She arrives at the mountain with the others, finding herself in a sea of faces all utterly unfamiliar to her. It would have been easier if Brigade or Lupine could have come with her, but it was with their help that mom and dad and even dads wolves had been too busy to notice when she slipped away. They were used to her brothers being wild, finding ways to get into trouble, tests the boundaries of a world coming undone. It was probably what made it so easy for her to sneak off, nearly invisible in that she has always been the quiet, gentle one.
But the call of the fae before her had been so irresistible, the promise of an opportunity to fix this broken world. Or at least that was what they grown ups called it, the ones with longer legs and bigger bodies, the one who were already there before she ever existed. They spoke of a plague, of sickness, of things that seemed wrong and out of place, resented, but it was all she had ever known. Venturing outside the designated safelands meant that some horses got sick. It meant they would cough and bleed and stumble around, and being that it was all she had ever known, it was easy enough to accept as normal.
Except it wasn’t normal, wasn’t how things should be. It was why Lupine was living with Wonder’s family instead of his own mommy, because she was trying to keep him safe and protect him while she tried to find his brother and sister outside the safe areas.
Maybe that was part of why this was so important to her. Why from the very first time she had heard the call and been too new and fragile to answer it, it had stayed in the back of her mind as an ever-present awareness. A desire locked away somewhere safe in her chest, tucked against the echo of her heart. She wanted to help.
So when the fae sends them on their way, bids them to hurry, waste no time, she has only a beat to decide that the best course of action is to follow someone. She doesn’t know the territory to which they travel, knows only that Pangea is close and to avoid it at all cost. Can feel it in her bones even when the warning of her parents is forgotten in the activity of things.
She picks a woman and a child to follow, perhaps drawn to the instinctive safety of someone who she assumes must be a parent for the way the walk to close and comfortable, and for the kisses she presses to his brow. It scratches an ache in her chest, a wound that is shy and quiet and stinging, makes her miss her own mother. She doesn’t realize until much later that there is another girl following them too, soft and pink and as beautiful as the dawn that waits to greet them when this dark night ends. She is far to Wonder’s right, and a little ahead, her eyes glued on the pair ahead of them.
Wonder makes no attempt to join any of them though, just follows the sounds they make as they cross dirt and stone, wear smudged paths where they travel. That it is night makes it easy to hear them, for the rest of the world is silent while it sleeps. Her unwitting companions take no breaks, and though her little legs are weary, she doesn’t dare stop and lose sight of them. But then suddenly they do pause, and for an instant she is so briefly relieved, those ocean-green eyes softening. Except they haven’t stopped to rest at all, and it’s only because someone has forced them to stop, a woman begging them for help. She can hear their voices raised and clear in the night, the woman so stern and the boy so gentle, so kind. Even watches long enough for the girl to encounter the same woman asking for the same help, and to the same end.
She is glad that she is not near enough to be stopped, has never seen this plague up close. Finds that she had no concept of the suffering until now. Words do it no justice.
She only makes it a few steps into the dark after the woman and those two children when a shape she had thought to be a small mound in the earth shifts and bleats softly at her. “Ohhh.” The sound is not a word at all, just a gasp of brokeness at what her eyes have already begun to unravel in the dark. A child who should be bigger than her, all sagging, broken skin over bones that seem too sharp, seem like blades trying to break through. Gaunt and sad and with eyes too dead and hollow to belong to anything still able to breathe.
Wonder is devastated, answering a second bleat from this sick, downed stranger by stepping closer to press her nose to the girls brow, sweep aside her forelock and breathe softly against skin that shouldn’t be so hot. She has never understood this until now, never understood the pain and the suffering, but she understands now.
“Don’t go.” That voice is brittle, all the life stripped violently from it. “I’m scared.”
It takes every single ounce of Wonders strength not to immediately lay down beside her, wrap her neck over those razor sharp withers and hold her so close. Someone else could bring back the stones for the fae, so many had gone. Wonder would be of more use here, wouldn’t she? But even as her eyes fill with tears she struggles valiantly to hold back, she knows it isn’t a risk she can take. If it was just herself, just her own life for this girl, she is sure she would make that choice. But it’s more than her, more than the two of them.
“Please, help me.”
And Wonder is sure her heart must’ve died in her chest, ruptured and turned dark like a black hole, breaking all her ribs in the process because suddenly it hurts too much to breath. “I’m not a healer,” Wonder whispers, those words like glass in her mouth, making her bleed all over them, “leaving is the only way I can help you, I promise. I’ll come find you as soon as I can.”
But this no is still a no, and the girl just blinks up at Wonder and then turns her face away, those hollow eyes even duller than before. “Please, wait for me.” Then with one last nudge against that fever-burned cheek, the chestnut girl turns away and disappears back into the night.
It is only by luck, or fate, that she makes it to the border of Silver Cove. Between the raggedness of her breathing through broken ribs and broken lungs and a body that aches with the weight of a decision she still isn’t completely sure of, and the tears that wander freely down her cheeks, she has no idea where the group she had been following ended up. She emerges not too far from them awhile later, flinching at the suddenness of the three of them standing there, and immediately turning her face from them. They are close, but they are not close enough to see the way she trembles, or the dark paths her tears have made down the lines of her delicate cheeks, and she is glad for this one small gift.
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love