they told me you were gone and i screamed

@Riannon

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a violent shiver wakes him; body wracking with the response as it slithers down his spine as if beneath his flesh a giant serpent had taken residence. slowly, helcaraxë takes note of his surroundings; lingering on each facet until the thrum of unease and spinning of confusion settles. the buttery golden rays of sunshine make the snow glow, the giant icicles that hang over the edge of the series of falls that rush over the darkened rock he faces glinting deadly in the soft warmth. thickly, he swallows, shifting in the cold patch of snow that has made his belly damp from the body heat that has melted the snow bed. it crunches under paw as he pushes himself to his paws; long and gangly legs unsteady.

“où suis-je? — where am i?” the voice, his voice, comes out trembling like a feather; cracking with adolescence and confused. frightened. despite the frantic clawing at his memory there is nothing. an brief flashing image of a woman that vanishes like smoke; there and gone betwixt his teeth for it'd never actually been a corporeal thing.

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[narrow width=800]the early-dawn moon waxing gibbous; she, that offers only silver echoes of herself as the night's gobbling shadows retreat. from morðfjall aėrith goes; toils in restive ways to untie herself from this bout of errant grief — for it must be, so she works to shake it loose like fur in the morning, and how could it still cling to her, that old stale air, the gauntness of it? the embalmed darkness that held no end but instead a forever?

nonetheless, dawn deepens to day; and slips of ghosts already accompanied her pilgrimage in phantom kisses and words whispered to ears that only half-listen; and she had half the heart to forsake it all. to consign them to whichever forgotten realm she had been ferried from. to the delicate and unlovely bones of her memory. storms pass over the sotaherra's eyes, and her brows pinch together in something hard and bitter. forlorn.

but to be fatigued would be to lay this search to rest before she had even begun.

then she emerges, finally, to this place where everything folds into itself in great keening rushes and snowmelt; consuming its own heart away to this very ... well, what-ever where she is. the line of her mouth goes thin in the mornlight; all too familiar to that feeling.

and then she sees him: this rimeling, with words unknowable and all coltish, anxious limbs; but it was the tremor that she heard therein that made the broke-heart nightingale step nearer with a low, lilting trill for a greeting.[/narrow]

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efforts to keep the wild straining of his rapid beating heart and the ice of fear coursing through his veins under reign — as if it were a spirited stallion straining against it's bonds — he tries again to focus upon what is. he has a heart. he has four limbs. a tail. ears. he is hale and whole; despite that the how of ending up in this foreign, cold place remains a constant unknown that no amount of straining gives light to.

the snow, deeper away from the banks of the falls, crunches under each step he takes; his paws sinking beneath the weightless substance. he pauses then, peering over a shoulder to contemplate that perhaps he should following the serpentine river of water. primal instinct, archaic senses that predated the dawning of his flesh and bone, tells him to. at least, here, he knows there is water that he thinks is drinkable and that is ...half the battle.

providing food for himself was another battle that helcaraxë wasn't quite ready to tackle yet. half formed plans are paused the second that the lilting trill comes his way. breathlessly, green gaze scours the landscape for the source and when it lights upon her, rushed thought and pale similarities spring forth the question: “mère? — mother” and again the call-out though he does not realize that she is not her. “ma mère!” desperate for it to be so regardless; reason fleeing.

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[narrow width=800]she hopes that she is never asked of this moment;
where she is ensorcelled by a thing that is more surer than some godsdamning omen from some tundrian almighty and before she can breathe she is surging forward, stumbling; breaths thin and wet and suckling, strangled, the salt of tears on her tongue as a woeful wheeze. no. she is not his mother  —  but a mother she is, what she had been meant to be before her womb had gone so horribly cold and her heart seized and beat no more and she was sundered, summoned and torn from herself; and she falls to her knees before this child who cries with a searing sob all the same, blinking hard and spartan through the film of hot, volatile, vengeful tears as she is utterly and wholly at her own possession.

unseeing, blind, haunted; damned to love, when it was what she forsook to be without. she was sotaherra ( wasn't she? ) and she must be more than what the old-world had seen her be  —  but she loves, ahti be damned, death be damned, what should have once been hers but would not ever now be damned; damning it all and herself and this graceless, rent heart; her arms open in a clumsy crescent, and she is off-kilter, and her throat has closed where soothing has split open within her breast, right in the very middle and deeper than her marrow, but if he falls then she will catch him.

and she would never leave him.[/narrow]

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he, who never was. he, who came to be in these foreign and strange lands with nothing but a fleeting and fast-fading fantôme of a was that had, perhaps, never been. a wretched sob of yearning: for safety, for warmth, for a mother's love tears itself from the curve of his chest; a foreshadowing of what will be strong bone structure encased in wiry muscles of time to come. like the rest of him, his body is young and gangly and clumsy.

she does not recoil at his cries; nearer she comes, sobbing herself. would he have been anything but a physical manifestation of the yearning he was at that moment he might've asked her why she cries. instead, falling against the plush, silken fur at her breast: into her embrace, all he can murmur in nearly incoherent hiccups was: “mère. mère. mère, mère —” a mantra. a record skipping on repeat to that one word. a naming of her; a crowning without concern for her wants.

eventually he quiets against the stranger and breathes in her scent that is unfamiliar to him. “je suis désolé, — i am sorry” comes a bashful, boyish mewl... unsure if she can understand him or not.

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[narrow width=800]the tongue in which he spoke was indeed familiar to her, but not in the way that the rimeling might have wished; for a moment, her mind flits to a not so long ago time past, where she met a frowning archer and the eglantine who she hoped did not suffer such boorish company. so she tries another, with shivery breaths that she bids to steady:  "tar na- úqua ana apsene,"  — there is nothing to forgivearms furling about the greymane boy, gathering him ever closer with her pale mouth molded against the still-downy pup's fur of his crown; does not wish for him to sound as remorseful as he seems, for as it was not  ( she thinks )  inarius' fault for having been felled like an undimming star, so was it that this child was not to blame for the predicament in which he'd wound up in. they were all of them misplaced; and the nightingale glares hard into the vault of heavens as she tucks the boy's brow into the crook of her moon jaw.

she hopes ahti sees her hateful eye.

the mirrorbright gaze gentles impossibly so, however, when she returns the entirety of her attention on the lost lad at her breast; the blush of her nose quivering as she scents the baby's breath of him, takes in the parts of him that are still a bit rounded by milkfat. does not know if he will understand her or no, but inquires all the same:  "indu tye túl ana mime unque? ana mime hísilómë? ana mime nixëlíndë?"  — will you let me take you to my hollow? to my cloudrest? to my frostchant?he would have pelts to rest his weary head on, and more protection that she could offer on her own. and, perhaps, he would find a sister in her other foster ...   "manen saiqua tye nin ela ..."  — how hungry you must be ...

it's only when he acquiesces that she cards a thin wrist along his cheek, if he lets her, to do away with some snowfall there.[/narrow]

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