he’s not ready for the icy coldness that suddenly wraps around his crystal heart. Cress was her mother. Was. A slight ache caresses the jagged edges of the crack in the glass but he doesn’t get a chance to linger on the pain of her death. Not when Dawn introduces herself as his daughter.
His dark eye can only stare at her, the gold flecks turning molten as the world seems to spin around him. There had only ever been Joaquin and Joplin. A third? He begins to stammer that it’s impossible until a memory suddenly swoops in, a reminder of that night he spent with Cress. After he had been fully broken by Ellyse’s betrayal and the cell in the Mountain. He had found Cress again and despite his incoherentness had been drawn to her fire. Drawn to the mare that had screamed in the cell next to his, one that had not betrayed him.
He had failed the twins.
As he gazes at Dawn, a mare grown, who had lived her whole life without him… The shame and guilt rise in his chest, consume him from the inside out. He burns alive with his failure and inadequacies.
He had let her down too.
“I’m so sorry.” Is all he can say, that haunted look returning to the ravaged planes of his face. “I didn’t know.” I didn’t know you existed. And even if I had… I was a mad beast. I would have failed you anyways. Things he wishes he could say but can’t find the words. The bear within him is unusually quiet, as if it senses something important. A flicker of a thought, more guilt submerging him under the weight of a shameful wave, of the one thing he had always been scared of. He had worried about it with the twins and now he can’t help but wonder if his curse had been passed to this child. If she had been burdened with a beast that she hadn’t asked for. He can’t bring himself to ask her, still in a state of disbelief and denial that a secret daughter was standing before him. Did this mean that somewhere the twins still lived as well?
“Dawn.” He finally manages again, fighting against his anxiety that lodges thickly in his throat. “Your mother…” What happened? He means to finish but instead it just lingers as an unasked question. His one eye unable to fully meet her own dark ones, so similar to his own. Instead he takes in the gold of her skin, the star and horn that graces her forehead. His daughter. His living breathing daughter.
Had Cress raised Ledger up on an impossibly high pedestal, or had Dawn just glamourized the few stories of her sire that Cress had given her? Cress herself hadn’t known much of Ledger outside of Carnage’s prison, but Dawn’s mother had never had an ill word to say about him. She hadn’t minded raising Dawn alone - she had done it with Rhaenyra before her, when Flamevein had left one day, never to return. Cress, even in her darkest hours, had always been stronger than Dawn had ever hoped to be, and always, always kind unless the situation called for otherwise.
She wonders if her mother had been scared, or if she had gone down fighting to the bitter end.
She doesn’t want to think about it, but she does. All too often.
She also wonders if this is too much, too fast for Ledger, and quietly she begins to regret her words as his dark eye bores into hers, the golden flecks familiar - she has seen them in her own reflection, and the same eyes in several of her children. When he apologizes, it is all she can do not to cry in response to his broken tone. “Don’t,” she tells him with a sad smile, taking a singular step closer and wanting to brush her nose along his shoulder to comfort her sire. “You couldn’t have known. It’s alright.”
Selfishly, she wants to dive right into everything that he has missed in her life, from her own blunders in love to the kingdoms that she had ruled to the grandchildren that he hasn’t gotten to meet, but something pulls her back and holds her still. Your mother, he says and her heart skips a beat as she rocks back suddenly, knowing what’s coming next. The words don’t fall from his lips but the question is there, and Dawn struggles to catch her breath as the words start pouring from her.
“I-I don’t know what happened to her,” she says, trembling as she remembers the scene that she had staggered upon. “Some monster had attacked her in the Cove” - Dawn’s own adopted son’s child, at that - “and I blame myself for that, because I think she was coming to visit me - she lived in Tephra at the time and had promised to visit but I hadn’t seen her in awhile and so I was worried for her but I never expected her to be dead. The monster tore her head clean from her shoulders, she never even had a fighting chance. All Cress did her entire life was fight for a chance and for her life to end the way it did, I-I just-”
Her mindless babbling is broken by a sob and gasps for breath, and it’s a few tense minutes before she can calm herself down enough to continue.
“I went to the mountain to try and beg for them to make me a little bit more like her, because I didn’t have a single piece of her left - she was all fire and I am all ice - and all they did was take away all of my powers and tell me that I need to learn to be strong without them.
“But I don’t know how to be strong without her here, Ledger, I just don’t.”
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
She moves as if to comfort him and that gesture alone brings a fresh wave of guilt to crash inside him that only lingers as she speaks and tries to absolve him of any wrongdoing. He instantly regrets asking about Cress as the question that hangs in the air seems to land on her like a physical blow. She begins to tremble and he (being no stranger to trauma) goes to place his muzzle on her shoulder to steady her. Pain reflects in the dark eye as she speaks of Cress’s death and of Tephra. His shoulders sag as he adds a new burden to them. If he had stayed in Tephra, would it have changed anything? Would he have gotten to know his daughter, would he have been there to visit her at Cress’s side? Could the bear have saved her?
He knows this feeling too well, this suffocating guilt that she feels, and when he describes the brutality in which she had discovered her own mother it eerily reminds him of the carnage that had befallen his own when he had been mere hours old. This is his worst fear. He had never wanted his children to befall the same fate as he and yet here was one standing before him telling a tale that somewhat matched his own. Dawn begins to falter in her words and he soothingly pushes the stray strands of her forelock back from her forehead, distress in his gaze. “It’s not your fault Dawn.” Giving her the words that he had always longed for as a child when Raaquel had been murdered before his eyes. “Your mother was one of the bravest mares I’ve ever known. If her death was quick then take solace in that and that alone. She deserved better and I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help her or you.”
There is a flicker of the bear in his remaining eye as fury at the injustice of the world mixes with his grief and regret. He pulls his muzzle back to look at her and its a sad smile that finds his lips as he says softly, “Gods you look so much like her.” And she does, more than she realizes. She continues in her story and he listens to her but as she says “I am all ice” he suddenly freezes and a dread rises up through him. His first greatest fear was his children to follow in his footsteps, not just in trauma but in what he had become beneath the Mountain. He hadn’t seen it in the twins when they had been born but had his daughter innocently inherited his burden to bear? He swallows heavily but pushes that question, for the moment, to the side. “It seems to me that you carry her strength as much as you carry her looks.” He finally responds quietly. He lets the silence stretch for a moment as they both think of the fiery mare they had lost but finally he breaks it as he tentatively finds his voice to give her an offer. “I’m a poor replacement for your mother but you aren’t alone. I’m here now, if you’ll have me.”
And then another pause, a visible hesitation as he raises his gold flecked eye to meet her own staring back at him.
His muzzle touches her shoulder and she shudders at the touch, relief flowing through her as he comforts her. She knows nothing of her sire’s past, that he had experienced something similar to him, but at least she had been an adult when it happened to her. Cress and Dawn had lived very separate lives, only reuniting once every few months to swap stories and to talk about their children - Dawn has a younger brother that she knows of, who gave up his life to keep their mother alive, and Dawn has a smattering of children herself, all sired by men that she has loved differently over the years. Litotes, Clayton, Rhaegor; all three of them had been different forms of love, the purest of all finding her when Rhaegor found her after Cress’s death.
She has more children than just those borne of her body as well - Oriash and Ghaul, though the latter had burned too close to the sun. He had been like his father but multiplied tenfold, unknowingly cruel and ambitious, and had bitten off more than he could chew in the end. His life had been short but brutal, and it is often that Dawn wonders: if she had been more present in his youth, other than teaching him to hunt and keeping him fed and loved, would she have been able to curb some of his behavior?
Ledger brushes a few strands of her forelock out of her eyes and she meets his gaze gratefully, some of the pain melting away as he speaks of her mother. “Thank you,” she murmurs. She knows deep down that it wasn’t her fault, but maybe if she had been there… things would’ve been different.
He tells her that she looks like his mother as their conversation progresses, but then freezes as she mentions ice, and she watches him with curiosity. He tells her that she is strong and she can feel the tears welling up again but keeps a tight rein on them this time, a small smile stretching across her lips. “I’ve never had a father before,” she muses, quiet contentment flooding her veins. He asks her if she is a shifter and she doesn’t hesitate before answering: “I was, until they stripped the magic from my veins.”
She doesn’t mention how animalistic the shifting had made her, how any bit of anxiety had her digging claws into the ground. She doesn’t tell him how many times she has lost herself in the thrill of the hunt, or how when she is angry she loses herself to the bear entirely. Life has been strange without her shifting, and she honestly isn’t sure if she even misses that part of her.
“You have grandchildren, you know,” she tells him after a beat, smiling broadly as she thinks of each one of them. “Seven of them.”
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
If only she had told him. He could have told her where it had all come from, how he too had once been stripped from the bear and weighed down by the brunt of anxiety. But he had gotten it back and had only realized once it was gone how much of himself had been in the beast. He had learned to come to a certain peace within himself, still flawed, not perfect, but fine just the way it was. He wonders if she feels an ache, an absence, that he had felt when he had been parted from his magic. Even though he still despised the dark God who had put it there, he no longer felt the burden of a curse.
His new heart stutters when she mentions grandchildren. Had time gone on that quickly? Where had it gone? He wonders if he looks as old as he feels sometimes. Magic had always been tricky here and youth tended to cling firmly to even those not blessed to immortality. “Seven.” He exhales sharply, obviously overwhelmed by this unexpected news. With a sudden pang in his freed heart, he wishes Magnus was here too. That snapshot of a family that had always been stolen from them. To see how far they had all come no matter how cursed or treacherous their paths were.
“I would love to meet them all.” He says with an easy smile, gold flecks molten in the burning warmth of his russet eye. “And you should meet your little brother and sister. If you want to, of course.” This role of a father settles like static on his back, uncertain and still trying to place to land. He is trying though, trying to make up this debt he owed to all of them for not being the man he should have been. “We are moving to Sylva. If you ever want to visit… We would be happy to have you.”
