I'd bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there
I'm too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book
What was Pangea to Breach?
Nothing, really, if she was to answer immediately. Just a dirt-filled canyon.
Everything, if she was to think on it longer.
It was the place that had played such a pivotal role in the formation of her mother. The place where Sochi truly became who she was—the woman who helped start, and then, end the plague. Playing her role amongst the masses. Sinking her teeth into the stallion. Tearing her heart out in sacrifice.
It was the place that had born Yadigar—breathing the dragon she loved forth from the sand.
It was the place of Breach’s first death. Where Ghaul had ripped her limb from limb.
And, now, it was a territory over which she had thin power, a governance in name more than anything.
So it is begrudgingly that she answers the dark god at first, as contempt of his power over her as her mother had first been, and then more willingly when she realizes that it is her responsibility as much as those who call Pangea home to help in its rebuilding. She nods at his command, teeth gritting, before she takes flight to land upon one of the crumbled canyons nearby. Before she shifts into the wolf.
What follows is bloody, and long, and exhausting.
Teeth find flesh and hair. Ripping and snarling and tearing. She shifts, at times, as though a more fragile leg would be easier, and then shifts back when she longs for the teeth and the fight.
When it is done, she is dizzy with the effort, with the pain. There is one more shift as she takes flight again, the descent back to Carnage more labored and far less graceful than the flight away from him had been. And when she drops down low, she releases the gift to land with a dull thud at his feet.
Her own leg.
Chewed through and severed.
She loses control of the shift and stumbles away from him, her front leg bloodied and ripped apart at the knee. Already, it has begun to regenerate, but it is slow going—her gifts far exhausted by the multiple shifts—and it takes everything within her to keep standing, to not fall to the side, to meet his gaze.
This, she thinks.
This is what symbolized Pangea to her.
so take all the wind from my lungs if you're out of air
just deliver me truth, deliver me you