Çiçek gives herself up to Rivaini, relishing in her closeness. The sensitive skin at her flanks twitches at the whip-pricks of the other’s creamy tail; she lifts a hind leg and brings it down decisively, impatient for something she didn’t have half the presence of mind to name aloud. A hiss pulls involuntarily from her gently-parted lips in response to the whisper-soft caresses feathering along her stomach, resisting the urge to nip at the girl’s face and release some of the crackling, restless energy rising in a sudden second wind inside her like some sort of overstimulated housecat. It’s too much again, too much for one vessel to hold, and before she knows what’s happening it all comes tumbling out of her, hormones and emotion washing like soothing summer rain over them both.

She isn’t alone in her feelings, apparently: Çiçek whines at the absence of her bezelyesweet pea from her side, but finds her soon thereafter, instinctively bracing herself to bear the weight of another on her back. She didn’t quite understand why Rivaini would do such a thing, considering nothing of consequence would ever result from it, but she loved her long-lost Guardian, loved her with every fiber of her being, and she would move heaven and earth to give her even one small scrap of happiness. Her affection - or the fever, or perhaps the cloying humidity of the jungle surrounding them, or even the heat of their own gently-exhaled breaths - burns whitehot in her veins, searing her from the core. It feels… real, this closeness, as real as the sunlit afternoon she and Solomon spent in their little Cove-within-the-Ridge. Real, and true, and just as satisfying, flashing the tiniest glimmer of something deeply, inherently wrong amongst a murky, swirling sea of right.

Rivaini pulls like the current around her, and Çiçek surrenders gladly beneath her powerful waves, letting them drag her under.

Her beloved slips from her back, and the second the palomino doesn’t have to support her weight anymore she teeters on unsteady limbs, the last dregs of her energy spent. Green eyes fill her vision, making her head swim, and though the question her companion asks of her still confuses her, she laughs, closing the distance between them to better enjoy the press of the sugar-sweet lips who’d voiced it.

“Komik kız,”“Funny girl,” she murmurs against salt-damp skin, playing drunkenly along with the charade. “Did you forget so soon?

I am your Çiçek,” the golden mare confirms, and drifts into blessed unconsciousness.

-

She dozes, caught in the space between sleep and wakefulness. Rivaini’s tortured face plagues her, twisting into a mask of wounded rage; she leaves her, comes back, and leaves again, taking a piece of her broken soul every time until she has nothing left to give. Çiçek shudders, caught in the fever’s vice grip. For a few hours she struggles, fighting against the illness threatening to overtake her, and the semi-darkness of the canopy plunges into full evening shadow. Eventually, something breaks; the doelike mare stirs, reaching out in the pitch black until she finds the warm body nearest to her and her brown eyes can adjust.

“Sevgili,”“Beloved,” she groans, her lilting voice gritty in the back of her throat. Her tongue feels heavy, too big to form the words she wants; she expects Solomon’s whitesplashed form, judging from the masculine tang of the scent filling her pale pink nostrils. Jade-green eyes glitter like jewels from the broad face looming towards her. She reaches for them - and recoils, pulling herself up short.

Whoever this is, she realizes, her blood running cold, it is most certainly not Solomon.

Çiçek blinks. Fog lingers around her head, clouding around her thoughts so that she can’t seem to keep a firm hold on them. She tenses at first, wary, but the closeness of this little, vine-covered space and the unending soreness of her muscles forces her to relax into the strange man beside her. The mare feels like she ran a marathon, every inch of her physical form crying out for rest - save for her heart fluttering like a trapped rabbit behind her tight-bound ribs.

“Who are you?” she asks, briefly touching her nose to his strong neck. Her gaze meets his, only able to hold it for a second before shifting to peer up and over him, molten chocolate irises clearer than they’d been in days. Çiçek shuffles her weight from side to side, noticing the uncomfortable sweat-soaked tackiness of her skin.

“Where am I?” Not the Cove, that’s for sure. Probably not Tinuvel, either.

Where, she wonders, fear for her firstborn son bubbling like hot bile to the surface, is Şevket?