& all there is to see

otem You'll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley You can tell the sun in his jealous sky when we walked in fields of gold To be fair, there really wasn't any way to actually tell what had been a hallucination and what had not. Looking at Tilney now it did seem sort of absurd that he would have been on fire, with bat wings and a mouth full of sharks teeth. Obviously that wasn't real. But at the time she'd been so certain that her life was about to end. She could smell his horrible breath and see the saliva glistening off of his fangs...So even though she knew that there was a pretty good chance that she hadn't actually been able to breathe underwater, she was slightly put off by Tilney's lack of credence in her words. "Oh...yeah ... my Father wanted her to move when she was pregnant with us...But I think she always preferred the Edge and the Moon Goddess to the Throat and the Sun God." Although Otem was disappointed that Tilney didn't actually know her mother and so had no interesting first-hand anecdotes of the Mountain, it did fill her with a warm sense of pride to here him so readily declare that he knew of her, as if she was someone important. Which in Otem's mind, she was. Now, Otem wasn't the quickest to make deductive leaps like Isopia had been, and she didn't possess her twin's ability to see patterns. This, combined with the fact that she'd recently been knocked unconscious seemed to justify why it took the girl so long to realize what should have been obvious: "Your daughter? Does she have curly hair? And ... an aunt called Aelf...aelf-e-wine?" The name had been so foreign (and Otem's mind had been on other things when Maude spoke it), that she could barely remember how it sounded. Her burgundy and gold gaze stared up at Tilney, face twisted in a confused but hopeful smile as if willing him to fill in the missing sounds and syllables. Otem thought of Maude and their meeting on the cliffs, crying about their lost parents and then Maude singing to Otem a song she had written for the Gods back in Helovia.

Image Credits

@Tilney