Falls

long-lost firstborn of titania and rougaru

🙐---🙖





Wait for me.

Two years have passed since Faline last heard her mother's voice, but she remembers it like it was yesterday, the image clear as crystal in her mind's eye. Much has changed in the seasons since; she was not a mare, then, but a girl, barely weaned and clinging to the remnants of her foal coat. Trusting, obedient, she knew nothing of the world save for the love and protection under which her dam had sheltered her, and she had held faith in Titania's whispered promises, because she had no reason not to.

Wait here, quietly, but do not linger for more than one day.

And wait she did, nestled safely in the undergrowth, as the shadows grew long and heavy, and the peace within her heart shifted into turmoil.

Now full-grown, Faline paces the southern border of the Peak, anxious. She hasn't told anyone what she's doing, or where she plans to go - but who is there to tell? Kolfinna, soft and grey and motherly in all the ways she'd needed after Titania's disappearance, had gone to Tinuvel some time ago, taking Kalanthia with her. Calfuray, too, was off on her own business, and truth be told, Faline didn't necessarily want them tagging along for this. She loved her adopted sisters, along with Kolfinna, but their bravery far exceeded her own, and though she could have used a little courage, she didn't need the intensity that often came with it. What she wants to do requires subtlety, and how subtle, really, can four bickering horses be?

About as subtle as a lone mare lollygagging out in the open, she realizes, and heads for the safety of the trees.

The bare-branched canopy shrouds her well enough, smoothing down the pointed edges of her ragged nerves. With the forest to block the wind, and the long grasses of the meadow no longer brushing against her inkjet legs, Titania's voice returns, her words louder in her daughter's ears with all the other noise drowned out.

If I do not return, you must leave our little grove and go North.

Faline turns back, now, and even here, she can see the outline of the Peak, looking the same as it had when Titania had pointed her towards it many seasons past. She stares at it for a long while, uncertain, and remembers.

Go North, my fawn. Follow the mountain, and don't stop to talk to a single soul until you've reached its base. The Amazon women will keep you safe until I can fetch you back to me.

For Faline, the Peak had always meant safety. She had spent two long years under its looming presence, secure in the obscurity of its shadow and sheltered amidst rows of strong-willed mares ready to protect each other at a moment's notice. It was where her mother had wanted her to go, and where she had promised to return, and like the good, obedient girl she was, she'd waited. The days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years - and she waited. Faline grew up without the dam that birthed her, filling the gaps of her mother's memory with her own imagination - and she waited. She bid goodbye to the ones that came to her rescue, to Kolfinna and Kalanthia and Calfuray and all the other Amazons who had come and gone since her lonesome arrival... and still, still she waited, worried that if she left, Titania would return, and she would not be there to receive her. She waited for so long that she lost the parts of herself that weren't wrapped up in the mystery of her mother's fate. Titania was her world, her everything, her reason for being, but who was Faline? Who could Faline be, if the missing parts of her were made whole, and the story of her life was hers, purely hers, and not a patchwork medley of the souls who'd once helped shape her?

A bramble tugs at her jet-black tail, bringing her back to the present. Faline looks around and finds she has been walking, picking along narrow deer paths and ducking low-hanging branches. The shadows have grown long and heavy, the air turned bitter cold, and the small, quiet space she's found feels as strange as it does familiar, tucked away as it is beneath the tangled undergrowth.

Her mother's final words come forth, louder in this moment than the frantic beating of Faline's young heart, and in an instant she remembers this place, the long-gone comfort of her mother's scent, and the hours she had spent, hungry and alone, waiting for a savior who would never come.

Do you understand?

"I do," the fae Queen's lost child answers, her sad, soft voice crushed by the silence all around it.





🙐---🙖




faline

every tear’s a waterfall