03-23-2021, 06:33 PM
This time she welcomes the touch that she is given. It still feels strange, she’s still tense, but she is able to enjoy the comfort it brings. The words bring comfort too, it is encouraging to know that the pain in her chest will go away. There’s no reason to believe they’re anything but the truth - she does not yet know that it is possible to lie.
She nods with the name she is given - the memory of those syllables extracting itself from the jumbled mess in her mind. “You’re… my…”
But how to describe the creature that ties them together through blood?
The word mother does not fully seem appropriate, but neither does queen which was how this mare thought of the one who laid her egg, who raised her and taught her how to hunt and hone the instincts she had known since birth. Who she had followed without question for the entirety of her life until she had ended up here.
So perhaps mother is best. The black mare frowns as she tries to sort out the words she needs and place them into an order that makes sense. Hearing Ryatah introduce herself has dislodged memories she hadn’t known where there - like the name of her mother. The name might have even been tied to that visit Ripley made in Hyaline - perhaps she would not have known at all if it had not been Ryatah’s voice that said it.
It is good to have something to focus on, though it does not ease the pain in her chest or the emotion she cannot name (sadness). When she speaks again, each of her words are spoken slowly and with such care. “You are Ripley’s mother. And she was mine.” The frown does not ease up as her thoughts fall into something of a more coherent mess than the jumbled one that she had stumbled out of the forest with. She knows this mare’s name, knows the name of her mother and a small collection of others, but she does not think she’s ever been called anything.
She’s always been one of the monsters, one of them, never an individual. Until now.
“I do not have... name.” She does not state this with any sadness in her voice but her confusion over her own identity - over what she's supposed to do now that she no longer belongs to the only family she's known - makes the ache in her chest deepen.
NOSTROMO
@[Ryatah]