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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


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    [open quest]  come along to the river; round 2
    #11
    i will be brutal
    He opens his eyes and the river runs its course before him. Those tired green eyes watch Nikkai as she observes them each before she is pulled under. When she surfaces, she is coughing and sputtering in two. Curiously, he tilts his head and observes with slightly narrowed eyes. This place is strange in a way that he despises but he makes quick note of the way some magic disrupts everything here. He imagines he must be cunning to overcome this trial if he is to return to the living and protect his brood from whatever forces may be.

    But then Nikkai is speaking and his ears swivel forward to catch her voice clearly. His person? There is only Dillan, he thinks as he turns his head to search across to the opposite river bank. His death was violent and bitter, however, and only one who suffered a peaceful death could await him on the other side. He does not know this, however, and he half expects to see one of his children he cut down waiting for him on the other side.

    His breath catches in his throat when he sees her, standing there with a smile woven from starshine and summer rains. Of course a death for her would be a peaceful one. Darling never knew how to be angry a day in her life, never raised a hand in the name of violence or bloodshed. His firstborn by Dillan was his antithesis and he has always loved her for it. But why is she here? How could two of his children be in the land of the dead already? These thoughts summon a deep rooted ache within him and he bites down sharply on the edge of his tongue to keep from spiraling into more grim questions such as these. Darling needs him to take her home, and he cannot fail her.

    He takes in his surroundings for a moment and chews the inside of his lip as he thinks. The river is too swift to simply wade and he has no wings to simply fly over it. He will simply have to gamble, then, he decides.

    Larva takes a trembling breath and steps forward, into the river where smoothed rocks jut out in defiance of the current. “I’m coming, Darling!” he calls above the noise. “Don’t move from there!” Larva isn’t entirely certain this will work but he is desperate to reach her, to hug her close and keep her safe. He has done so much wrong in his life but he would spend the rest of eternity doing right by her. It feels like his third death when his head slips under the water, pushed over by the steady rush of the river, but he reminds himself that it will all be worth it. The world goes black for a flickering moment before he opens his eyes again. Like Nikkai, the river has made a perfect copy of him, but his other half remains caught on the river rocks. Quickly, the Larva pressed against the rocks sinks his teeth into the other’s mane and locks their legs together.

    He repeats this again, letting the river tear him under near the massive rocks, logs, and debris caught along the river’s edge. Each time, Death creates another curious copy of him and leaves his former self behind. His lungs burn and his joints ache but he continues in this way as his many bodies begin to build a chain, anchored to one another in a tangle of legs and teeth roughly gripping flesh. Each version of Larva struggles against the current but all their sage green eyes remain trained on Darling’s worried face as she paces along the river’s edge.

    He has no idea if the chain will break or if they can even fight the current enough for one of them to reach the other side. And still, he floods his lungs with water and lets each copy sink its teeth into his mane. He would die a hundred deaths and live a thousand different lives to keep his Darling safe.
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    #12

    they're gonna eat me alive.

    Nadya had been forgotten in life.
    So she had forsaken those she loved in death.

    At least, that’s what she’d told herself. Her desire to be included had driven her to worlds unknown. It had destroyed her. It had doomed her.  But the longing still flickered. Even now.

    Even in death.

    The sound of rushing water roars in her ears.  Death had always been quiet - but not this, not now.  Her amber eyes fluttered open as she tried to comprehend where she was and what was happening.

    Nadya stands with those who hadn’t fallen in battle. She hadn’t succumbed to broken bones, but rather a broken spirit.  Once her will had been broken, her body slowly slipped away.  The pale blue mare can hear the water as it rushes over the edge. Her amber gaze is drawn to where the water falls away - crashing against hidden rocks below.

    It takes her a moment to notice the others. To realize that one mare stands on both sides of the expanse of rushing water.  Had she brought her here? Idly, she turns to stare back over the edge of the waterfall - it’s alluring in a way she cannot explain. Would it hurt, if she tumbled off the edge?  Pain had not been able to reach her in death.  But now? She wasn’t so sure.

    She could feel the angry droplets of water stinging her skin, and as she let out a little sigh and turned - something on the other side of the river caught her eye.  Her heart lurched in her chest. She staggered forward a single step, her body responding automatically. 

    ”Father,” she breathed, the exasperation evident even though her voice was weak. She blinked in disbelief. Because there stood Trashlip - not has he had been in her lifetime, but as he had been in her dreams.  He was not a creature born of death and decay as she had known him.  He stood firmly - flesh and blood - no aura of death surrounded him. She felt as if his bright yellow eyes could see straight through to her soul.

    It was in this moment that Nadya realized she hadn’t forsaken her family.  Not really. Not completely.  She had simply buried the want (the need) to be a part of the family she’d been so isolated from. Even death had not extinguished her desire for family.
    She took a single step into the river and recoiled when she could feel the strength of the current. She could feel the water pulling the silt and stones towards the edge.  She knew it would take nothing for her to be swept away.  One more step and she’d be pulled under. 

    But another glance to her father was all the motivation she needed. “Father, I’m coming!” she managed, louder this time. And in response, she could hear his voice in her mind. “Come, daughter,” she could hear clear as day, the voice from her memories. The navy stallion stepped closer to the water, watching and waiting to see what she would do next.

    Nadya closed her eyes, drawing all of her most treasured memories to provide her with the will to do what must be done. When she opened her eyes, she felt the calm settle into her bones. After all, she wasn’t afraid of death. She had welcomed death when it had come for her. What did she have to fear now?

    As she drew in a deep breath - she could swear she smelled the Chamber. The sharp smell of evergreens and the thick mist that wove between them.  And as she looked back towards her father - that mist began to materialize before her.  A path, of sorts, leading her to her father.

    The Chamber was leading her home.

    So with a tentative step, she placed a single hoof upon the fog that hovered above the river.  The mist seemed to give under her weight, but kept her hoof above the rushing water.  So she repeated the process.

    A second step.  And a third.
    Until all of her hooves were settled onto a seeming bridge of mist. 

    She proceeded slowly - her gaze jumping from her father to the mist below.  But her gaze didn’t drift to the waterfall any longer.  Nor did she focus on the water and debris rushing below.  A few times she struggled, a hoof slipping from the makeshift bridge and into the water below. 

    It took more concentration than she thought she possessed.  She was soaked by the time she made it across the center - not just in mist and spray but in sweat as well.  Her muscles screamed at her - having been dormant for so long.  But soon she drew near to the other bank - to her father. 

    For just a moment, her concentration wavered, and with it her balance. She struggled to find purchase on the misty path, which seemed to be rapidly disintegrating under her feet. Her eyes widened as she considered what to do.  Did she try to leap the rest of the way?  Did she try to run?

    She looked up at her father - her eyes pleading.

    “Father,” she breathed, again, paralyzed with indecision. The yellow-eyed stallion simply nodded.

    And so she leapt...

    n a d y a

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    #13
    take my soul & make it undone
    be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
    She wasn’t quite sure what she expected on the other side.
    She’s positive it wasn’t this.

    The sound of the water is the first to meet her ears and it sinks a sharp instinctual knife of fear into her belly. While this water is rushing from an angry river, it isn’t too far off from the hungry flood of ocean water she’d heard in the final moments while she faded away. As Wishbone opens her eyes and scans the shoreline, she finds herself aware of the absence of her beating heart (a heart that would normally be thumping in response to the fear that just swept her away for a moment). So, she is still dead. The roughened faces of strangers are clumped around her and, in the far distance, the hazy shapes of other strangers too. These must be other Dead; their expressions of mingled confusion and expectation are mirrored in her own amber eyes.

    Frustration boils along empty vessels.
    Wishbone would kill to be alive right now.

    The mahogany hadn’t noticed the shape of another in the water until her form splits in two. The mare’s coloring blends easily with the quick currents of the water, shades of gray and deep blue. Beneath the surface, Wishbone notices flickering patterns of silver and pale pink — perhaps fish or an undead monster ready to swallow them whole. The world of the Dead is strange and twisted. Wishbone finds herself unsurprised at most things at this point.

    “If you can get across the river to your person, you can both go home. To life.”
    Her person?
    “It’s just like summiting Tephra, daughter.”

    His voice shouldn’t carry this far, across the angry river and roar of the waterfall. Yet her father’s voice awakens nostalgia Wishbone wasn’t aware existed. Memories pass through her mind so quickly she feels nauseous and lightheaded — climbing the volcano’s rocky face, covered in scratches with her thin baby-mane clinging to her sweaty neck; the smell of feather and wind against the smokiness of lava and freshness of tropics; a thousand stars illuminating the angles of his cheeks as he tips his face up toward the night sky.

    How had Warrick, her brave and confident father, died and she not known it? Had it been in the days of her traveling? Or in the months of her own death? Why had she not seen him among the Dead, weaving between gray shapes and cloudy faces? None of it matters anymore. Wishbone was going to bring both herself and Warrick back to the land of the Living. “I’m going to save us, Dad.” She hadn’t used that word in so long. So long, in fact, that a slender flame of light warms a corner of her iron-clad soul.

    She doesn’t spring into the heavy currents like some of the other war-torn souls along her shore. Wishbone knows the sensation of water bubbling in the lungs and struggling for air that no longer exists. She doesn’t plan on reliving those memories. After watching with a calculated expression for a moment, the mahogany mare turns away from the rest and begins walking upstream. She hopes that something else will present a way to get across. They would have been all been placed in a place with disparities in order to make the crossing a challenge. If she traveled in an unsuspecting direction, perhaps a resource would reveal itself.

    It starts with a thickening of the air. It feels more difficult to breathe and Wishbone’s lungs heave with the same effort as if she were at the summit of the volcano, though that air had been thin and this air is the opposite. She continues to walk with caution, wondering if this world of the Dead has limits that she is beginning to stray out of. Just as she considers turning back, the world becomes cloudy in her vision. The haze takes a shape as the mahogany comes to a halt among the darkening fog. It gathers as though a hand manipulates it, strands tossing and turning in midair until the form of a tigress appears.

    “You wish to cross?” The fog-tigress’s voice is grating and clicking, like a hundred voices all speaking at once. Wishbone intends to answer, but she doesn’t have a chance before the fog speaks again. “Trust my shape to cross the river.” The fog morphs again, an invisible hand forming shapes out of shapelessness. It becomes a hovering mass of waves, shifting and rolling like the tides that lap upon Ischia’s shore (tides she has drowned in). It’s a peculiar sight — deep blue river angrily rushing below while thick gray waves swoon and fade above.

    Wishbone wavers for a moment, but the sight of Warrick on the other side of the river dampens nausea accompanying the thought of being among water again. When she steps into the fog-waves, she finds herself floating. At first, the fog remains in place, hovering above the river. Should she swim? Wishbone moves her legs in the rhythmic motion of swimming — a skill that Tephra and Nerine taught her well — and the waves propel her forward.

    “Stay very still.” The fog is a stern hiss in her ear as they reach the halfway point of the river’s width. “I am here, daughter,” Warrick calls from the other side. She can see him through the fog-waves, the edges of his body shifting and fading like a fever dream. A platform of the fog keeps her away from the harm of the river while the rest morphs into the familiar face of Tephra’s volcano. “Ascend me to reach the end.”

    She is wordless in her determination. By the time Wishbone reaches the pinnacle of the mountain face, she is soaked in sweat and panting hard. Yet the descent is before her, looming and steep. Warrick’s shape is more visible now and it taunts her closer. She can almost smell him now and the scent is crisp from autumn air and warm from his comfort. Her sinewy muscles are exhausted from the climb and it is when she is halfway down the face of the volcano that her legs give out beneath her.

    “Oh, shit.” It’s the only thing she’s said so far since seeing her father. Wishbone fears it’s the last thing she might say (and this adventure feels so tantalizingly real that she forgets she is dead). Her feet can’t catch on the fog as she slides on the slippery surface. The river rears up toward her with a mouth so full of hunger she can almost hear the screams of those lost from its teeth before her. At the last moment, as the mist disappears beneath her feet, Wishbone pushes off with as big a jump as she can muster. All she can hope is that she will land on dry ground.
    credit to eliza of adoxography.
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    #14
    All she had ever wanted was her freedom.

    And after she had had that, she had only wanted rest. Unlike some, the little red mare had achieved both of those things, both in her life and her death, but now, now something else is taking shape. This is an existence that she had not prepared herself for. The Afterlife is ever expanding and, she suspects, is governed by very different rules than those of the world she left behind. This is how she closes her eyes on a bright, snowy, landscape, and opens them again here at the side of a rampant river roaring and crashing over the precipice. Her feet carry her to the edge of the water and pause there, the current licking at the hard shell of her hooves, and Red Mare peers out. In the center stands a grulla mare she does not know, the mare splits  apart from herself appearing on either side of the impossible distance.

    If you reach the other side, if you meet your other half, you may both go home. To Life.

    "But I don't want that..." her voice is small against the rush of water. Red Mare does not want to return to Life. It's unnatural and unnecessary, there is nothing left there for her to do. Besides, if the whispers are true, the gates are already off their hinges and she could cross them any time she wanted. There's no need to bother with this nonsense just to go live again.

    Dark brown eyes find themselves flicking upward, seeking out the face that waits for her on the other side. Of course... It could never have been anyone else, not for the little sorrel that left Beqanna to discover the world beyond. Brown eyes meet brown eyes, red tails flicking softly in unison. The red face she recognizes only from its reflection shining back at her in still water.

    It's herself, a wry smile on her lips and one ear fallen back like an eyebrow cocked, questioning.

    She wonders if that Red Mare feels the same way, in her heart, knows that she had never gone looking for anyone harder than she sought herself - if she, too, prefers death. There's a whole world here, why go back to the one we already explored? For a moment, she thinks she sees the other chestnut nod, but she can't be sure. A deep breath in, then out. Imagination. It's something that she has sometimes lacked, it was a simple life that she wanted, a simple life that she had. Death, it seems, will not be so simple, it will not be darkness and rest, it is endless and stretches across many realms. Another breath, her eyes shut.

    Nobody could cross that river.
    You have no body.
    A voice in her mind and she almost gasps aloud at it. What?
    You have no body. You don't bruise, you don't break, and you certainly don't drown.

    Her eyes fly open and meet the gaze of that Red Mare across the water. She is nothing. Her body is lost to time and what is she? A remnant of thought and memory. She thinks she stands before what she thinks is a river. But it isn't, and she isn't. Perhaps the mouse-dun mare can't cross the river without help or magic, but she is flesh and blood. The chestnut has no such limitations.

    "I am nothing, and nothing can cross the river."

    Grey lips press into a firm line and Red Mare steps forward resolutely.



    Red Mare
    ...
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    #15
    To be a spirit is a rather inexplicable feeling unless you’ve been a spirit before. Faulkor still feels. He still blinks as if he has eyes and breathes as if he has lungs. He can still hear the rush of the river even though his physical ears are rotting in a cave somewhere in the land of the living. Somehow, despite the separation of his body and his spirit, he still is.

    He lands along the wet bank of a raging river - broken from the obscurity of his dreaming and placed here. There are others on his side of the shore. He did not know them in life. He does not know them now. He does not know that they had died violent deaths like himself, and he doesn’t care.

    The river is wide and swift. His eyes track the current until the water plummets into oblivion. He wonders what it would feel like to let the river take him. He blinks - more aware now than he has been since death had taken him, though the edges of his vision are still foggy and dream-like. There is a mare in the middle of the river, standing perfectly still despite the power of the current. Strange, yes, but perhaps not the strangest dream he has dreamed. That is, until the stone gray mare is suddenly engulfed by the white water and reemerges as two - divided yet somehow the same.

    Now transfixed on the scene before him, he watches as the two figures turn away from the river, each in a different direction. But, he does not watch the figure that approaches his side of the shore. Rather his eyes follow the other figure to a scene that nearly mirrors the bank he stands on. There, amidst the mud, mire, and strange faces he finds a familiar white figure. Despite the gaping width of the river that separates them, Faulkor feels as if he could reach out and touch her.

    For a moment he wonders if he has fallen again into those dreams that have kept him here in death’s tender grasp. Perhaps it is a dream, but this one is different. This one feels more real.

    “Sider.” he whispers against the roar of the river.

    Nikkai’s voice pulls his attention to her, but he is reluctant to lose sight of the white apparition that stands on the far bank, and so he does not dare spare more than a glance or two at the grulla mare.

    “If you can get across the river to your person, you can both go home. To life.” She says, and before her voice has died away, Faulkor charges into the river.

    He had killed her. Yet, his pale spectre had not died violently. He had killed her, but he didn’t have to touch her to do it. He had killed her, but she shouldn’t have died for him. Her heart shouldn’t have been his, but he broke it anyways. He had killed her, and all he had to do was leave.

    The river swallows him whole. The current forces its way into his chest and he feels as if his lungs will burst from the pressure. Perhaps they would if he wasn’t already dead. He succumbs to the will of the water - allowing it to take him further and further down.

    He sees things down there along the river bottom. Tangled in the weeds he sees the faces of their children. He hears their beating of the hearts. He feels the love and the hate that had simultaneously kept them together and torn them apart in the life they lived so long ago. He feels Sider’s pain at his betrayal as if it were his own. He feels her heartbreak flooding through him - pinning him against the rocks below. Everything that kept them apart in life - their pride, their unwillingness to forgive, their inability to forget - rages against him now.

    Trapped by the current, Faulkor has no choice but to watch as the water passes over him, carrying memories of his life through his vision. He sees himself disappearing into the depths of his cavernous home -  never to be seen again by the ones he left behind.

    “Forgive me, Sider.” he chokes.

    He almost hopes to drown there, but he cannot. He almost wants the raging water to crush him into dust (for his spirit to nurture the river’s plants like his physical body feeds the cave creatures where he left it), but it does not.

    Then, she comes. She is a specter of white against the darkness of the river. Her mane and tail flow lazily despite the current. She is the embodiment of peace - the kind of peace that comes with letting go - the kind of peace that comes with forgiveness.

    “Forgive me, my love.” he says, and even though they are underwater his voice is perfectly audible.

    She takes him gently by the nape of his neck and lifts him up. Together they rise to the surface somewhere in the midst of the river, but perfectly at peace. At least for the moment death allows them.
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    #16
    She can’t open her eyes. Won’t. Not yet.
     
    At first, all that she can hear is her breath. Her lungs sit heavy in her chest, water-logged yet still bubbling with every inhale, exhale. Her body aches with the numb of her watery grave and she is not sure if the violent tremblling that overtakes her is from the cold that was her death or the uncertainty she now faces. She grinds her teeth together, a physical attempt to muster the audacious, brazen creature that she once was, though she still holds her eyes tightly closed, nostrils flaring wide with every gurgling inhale.
     
    She can feel him, right away. Tatter. He is not the manifestation of her pain-soaked deaths, not the fevered imaginings of a soul condemned. He is here. She had spent the first years searching the perpetual scenes of her suicide for some hint of his presence, hoping that she had not followed him across the veil in vain. Day after day, she woke, she walked, she died. Alone. Always alone. Now, though, now she finds his presence like the dandelions find the sun, her longing emanating from her clammy skin as if it were a tangible thing for him to reach out and grasp.
     
    After Tatter, she hears the river. She takes a deep breath (though it’s not enough; there’s never enough air in death) and slowly opens her eyes. His presence is a powerful force - it beckons her gaze, but she resists it with every bit of defiance she can muster. Still shivering, instead she looks to her left and then to her right. The old and broken are all around her – she was never a warrior, and though she had taken her own life, it had not been violent demise …
     
    The middle water roils with otherwordly danger and her grey eyes track the path of a tree branch as it is overcome by the riot and swept downstream. Her attention snags on the grulla mare just before she’s drug beneath the surface. The air is thick with longing as the dead on both sides have realized that the shore opposing them holds their dearest. The water’s surface stirs and produces two strange mares, carbon copies of one another. An ear swivels forward, the other joining it a moment before she draws them back and down, pinning then tightly to her neck.
     
    Did she want to live again? She had lived again once, and three lives were wasted.
     
    The strain of ignoring him, acting as if he were not the irresistible center of her world, is draining. Finally, agonizingly, she meets his burning gaze. Suddenly, somehow, she is standing knee deep in the river, though her eyes have not left his form now that it has found him. Something heavy bumps at her legs and at first she ignores it. As wildly handsome as their father, Tatter smiles at her, his mother’s cunning caught up in the corners of his eyes. He is just as he was, before they tore one another’s worlds apart, before they had tried to patch together what once was and could never be again.
     
    The heavy thing bumps her again and she looks down. Perhaps it is the already surreal reality she finds herself in, or a numbing effect that decades of her personal hell has had on her, but she does not gasp in abject horror when the bloated corpse of one of their daughters stares unseeing up at her. She reaches down, brushing her muzzle gently across the mare’s eyelid, closing Lyanna’s eyes. At that same moment, another heavy thing bumps into her legs and before she even looks, Frostreaver knows it is Eliska. Precious Eliska, who had given up her life so that Frost might live … only for her mother to drown their lives beneath the gray waters of the Beach. A single tear tracks down the side of her face as she tucks her chin over her - their - daughter’s ear and whispers her aching apology. It had not been life without him.
     
    The other dead stir around her, all of them clamoring to claim the prize that the grulla mare has promised. Frostreaver basks in their presence, whispering to Tatter so far across the river she knows he cannot hear her but still, she revels. A blink, another … and they are now stirring at her feet, beyond that of the push and tug of the current. Now she steps back, watching as her daughters give her equally winsome smiles and murmur their acceptances of her apologies. They roll off their sides and sink into the water up to their necks, sides pressed close together, and offer her their banks. She does not hesitate to step out onto them, finding purchase in the hollows of their backs and meat of their rumps. In life, her perch would be precarious, at best. In death … the well-matched mares surge forward, surging across and down the current, milk-white eyes trained on their father’s form.
     
     
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    #17
    cRess
    like a house on fire we're up in flames; i'd burn here if that's what it takes

    A loud roaring stirs her to consciousness, and Cress sits up with a groan. Blinking the heavy film of Death from her chocolate eyes, she climbs to her hooves, unnerved by the lack of fire in her lungs. Did dying strip her of all of her mortal abilities?

    As her eyes adjust, she sees that she is on the bank of a great river, with a grulla mare standing midway between the banks. There are other horses scattered along both sides of the churning waters, but Cress can only see the woman who is standing against a current that should be pulling her towards the waterfall – the roaring, she realizes – that envelops the seeming edge of the world. Glancing down to the water, she watches as twig and trunk alike are pulled to the edge, by a current that seems impossibly strong. Are they meant to ford this? With a gulp she looks for the woman again, but she has vanished.

    Instead there are identical copies of her standing upon both banks, watching the confused groups of horses who have gathered here. She speaks, and her words are senseless to Cress – her person? Cress has been alone for so long that she has zero sense of a so-called “person.” Even if there is someone on the other side for her, the waters are impossible to cross – the tide will carry them over the edge of the Afterlife, tumbling downwards to an inevitable destruction... surely that’s not what the grulla woman wants of them. Unless that is what she wants of them...

    Oh.

    It hits her like a thunderclap and she almost laughs as the tension in her shoulders releases – they’re already dead.

    Several of them – a lot, actually – have already begun their crossings, and Cress gulps as her premonitions come true. A few of them are swept under the swirling waters and the golden dragoness forces herself to look away; she doesn’t want to see their fates. Pacing the bank restlessly, she wonders who has been pulled into death to be her “person.” Certainly not Flamevein or Ledger; as much as she adores those two men, she is not sure that they could convince her to fight for life after suicide. Leliana, her dearest friend? Probably not; the magician is too strong to possibly be dead. It definitely isn’t her mother or her half-sister, either – she despises the two. So, who could it be?

    Then, suddenly – desperately: “Momma?”

    No. Her eyes snap towards the opposite shore and fall upon her youngest (and frailest) child, Ravine. A panicked cry rips from her throat and she splashes into the swiftly moving shallows, gasping as she is nearly ripped off of her hooves. How – why? He had been safe in Loess with Oxy when she departed – he can’t possibly be dead. The grulla’s words echo in her head – you can both go home – and she knows that she has to at least try, for Ravine’s sake. Cress may not want to be alive any longer, but her son is barely three; he hasn’t even yet started to live.

    “You stay right where you are!” she screeches, hoping t hat her words carry across to the red colt. “I’ll be there to get you before you know it!”

    Without further ado, she plunges forward until all four hooves are in the ripping current, and she braces herself as hard as she possibly can. The water threatens to overwhelm her already – and she is barely in to her ankles! – but she plants her hooves and refuses to let it, sheer determination outweighing everything else in her mind. She has to save her son. Slowly, she moves one hoof forward, and then the next. The water shouldn’t grow too deep, she imagines; she recalls that the grulla mare had only been submerged to her knees at the midway point. If she can make it there, the rest should be easy... right?

    The thought crosses her mind too soon – a sudden weight, perhaps a tree or a tumbling boulder, crashes into her hindquarters and she loses her balance, stumbling headfirst into the water as her limbs flail for purchase. Instinctively, she breathes in a lungful of water as the current sweeps her down the shoreline, only to realize that breathing in water doesn’t hurt the way that it is supposed to. She’s dead, after all! The panic begins to fade and she struggles to get her hooves under her, scrambling in the now murky river. With some effort she finds her hooves again and pulls herself out of the water, gasping as she rises and can see again.

    Gaining her bearings, she glances around, realizing almost too late that the current has swept her within feet of the waterfall, and Ravine is nowhere to be seen. Swallowing hard, she looks upstream and sees a tree trunk bouncing in the current, bearing down on her and leaving her no means to escape – unless the only way to escape is over the falls. A sob tears from her throat as she screams, praying for someone to answer.

    “Save my son!” she sobs above the roaring of the river, waiting for the moment that everything fades to black. “Please, please, save him.”
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