holding fire

ЯIKYN   The first few days were spent finding shelter, and locating everyone from home; having discovered a sizable cave in the rainforest, I’d made an executive decision that we would stay there.  My young daughters, though one was still missing, would never make the swim to the islands out in the sea, and I doubted that the forest we had initially been deposited into was a wise choice for residency.  Though the rainforest cave was prone to cave ins (if the collapsed ones near by was any clue), it was at least dry, and would do, until something better came up.   When I wasn’t with the others, I was with Duir, looking for Mordecai, or that better place for everyone to be – at least those that hadn’t wandered off to mourn in their own way, or hadn’t turned up yet.  Hoping that not having yet found them in either of the glowing forests meant they were likely to turn up on one of the islands somewhere, I set off towards the beach, recalling a span of it which had seemed a promising place to try and swim to the other side.   My companion, however, is balking about the mission before we even arrive.  Don’t want to swim, he bemoans, fearful of the ocean, and the way it ceaselessly churns beneath the endless rain here.  He’d been wary of it before, but now that it looked angry?  He wasn’t about to try and swim across it any time soon.  Beasties, he implies, flashing the glowing eyes and smoking forms of Kaos obliterated beings among other frightening things he’s seen: griffons hunting rabbits, a wildcat snarling as it leaps out from a mountain pass at an unsuspecting elk doe.    I use that word to scare Gwyn, I state flatly, implying he’s acting like a little girl, and he quiets, glumly plodding along behind me with his ears to either side, and his emerald eyes dark and stormy, like the sea which looms on the horizon in a narrow, fluctuating line of steel gray.  They still real, he remarks – and I can’t say he’s not right.  Instead, I clench my jaw, lifting my head just a little bit more to pretend I’m sweeping my eyes across the horizon in search of my newest daughter and her mother, or other herd mates, rather than ignoring the ugly truth that, yeah…   There probably are beasties out here.     call me a safe bet I'm betting I'm not

Art by VeerDesigns@DA | Table by Me

@Arleigh @Mordecai