Falls

When one was a captive in a gang of men, it was only natural that one would experience a shift in one's emotional state. Certainly, Sabah had experienced plenty of that. For weeks now she had lain awake at night, crying quietly so that no one would hear; during the day, even the gentlest rustle of a bird's wings in a nearby shrub would set her teeth on edge, flatten her ears and tense her hindquarters.

Still, she wondered. When she thought of Acid, or Zion, or remembered what it had been like carrying an unborn Abraxas, she wondered. When she laughed one moment and wept the next, or when her stomach panged with a hunger that no amount of grass could satiate, she wondered.

And then, quite abruptly, she knew. It was not a feeling she could explain: she knew only that she felt different, and nothing would ever be the same again. The secret stewed within her for weeks. She could not imagine what she would say to anyone, least of all her son. Acid would undoubtedly assume it was his, and it was only a matter of time before he began gloating in front of Abraxas and her shame was exposed. Fear and anxiety and disgust clawed at the walls within her, desperate to escape—desperate to put this prison full of unwashed criminals behind her, even if just for a day. An hour. A minute.

And so one winter's day, when a break in the cold had thawed the land and turned everything to brown mush (but how she loved that brown mush, for it would not betray her whereabouts like the snow would), Sabah slipped away into the common lands. She did not tell her son where she went; Abraxas was a terrible liar and would undoubtedly give her up the second he was questioned, but quite honestly she could not have said where she was going until the rumble of the falls hit her ears.

The water—yes. Fresh water, hordes of it, untouched by salt or the lips of the foul creatures in the Lagoon. Her heart sang as she waded directly under the wall of crashing water. The bite of the cold, the shock of it plunging over her eyes and ears and nose—it pummelled every conscious thought from her brain and slowed the frantic beating of her heart. In those moments, she could not have named a single thing that troubled her. She was flesh and blood, and nothing more.