While she stands with the other girl, panting, she simmers.
Hopelessness does not fill her (it should, she knows that another seal will be broken, despite their best efforts to prevent it). Instead, a coiling snake of rage tightens around her heart. It squeezes her constrictor-tight and leaves her gasping for air. All the while, though, she burns.
She has always burned.
The heat comes easily, readily to her limbs and tongue. Her nerves are like fuses, too short and quickly lit. It fuels her, this ever-glowing anger that makes a home in all her vessels and chambers. She’s never been short of her father’s fire, but sense says it’s not what she needs to call upon. Not now.
What she needs is her mother’s cool, steady iron.
Because Conquest comes at them again, his yellow eyes tracking and predatory. Because she sees that they have nowhere else to go, and even if they could somehow outrun the behemoth, they wouldn’t - the seal has to be protected at all costs. Because while Conquest charges them and the lamb lingers out of sight (but still here, they all know it), she needs to be thinking clearly instead of rushing headfirst into a battle she can’t win alone.
Fortunately, Kreios appears. She watches as he turns his back on them, invites the violence upon himself in order to protect her and Weaver. It negates her heat more than any other act so far. For the first time since the bells began chiming in her head, she thinks maybe everything will be okay. Even as she watches the drops of blood fall from the spotted stallion’s shoulder (splattering onto the colorless ground in saccharine, syrupy drops), she thinks maybe this plan will work. How can the lamb find a seal that’s already been absorbed into them?
But even as Titanya moves closer to do just that, appreciating but leaving Kreios to his selfless fate, she hesitates. If only a fragment of the seal causes such a rush of magic and power (and weight and responsibility) within her, what will an entire seal do? Should she let the other painted girl, already ahead of her and closer to the ancient rune-stone, absorb the whole of it just in case? Are they even physically capable of it?
The third blast rattles her before they can act further.
The world flickers in the instant just after the seal explodes (or at the same time, she can’t tell and doesn’t think it really matters, anyhow). The green of home beckons beyond this plane. She can almost smell the evergreens of the Dale, can almost feel the bristle of the needles tickling her skin. Unlike before, though, the green persists even as purgatory comes back into focus. The young mare narrows her eyes, sure she is imaging things now on top of everything else, and then understands why.
This time, their enemy is different. He moves into the woods almost immediately, but his radioactive-green glow persists. His name, too, lingers in the deadened air long after he moves off. Famine. Titanya has no point of reference for the word. Conquest and War, sure; plenty of kingdoms used one to get the other. But Famine? She’s only grown up on the sweet grasses of the in-between places. She’s known the deepest slumber of a belly fat with food. She’s gorged on the ice-clear waters of a mountain spring until she thought she might burst or drown or both. The idea of starvation is not as easy to swallow as the sting of the sword.
Trying on her mother’s steel, she does acknowledge these thoughts, but only barely. She’s far more interested in the way Conquest and War respond to the emergence of their comrade. His flight from whatever hellish pit he’d been hiding in into the forest stirs them in a way they hadn’t been until now. Now, they band together, a singular purpose guiding their strides. The mutated beasts close behind them, some limping and some completely whole and able. She’s glad to see that some no longer move at all.
It’s obvious what they must do, if only because they have done it twice already. She’s still glad when Weaver articulates the plan out loud. Even in her youth, Titanya understands the importance of comradery among soldiers. And in their little group of relative strangers, they can use all the trust-building they can get. Get the seal. Surround Famine. Don’t let him escape and reign eternal hellfire down upon Beqanna. Check and done. Easy enough? She nods her head imperceptibly and sets her jaw, providing one small addendum: “and do as much damage to the monsters as you can along the way.”
The sabino leaves Weaver and Kreios to plot out their own, different courses to the same endpoint. There is no sense in them following each other, because the fragments are likely scattered around the clearing as they’d been before. As much as it pains her to split up from her comrades, she must in order to help reunite all of the pieces of the seal. She’s much slower, this go-round. Her chest is mostly restored to its usual size, but so tender that she is conscious of each breath. Her left hindleg still throbs madly, the muscle spasming where War kicked it. Worst of all is where his teeth gnashed into the top of her hindquarters. She can feel the open, ugly wound of torn flesh. And while the blood has stopped running in rivets down her sides, it is far from healed. She wonders if she will ever be completely healed after this, even if her body is. She wonders if she would want to be.
She still wonders if she will live long enough to care either way.
A beast creeps up next to her while she is busy searching the ground. Its approach is nearly silent but an odd sound draws her attention to it just before it can attack. And when the black and white horse turns, she’s not sure what she’s seeing. The monster looks like a small bird at first, low to the ground and unremarkable. But in the next instant, it snaps its tail feathers into an arcing, raised display far larger than she could have imagined. Not that she could ever imagine an animal like this, real or mutated. She doesn’t know that the peacock part of it is real. All she knows is that the glinting line of razor-sharp feathers are very close, too close, in fact.
She’s distracted by it, but the bird-beast doesn’t attack with its tail. It opens its beak and a miniature harpoon-like tongue shoots out and impales her just below her left shoulder. Titanya inhales sharply at the pain and spins to her left to try and dislodge the creature. It’s stuck fast though, and she is disturbed further when she sees that it is drawing ever-closer, pulling itself in with its disgustingly long tongue. It hurts like almighty hell, but she raises herself into a rear, ignoring the flash of pain from her wound courtesy of War’s mighty jaws. The tension of the peacock’s tongue finally breaks but the hole it leaves when it rends away is deep and bleeds freely. Untethered from the creature once more, Titanya considers her options. And even if she should immediately leave and find her piece of the seal, this last, painful indignity cannot go unpunished. The young mare rears up again and strikes out at the rattled bird, aiming for its (relatively) soft-looking head. If she feels it burst like an overripe apple beneath her feet, she considers it worth the quick delay in her search.
The world flashes again.
Green meets grey in a dizzying, nauseating melt. She can feel the remnants of Conquest’s fever in the corners of her mind and she stokes the fire, giving herself to the heat once more. Just have to hold on a while longer, she tells herself, just have to stop the world from ending. The brief addition of color into their sad, still realm directs her to the only remaining grey object – the fragment. It shines in the warm light of Beqanna, a beacon and a warning of their potential failure all at once.
Titanya steps on it with her left foreleg, feeling the sweet relief of its healing working on her newest wound. Three seals of four. Three promises to play her part, to stop the apocalypse here and now rather than there and soon. There where her family waits unknowingly, where the rest of the sunrise lands wait in ignorance. And soon. Too soon to find her lost brother before Famine takes him, before War takes him to battle in the uniform of the doomed. Three seals of four. Just one to go? It is too much to hope for, too naive to believe they’ve been so successful already. She presses on.
The forest is like another dark monster.
It’s okay though, because she thinks she has enough fire left to light her way. The going is painfully slow, even still. She curses each limb that inhibits her ease of movement, hates the way the shadows make her anticipate a minion appearing at any moment. They don’t, however. Whatever loyalty kept them tied to War and Conquest in the clearing seems to have waned or disappeared altogether now. Even if it’s only a temporary break, she’ll take it. Instead of the monsters, she battles a new enemy as she follows the nuclear-green glow of Famine. An exhaustion that sinks down past the tips of her toes and into the spongy forest floor overcomes her. She knows she’s been through a lot (the understatement of the year; she feels like she could sleep for centuries and want a longer slumber upon waking), but this is no easy tired. This is not the kind of tired that can be tackled with a quick wink of sleep or a bite of lush, spring grass.
Speaking of food, when did she become so achingly hungry? Since when did her stomach feel like it was carved out by the rough work of a sadistic woodcutter? Titanya takes a moment to glance at her sides, making sure they haven’t caved in without her noticing. Surely she’d notice, wouldn’t she? When she sees that her sides aren’t dented with her newfound, voracious hunger, she continues on, creeping dangerously close to the third behemoth. While she slow-walks, she can’t help but eye the forest around her with a new mutation of her own: her stomach-eyes. Everything becomes a potential meal; she barely stops herself in time from eating a moss-covered rock perched atop a larger boulder. So this is what Terran feels all the time, she thinks, passing a rotting log and sampling one crumbling edge of bark.
When she emerges into the small forest clearing, angry but also too tired and too hungry, she sees that she is not alone. Two females (one that had given herself completely over to Conquest and one that she hadn’t seen at all – by the girl’s design - since before the lamb appeared to them) wait alongside Weaver. Titanya nods weakly at the black and white filly but does not go to stand next to her. Famine is exactly where they want him (for now, although she wonders how easily he could brush by them if he wanted in their current states). His apocalyptic, emerald gaze lands on her and she sways in place. She thinks she will fall and break open into a pile of wasted, hungry flesh and dusty bones. But another flash tears his eyes away from her. She follows his eyes to another green, the green of Beqanna bleeding through.
“No,” is all she manages to say in protest. “No,” she says again, and the corners of his lips seem to raise in a knowing smile. But the grey comes back once more. For now, he can’t escape. For now, they have to wait for the others to find them. Even as broken and tired and starving and bleeding as they are, this isn’t over. There is still work to be done.
Titanya