I'd love you if I only knew how to // Any

[aletta]

Aletta’s dark eyes flick to the emptiness, to the uninhabited space beside her that seems to be occupied in Sabra’s mind. The gray mare continues to frown as one jet eye remains on her companion and her head turns, glancing again to the vacant air beside her. There is only the shadows casting from the trees, the sunbeams that break through the branches above them.

There is no child.
There is nothing.

When she turns to fully face the winged mare again, she is snarling. There is something untapped in that grin, something displaced and it makes Aletta all the more cautious in her rebuke of Sabra. Her ears pin and the pale woman flashes her own teeth, a warning to the pegasus that her proximity was close enough to the former Regent. A warning that if she came closer, her teeth would gladly serve as a reminder of that proximity.

Back to her grave, sings the blue mare and Aletta doesn’t bother to hide the deepening of her scowl. Children do not belong in graves before their mothers. It is against the natural order of things. It storms across her face and flashes across her eyes like lightning strikes - a reflection of the turbulent emotions raging internally.

Her neck snakes out, thinking for a moment that Sabra means to lunge forward when her neck arches. Surprisingly, the blue mare reaches down to clasp the wood that obtrudes from her chest with her teeth. She pulls and tugs at something that doesn’t move. Blood starts to run away from the violent action - down her breast, her long legs, to the green spring grass where it basins between the two of them. Aletta should move away and she knows her expression; shock at the disturbing display she has just witnessed and her immediate distrust of the Magic that has tainted the air.

Despite Sabra’s best efforts, the spear remains firmly lodged in place and the mare is (somehow) still alive. Aletta’s weight shifts to her haunch as she looks down to the fallen woman and she turns to leave. Nothing good will come from helping the blue mare. (And what can she offer anyway?)

Best to leave to the ground and her Gods; maybe they will hear her and spare her the misery she currently carries around. It is not her problem, she tells herself. Her children are grown. Her mares are gone. She owes nothing to this one. The dappled woman sighs and gives the first shake of her head until the dead eyes of Sabra trickle through the hollow defenses of Aletta. The vacancy there - the absence of anything - reminds her of fragile-eyed Brynn and all the ways she had failed to keep her friend together.

She looks at Sabra and thinks of Brynn.

Nothing about them is the same. Outwardly, Brynn had been flawless and whole. Outwardly, Sabra is bleeding and broken.

"Don’t apologize,” says the silver mare, aware that her hoarse voice sounds more severe than intended. They are all plagued by death, somehow. The immortals drag the dead around with them in their memories and for the mortals like her, they have long begun the process of dying. There is no sense in apologizing for being haunted; Aletta does not and she doesn’t expect it of Sabra, for all her rambles and poltergeist daughter.

Her reality is altered but the ground beneath her hooves is firm enough, the gray mare knows. "Can you stand?” Aletta asks, deciding that getting @[Sabra] to rise seems like the safest place to start.