Porcupine Ridge amygdala

anything goes, sans death; need drama for her

@Sundance had gone upon a pilgrimage of sorts. his voice had invited her, and she had wanted to go, even taking several steps after the priest. but in the end she had not, for it had occurred to teya that she might use this time to become a faerie herself. and so, bring a smile to his face when he returned.
and so she had not come back to the court, deciding instead to go into the mountains. @Bridget would be all right without her; teya was somewhat jealous of izumi's austere beauty and opted to stay away for the present, perturbed by her reaction. 
the girl's time within the empire had halfheartedly honed her for stonepath travel, but the cold deluge that caught her unawares sent teya shivering into a glen, curling beneath a bevy of ferns to outwait the rain with an ironic reget seizing her heart.

Come evening the girl struck upward even as the scalloped ground dug its points into her feet and even as the sky opened up to release a downpour. It was cold and cruel and not the warm moisture she and the gallinippers so loved. 

What dribbles down her ankles is rainwater with days worth of blood and sweat. These parts of her percolate through the ground and join the water table underneath where eventually it will come back out again through a seep, vadose water that darkens the rock and sand around it.

She staggers over the talus slopes. Ghosts of her mother, her father, her baby brother, they follow. 

It's a long ways up there, her father says with his black mouth. But Bailey is too busy shivering to answer.

if she slept teya did not know it, fitful snatches of slumber stolen here and there when her body finally bent beneath the downpour. and then, trudging; the sound of foot upon waterlogged ground. she lifted her rotpumpkin muzzle, blinking between the water-drops toward the shadow casting itself toward her.
an androgynous figure; teya drew a breath and straightened to a sitting position. a stranger, a tumorous spread of color across this one's face. teya stared, fascinated; would the shade of death pass beyond or fade into something mutable here?

Spit and rain collected on her lips coalescing into a film that pops with a trembling word:

Ma? Surface tension breaking apart into a silence that prolongs itself as her chest, concave and congested, strains with the effort of breathing,

because the last time I saw you was your head tipped back up to the sky showing your pale and unwashed neck as dirt was thrown onto you like salt over a shoulder, and no one wanted to touch you cause you were sick so you were buried face down, all ragdolled and all scrunched up,

back in the sour slum courtyards of Mississippi at sunrise saturated by tupelo gums, wet grass under her like thinning hair, all swelling in the wet darkness of deltas and swamps pruning up in the moisture, Ma's coffin crumbles apart along with her.

So how is she here?

ma?
the edges of teya's mouth downturned in consternation. she hesitated only a moment before slithering out into the rainwet air, breathing in the droplets as ash-orange ears cupped forward. "ma." her turn to repeat it, sitting unfamiliar and round and half-swallowed like a lump of unbaked dough in the back of her throat.
gaze pressed to the stranger. something weirdly familiar in the sound bouncing from the other. she folded her lips around it once more, silently, and waited.

No, of course it wasn't ma, ma was six feet under, ma was fodder for the crows and the mushrooms that sprouted from the nitrogen that seeped from her body into the soil, so cancer-ridden that she might as well have been dead at least three months before her actual last breath left her. Low-effect zombie, insulin coma mannequin, up until the end.

In Bailey's eyes she still sees her, the sallow back pressed against moss stiff and stale with sweat. She could count the knobs on her spine even from ten paces away in the dark den.

Sorry, she says, her voice just a few seconds away from a real sob. She drags in a shaky breath and the cold air hurts her teeth. Just underneath the enamel, the nerves snarling like tangled wire. I was just fixin to leave.

Far too many ghosts for a girl who'd only lived through four seasons.

no, came her thought, and then "no" climbing softly out of her throat. teya foud she did not not want to be alone; she shook out her fur from the downpour and attached herself to the sorrow in the woman's words. closer now, closer to see that splotch of something unknowable.
"stay." and now teya's true reality of failure, an empathy too overbearing for her to consider leaving behind. extended to this girl as they both dripped with rain and stood with gazes locked, if teya succeeded in finding the other's expression.