Rafe
▻ mula (x rafe) | ardra (x rafe) ◅
[--timeskip to catch up to present--]
Rafe had returned to them and he had not failed to make his apologies known. It had healed something in her to see him come back to her, even if he seemed a little deflated for a week or two. Mula had gotten into trouble, of course, but the boy was as poised as an elder about it. Apparently, she mused, he was going to be a better version of his grandfather. Antares was not evil, but he often led with his heart rather than his sharp mind - Mula had no such qualms. His mother had been ailing after his birth and when he realized that not everyone's mother was so tired all the time and so weak when attempting to stand after a night of sleeping.
The shaman woman that had come after Rafe had insisted she grow well again had come and helped her - finding the sickness and rooting it out after a few weeks. She had been a young girl, but so knowledgeable. She had, in private, also told Jyeshtha that birthing would, from here on, be a dangerous prospect. For Jyeshtha, though, having Mula had been a defining moment of triumph and she had realized that more than anything before, she was meant to be a mother.
She cherished her little graying son that looked enough like his father as the graying had begun for his first year of life. Antares, when introduced, had admitted that he had been much the same as a boy. Rafe, had met him a bit later than his grandfather, but it had been worth the wait.
She looks at Rafe now as he approached her - a soft smile on a less weathered face, not so wracked with sickness and weakness as when Mula had first brought him to her. She had not needed to scold him at all, his face written clear with the shame he felt for his absence. She had told him that it was natural, that burning out from the constant turmoil of the world was destined to do a number-- and their nights then had been spent [when he was with her and not one of his others] in a mixture of embraces that sometimes chased them away from her sleeping near-yearling son.
Now, she felt it again. She felt it again and she felt wrong for having kept her condition from Rafe so selfishly, avoiding his refusal of her in the only way she knew how… in silence. "Ah, our handsome leader." She says this playfully, knowing that they had never claimed something as meager as love from the start. She had affection for him, one that might even be the early buddings of love, but he had called her to him to spite her father and to finally become her own self. It had not been business, nor politics-- but the freshness of their passion did speak to something akin to the love ballads where it sprang in her like a new spring amidst the fall coloring of leaves.
Lust but with something of an undercurrent she had not had before he’d returned to her with Mula. "I wanted to tell you," she smiles softly, a bit embarrassed despite everything, "That I have started to feel as I had with Mula." A new life grew, bringing her greater hunger and more restless nights. It was all the clue she needed before telling him that their nights had borne fruit.
OF THE SALEM BADLANDS
▻ mare - curly eared arabian mutt - graying buckskin tobiano - 15.2 hh ◅