pay heed the squall Posted on October 31, 2022 at 01:50:01 PM by Charybdis
Her dreams had been silent and empty as of late. A semblance of peace had settled over the troubled waters of her soul ever since Faolain’s true return, but some nights, Charybdis still found herself waking, just to make sure that it wasn’t all in her head. And once she was awake, the pale mare couldn’t find her way back to sleep. She listened for voices in the dead of night, but there was only ever the jungle breathing, and somewhere deep in the earth, buried far beneath the towering Ridge, the beating heart of Atlantis.
Long ago, the half-sighted mare had resigned herself to the fact that her rivers were lost to her; they had their own paths to follow. So it was not these ones that the red-shouldered mare sought under the cover of darkness, but the boy she had abandoned, because he wore the face of a ghost. I lost ‘im, and ‘e were lost to me, that was all she’d said to Drogon, the first time he’d asked after his son, and it’s all Charybdis could bring herself to say.
If nothing else, she was grateful for Svenja’s presence, and the colts that Drogon had gathered to them. It meant that she could slip away unnoticed far more often, to search for the fire-and-ice colt she’d led Drogon to believe was dead. It was wrong of her, to hold back the truth, but Charybdis reasoned that it very may well be true by now. She’d not sighted him near the borders of the Harbour for some time now, and neither had she caught traces of his scent on the air.
The sense of foreboding that had sunk into her bones the very moment she’d first looked upon the red and white child had left her, washed away by the aftermath of the hungry, drowning wave that had rushed inland to the southwest. Perhaps the ocean had claimed him, as it had claimed many before. Charon and Acheron. Skylla twice-over. There had been no flicker of green on the horizon (Charybdis had been watching and waiting), but perhaps it was yet to come.
As dawn broke, as was her ritual, she headed for one of the many winding paths that would lead her to the spiny crest of the Ridge, where she could stare out to sea, watch the shorelines and study the jungle. Then, she would be ready to confront whatever dangers she saw coming, both from without and within.
And meet them she would, bolstered by unsung faith that ripped all fear from the deepest reaches of her hidden heart.