Shiny happy people - CAM!

[Pevensie]

At last, the riddle begins to unravel. The cataract clouding their relationship seems slowly to demystify, creating clarity where once uncertainty and suspicion reigned greatest. She perks up her ears, listening intently to Camrynn's explanation. Half of her wishes it had not come to this, having to ask her to justify, she wishes that her adopted daughter might have thought better of her and let her know the secret. However, it was not to be that way. At least, one way or another, the truth will now come out.

"It never does well to dwell on the what if, for we are powerless to change it," she says sagely, frowning at the thought that perhaps Cam might be able to change it, though Pevensie knows just as well as the next horse that no good would come of such things. In tandem with that thought though, she is pleased that Cam at least was always intending on coming to the Deserts, and that selfish little pang of pride that she was the one first chosen. Even an old horse can out their small victories.

Then Cam opens up further, a book with sun-bleached pages flicking in the breeze, allowing her the brief glimpses at a private soul and letting some of her text shimmer in the daylight. Difficult to decipher but not impossible, just careful with the pages she chooses to reveal. Pevensie can respect that though, as a mostly private horse herself. Unless directly asked a question, she doesn't feel the need to shed her years of useless endeavours onto young ears. 

"Just be careful you don't get hurt with that need to explore, because not all the answers we find are the ones we want to hear. I guess that's why I've given up searching, why I just let what will be, simply be," she says softly, thinking back to the countless times she should have visited the beach to find the bodies or confirm their absence. Maybe she is a coward, but she would rather live in faded hope than have her dreams dashed with the cruel touch of reality. "I don't know why I said that... you are no child. You don't need to listen to me," she says now with a chuckle, looking up at her 'daughter'.

She hopes that is what they are, mother and daughter. And though Cam has said more than ever before, the little buckskin still can't help but feel that she is not this mares true mother. 

 

[Camrynn]

so you wanna play with magic?

"No, it never does well to dwell on the what if." she echoes, her velvet voice far away. Although for her that's not really true. As Pevensie suspects, Camrynn could in fact re-write history if she wanted to. For her, time is not so much a linear absolute as a suggestion of linearity. She can jump around within it at will, rewriting, erasing, changing, picking apart and putting back together. In the exact way she'd split time at the moment she'd decided to go with both of them, she could pick apart and put back together any moment in the history of history.

She doesn't, but only because she hasn't needed to yet. She doesn't fear time the way most horses might, but she does respect it. She isn't about to go dancing about in the timeline without thinking through the consequences, without being at least somewhat sure of the butterfly effect. She understands what it means to have the powers she has. She understands the kind of chaos it can create. But chaos has never frightened her. Not at all.

She listens with interest and curiousity as Pevensie warns her about the need to explore, and about getting hurt. Camrynn finds it touching, but also strange. In this way, Camrynn is the opposite of Pevensie. She does not believe that the truth can hurt her. And perhaps it really cannot, because to Camrynn all the painful truths are either irrelevant or malleable. Death is nothing to Camrynn. She will never experience it herself, and of the few she truly loves, none of them will experience it either. Eight may wander, but in the end he's eternal just as she is. Evrae, Yael, even Pevensie herself – they all will endure. Camrynn couldn't care less for her true family; she'd kept her grandmother alive, yes, but only so she could kill her (as a byproduct of getting what she actually wanted, but still).

Pevensie speaks again, and Camrynn chuckles along with her. "I was a child pretty recently. So what if that was my second go at it?" she offers, her voice light with teasing mirth. At the end of the day, Pevensie has been more of a mother to her than her own mother, that much is certain. As much as Camrynn has had a mother, Pevensie has been it.

"I don’t think I was ever a child." she says, her voice pensive. "I never knew my mother or my father. In fact, I could probably go find them if I wished. They're both still alive, somewhere out there." she pauses then, thinking about the black stallion and the equally black mare that had been her parents. Her father had ruled the Valley, yes, but he'd been the king consort to a deserving queen. Chernobyl himself had never deserved anything in his life. Verily had been little better. "You're the closest thing to a true mother I've ever had." her voice is quiet then, because it's true.

"Do you have biological children?" she asks, although she already knows the answer. She can feel the loneliness that echoes in Pevensie's heart, the holes she has filled with love for other people's children. She knows that Pevensie has never carried a child herself.

Perhaps, she thinks (but does not say), it's time she changed that.

CAMRYNN

co-queen of the deserts, magical, mother of badassery