Falls

long-lost firstborn of titania and rougaru

🙐---🙖





The filly smiles, warming Faline like a ray of midsummer sun. Some of the tension in her posture melts away, allowing her to return the favor, though her grin is much smaller, much more timid - and much more fleeting, golden light drifting further and further behind billowing clouds with every new question, her words of thanks forgotten. As far as she knew, she wasn't named for anyone, or anything. With the smattering of spots along her red-brown back, and the way she'd learned to hide, so still, so quiet, amongst the shadows of the Crossing, Titania had taken to calling her her fawn, but that was years ago. Now, she's just... Faline.

How would it feel, she wonders, to carry the legacy of someone's name in her own? Roux doesn't seem to care for it much, if the sarcasm and the eye-rolls are any indication. It might seem silly to her, or boring, or unoriginal, but from where Faline is standing it looks like a gift, a link to her heritage and the loving parents she'd been so lucky to have. Faline was loved, of course; everything Titania had done, including sending her to the Peak, had been an act of love, and so was Kolfinna's careful stewardship of the past two years. But her family was shaped differently than Roux's. She never knew her sire, and she learned very early on not to ask Titania about him. She didn't say much, even less when prodded. All Faline ever got was that he was bad, evil, a demon with the soul of a wolf in the body of a horse, and that they must never allow themselves to be found by him, or something terrible would happen. Not even Kolfinna could decipher her mother's cryptic words.

Was that the answer, then, to the mystery of her whereabouts? Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, when Titania thought she was still sleeping, Faline would catch her staring wistfully out to sea, eyes pointed to Luthien's temperate shores. She spoke of the Thicket like it was an old friend, and though the memories she described were mostly golden, they always came bittersweet off her smiling lips, like it hurt her to recount them. What unfinished business did Titania have on that not-so-distant isle? Had she gone there, looking for the older sister Faline had never met, and fallen into some sort of trouble?

For years Faline had followed her mother's wishes, avoiding her nameless sire's pursuit, and yet something terrible still happened.

Maybe it was time to try something else.

"It was my mother who hurt me," she finally answers, choosing her words carefully. "But I think... it might be... because somebody hurt her."

Faline swallows back her fear, offering a hurried explanation. "She sent me to the Peak," she said, "when I was just a girl. She was searching for someone, and she said they'd keep me safe, if..."

Another swallow, this one to tamp down the sudden influx of tears thickening her voice.

"Something's not right," she continues stubbornly. "She promised she'd come back. She always came back.

She loves me," Faline whispers, unsure if it's meant to reassure Roux or her own nagging sense of doubt.

"The Thicket is the best place I can think of. It's on Luthien, I think, but I don't know where it is, or how to get there, or if she'd even still be there, but it's been so long. I can't just sit here and wait for her anymore. What if she's hurt?"

She lifts her gaze to her new silver-haired acquaintance, her eyes glassy with emotion but determined. "I've got to do something, Roux. I have to try. I'm scared, but I've got to." Faline doesn't say it - she can't, having said entirely too much already - but in her stare there is a question, as clear as the pain on her young face.

Will you go with me?





🙐---🙖




faline

every tear’s a waterfall