hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Isle had slipped from the Tundra one morning as dawn painted the kingdom in subtle shades of pink and gold. There was restlessness in her bones and wander in her heart as she disappeared through the narrow gate with a full, swaying belly and her family on her mind. It had been awhile since she had last seen mother so it was to the trees of the forests buried at the bottom of the mountain just outside the Chamber that she went. There was anxiety knit into the restlessness she felt, worry woven with the joy at the idea of being a mother, of having a family of her own. It wasn’t something she ever thought she would have or deserve, and therefore it was nothing she had ever spoken of with Oksana. Now there were so many questions fluttering like bird-wings in her belly, concerns that although Offspring did his best to appease, it just wasn’t the same as talking to a mother.
So while Offspring was preoccupied with organizing his kingdom and solidifying alliances, she slipped away for a few days. She doubted very much that he would have let her leave the safety of the enormous ice walls this close to birth. He was stoic, yes, but over-protective of her and she loved him for it. It was strange to feel so important to someone, stranger still to be important to someone like him. So she left quietly, feeling slightly guilty in the event that he might notice her absence and worry, and after a slow day of travel spent the next day curled like a child again inside the warmth of her mother’s wings. On the return trip back to the Tundra the following day it was with a much lighter heart, and even some of the anxiety had been soothed in her belly. There was something contagious about the love with which Oksana had spoken about each of her children, something that only deepened the longing in Isle’s swaying belly.
But as she returned home she found herself remembering Thaniel and Maribel and how Offspring loved them, remembering the way Oksana glowed with all the love she had for her children, and found that her feet had chosen a different route back. It was one that carried her past the place where mothers and fathers chose to abandon the young as though leaving them behind would erase the burden altogether. Would erase a memory better forgotten, a life better unlived. She goes far enough in to find an open clearing, and relief swells in her chest because it is empty. There is no one here. But as she turns to go, there is a new smell tangled in the breeze that sweeps idly, lazily past her. It is a smell she doesn’t recognize- birth, but it is mixed with the scent of fur and dust, an entirely equine scent. Her delicate face turns urgently in the direction from which the breeze had come, but the wind is gone and with it that strange, faint smell. She can see nothing in the grass, no crumpled body which is both relieving and disconcerting because she can smell him stale in her nose.
The noise that comes from her is strange and guttural, a low urgent sound that belies the hormonal-fed distress bubbling in her swollen belly. It isn’t until she drifts closer to the shadows cast at the edge of the tree-line, her attention drawn there when a rather perturbed squirrel scurried away from a small mound at the base of the foliage to claim another, emptier tree that she finally notices him. Isle swept forward cautiously, slowly, slowly as she only ever was these days with the child in her swollen belly ready to arrive any day now. She exhaled loudly, her breath a huff of warm air as she drew gentle lips across the deep chocolate color of his delicate skin. His tiny rib cage rose and fell beneath her whiskered mouth and only then did the distress blossoming like a bloodstain in her chest retreat. Again she touches him, gentle, always gentle, with nuzzling lips across his neck and the tufts of his flaxen mane, reflexive kisses against the soft place behind his ears. “Wake up, little love.” She tells him in a voice that is only just barely above a whisper, her dark eyes soft and kind where they traced the angles of an impossibly small, perfect face.
Isle
