hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Momma? He asks in a sweet, drowsy voice and her heart skips a beat in her chest. It is in this moment that she realizes she must be, that she will be, that the idea of leaving him behind feels like a blade in her chest and she cannot breathe around it. She responds wordlessly, lipping gently at the curved points of small ears, swallowing back the swelling outrage she felt that anyone could create something so important as this and leave him to the grass and dirt as though he were nothing more than unwanted waste.
She drifts closer still, gentle when her nose brushes his cheek and his eyes flutter open, framed soft and brown by sooty lashes that tickle her chin when she presses a quick kiss to his small forehead. He whispers his uncertainty, places his name in the hands of her waiting heart, a heart that reaches back to his, and it takes everything she has not to flinch at the lonely way his name speaks to her. “Neverwas.” She repeats, she hums, she sings, changing the heavy notes with a smile that slips hesitantly across her lips. “No,” she says and her smile deepens until it has touched her eyes and they gleam with warm notes of honey flecked into the wild brown, “no I came for you, Nevi, won’t you be my little love?”
His shyness breaks her in half and she wishes she knew a million ways to show him how important he is, hates like she has hated nothing before that he doesn’t already know, that no one ever told him. Instead he was given a name meant to rend him in half, a name that would carve him hollow and haunt him like a ghost so that he might always remember that from which he came. She touches her nose to his withers, willing him to stand so that she might pull him close to her chest and promise him the world he deserved but had never been given.
Her nose hangs close to his delicate face, her eyes soft and warm when they reach out to capture his fluttering gaze. There is an unwelcomed thread of doubt worming its way through her tumultuous thoughts and for a moment she is convinced that if she blinks he will disappear and she will never see him again. He is such a shy little thing, all tremulous words and wide eyes, ephemeral in the way her heart already aches to love him. Instead she sighs, and it is a quiet sound, like snowflakes cast against the ice wall surrounding her home. She wants to tell him that someone let him down, that she never would, but when she settles in those uncertain eyes all she can manage is another kiss to his forehead and her whispered name. “I am Isle.”
Isle
