Those great goddesses of peace.
It booms in her ears. Her head jerks up and her nostrils widen.
Smoke. Acrid and dark – so impossibly dark as it takes banana tree bark and large nests weaved by overhead societies of apes, who erupt in sharp and angry screaming and howling. A thousand vibrant wings hum and take air, cawing madly. Hundred of paws, like ghosts when they are one, come together in an unnatural many and thunder. The wild and panicked wail of elephant trunks split the air like nothing possibly can as they cry to the ones they love to flee and be safe.
“Longear!” she turns, panic gripping her chest, screaming over the din of an entire jungle in peril and motion.
And fire. The singed scent of bark and petals hit her nose. “Longear!” The rose grey spins around, nickering shrilly for her daughter, until from the underbrush her rabbit comes, breathing heavy and flattening in fear. “Run! Follow them, as you are! Now! Find the rest of the sisters, find the mare that is calling.” The girl is off, faster and more agile close to the ground in her other-body. She turns too. And she runs.
Vines whip across her body, slip down her neck and press deep into her throat her until she can duck and fight past them. Dark clouds gather overhead and thunder cracks the sky, and then it pours and she wonders if her mother crossed this same path as waters wetted the floor into thick and sucking mud.
When she reaches Prague, Longear is in her filly form, feverishly keeping watch for her mother. “Longear, here,” they reach for each other and the girl tucks herself close. “I will stay. I’m not a solider, Prague, but if anyone must leave young, leave them with me,” she turns to eye a scowling gather of jaguars, the mountainous pacing of elephants, already circling their own young. “Have a couple of them stay with me if you can, and I promise, nothing touches them. I will make sure you know they, and this place, is safe. If we are breached, then this whole pace has been lost.”
But it won’t be. It has survived water. It will survive fire.
charoli of the amazons & mother