Post

Region: The East Pacific

Edited

It's the moonlight that woke Mother Charity, cutting through the window and into her eyes. She noticed Prophet first, the sweet bundle of bones curled up not an inch from her nose. Bedtime meant a little stress for the baby, what with everyone who saw for him closing their own eyes, but at this time of night he was so peaceful. Shining, too, in the silver light. Almost a pretty fragment of the moon. Beside and under Prophet, gleams of wine red, sharp steel blue and gentle grey announced his siblings Chalice, Kris and Shield. Mother Charity's heart tightened for a moment as she tried to find the parents - everything was safe in this place but the fear of loss was always strong - then she sighed in happiness as she registered Oatmeal and Dandelion's twin weights draped across her side. Ephemera and Firebrand, bless them, were curled up in a little knot at the foot of the bed; Dav and Echo's breathing rang gently through the air from just beside that mattress on the floor.

Charity swallowed a little sob then. She'd seen marvels in the Wershian orphans as they learned to trust her love, she'd seen life steal into their eyes as they dared to believe they were safe . . . and here she was in tears on the floor of her cell, weighted down with warmth, head swimming with the dragons' dreams of safety and sweetness and love. The same marvel. The same hesitant belief: this time nothing will be ripped away . . .

She tried to give the hatchling back. She did. When Echo didn't want "that" close to her other children, Mother Charity tried Ephemera (matrons traditionally mothered the rejected children of their own); she didn't want a Fury's viciousness associated with her family. Once that decree was given, it was really a lost cause, but Charity tried every other member of the family as well -- worth a shot, worth a try, with the baby reaching desperately for the minds she knew ought to be loving her and too young to understand why they didn't. Charity herself barely understood it, going on eighty, and what glimmers of understanding she found only filled her with a cold and terrifying rage.

No one wanted the child. What interest they showed in her was cold and proprietary: they wanted to strip away the name she was already responding to, and call her 'Lightning' instead because snowbanks were an unsuitably soft and quiet name-association for a Fury to hold. As if she wasn't soft herself, quiet herself. As if she wasn't snowy-white.

You can't disobey me, Ephemera had snarled at last. I head this family and I say the Fury is not ours.

"I head this city," Charity had replied -- shaking inside, sick with the realization that she was using her rank against family -- "and I say as Warden that she is mine."

They left for Thriwich not long after that, with no parting words but a dark you'll see hurled at Charity's back. "You'll see," like she hadn't seen the ugly truth already. Like that seeing hadn't built a wall between them which could not, she suspected, ever be torn down.

Restoration of Eastern Kaiserreich

Context • Report