name = away | *name = in danger of demotion/deletion | [name] = stolen
February 25, 2015 Hi everyone! Shatter Me is taking over as queen of the Falls. If anyone has any questions feel free to contact me. :) Kingdom meeting mandatory so I can see who is still here. Thanks guys!
nothing tastes as sweet - nylee, any IP: 8.39.115.8 Posted on December 11, 2014 at 07:41:52 PM by alysanne
We climb. Together at first, where the land is wide, the grass bright summer green, flowers still lifting petals to the sky. We are nothing, really, just small creatures that dot the earth. Small compared to the waterfall, tiny compared to the blue above, nothing compared to all the lands and the world we will never entirely see. But together, gold and black and white, I feel giant and whole, like the world is ours and ours alone.
We slow together at the top of the cliff and I simply stand for a while, the wind whipping at our black and white manes and tails, a flag above the waterfall for all to see. There are so many goodbyes I could say; years I could spend trying to feel like I’m not leaving them behind. But no matter what words there are to say, I will be leaving them behind. And so there will be no goodbyes.
Instead, in the wind, I simply look. I know my children, even from so far above. Kellan, alone and hard at work as he always is, crossing the border back into the kingdom from some mission or trip, I can’t be sure. Kaelie, here on a visit with Natilyn and Kaden, close to both as if they are all family though only the girls share any blood. But that’s never mattered. Not here. Not to our family. Kaden was one of us too, now. Keely is gone, but I already know this, and so I don’t look. The wild child, sweet and innocent and naïve, and yet always moving. She’ll come home, one day, and Kellan will tell her everything.
I see Marge and Barret. Broken now. Broken perhaps as they always had been. My heart lurches, because I have failed them both time and time again. Part of me longs to run to her now, to fix it, but I know the truth after so many years of trying. I cannot fix it for her. I cannot fix any of it. Eventually, in the end, all our actions will no longer matter anyway.
The knoll where our parents are buried is still covered with flowers, so rich with color that it is impossible to miss. Spring lives forever on their grave, and I smile slightly, because they deserve no other after-life. They deserve a marker of everything they did and everything they were even when time has erased their names. The kingdom will not erase their presence.
There will be no mark left for me. I don’t need one, don’t want one, don’t deserve one. I broke too many things, and I could never fix enough to make up for all that I have undone. Left my home on the brink of war, left my sister to deal with the repercussions of my decisions as Queen. Selfish. I took my children away and hid from the war, hid from everything, lived my life as if it were perfect, as if I had not a care in the world.
Then, in coming back, in finally trying to do the right thing, I sent Modred to his grave. Modred, who could not leave me, who could not bring himself to do anything to hurt me again. Who plunged into the ocean in order to follow me.
Selfish.
And yet I can see him in the river where we once swam, so many years ago. Years I have lost count of. Years that have stopped meaning anything at all. When did we stop counting? He’s smiling, lazing in the river as I look down, past the bones at the bottom of the waterfall of ancestors I never knew, past the grave of my parents, past the places where my children go about their lives. He waits, and I smile slightly, all my failures drifting away.
My children, I hope, will be better than I was. They will learn from my mistakes, and they will make their own. They will come and go and start their own families and they will stand some days, I hope, at the edge of the river and remember that I love them. I hope they will not mourn, because there is nothing to mourn.
I am alive beneath the sun, with the wind in my hair and the roar of the waterfall drowning out everything but this. This moment. Gold and white and black atop the cliff that will always belong to my parents, to the generations to come, and never to us. We were children of the water, not the wind, after all. Gold little fish.
I turn then, finally, to my twin, my other half. Practical and safe and always looking out for everything I ever did, for everything any of us ever did. She kept us safe, as best she could. I smile then, the same wild smile that I had as a girl before I went racing off somewhere, before she came timidly chasing me down to watch my back. But now we are less different than we were then. Now, we face the cliff together, two parts of one whole.
We came into the world together, and we will leave it the only way we know how. Together.
My smile grows, dangerous and wild and alive – breathlessly alive in that moment. I look back at the river, and Modred’s there, waiting. And Edmond and Neraza stand on their knoll, not really here but waiting. Smiling. I nod to Nylee, pressing myself close, wrapping my neck around hers one more time and just stay, stay for a moment and another until I hear the water calling my name.
Alysanne, it sings, pours around me, and I wonder if Nylee hears it calling to her. A different name, but in the end, all the same.
I take a breath, pick up my feet, and run.
The ground disappears beneath my feet, and for a moment, there is nothing. Just air and I hang above the waterfall. For a moment, just a short moment, I fly.
Then the world comes back and I’m rushing toward the water, but there’s no fear. Just laughter on my lips, ringing out over the sound of the waterfall as the kingdom wraps it’s silent, loving arms around me. I look over once more to Nylee as I feel the Falls take hold, skin becoming scales, legs becoming fins. I hit the water with a splash.
We will always be the golden children of the river.