Lone Star Mountain stumucha

might be a long shot given the space of time between the 18th-25th but gonna go for it! <3 attn: @Judah & @John <3

skaigona did not let @Ezra from her sight for one moment. crossing the land was how she had lost children, one by one. now they were all gone; he was the last, and there rested so great an emphasis on his existence that it was unfathomable.
hard-faced, hungry, skagiona found a bare ledge of rock under which she and her boy might huddle, as she did not want to leave him alone in this downpour to hunt.
but before she joined ezra, skaigona let out a loud, haunting cry, a song of mother's search for sons and daughters. gideon might be foremost, but she had done wrong by them all.

Ghosts swarm the mountain, their songs, sibilant, lonely. Spirits like the kind he heard as a child on the island. Death was here, too. Death was everywhere.

“We should go,” he urges @John, throat dry as old leaves in spite of the downpour. Rain steals the words off his voice. He tries a second time, louder.

“John.”

Thanks for getting things going, and for your patience. Life has been busy. :)

John responded to the call from Judah, even though the downpour filtered out the noise. Yet John too, heard the cries, and he recognized it, and his heart nearly skipped a beat. 



“Yes. Let us go…. Toward the cries. They will guid us through the rain.” He said as he got up and moved to a position beside Judah. Then, they would finally descend from the mountain high, to home he left behind, only to bring a mother’s sons home. Or, at least one.

John returned a call, not a cry to haunt, but a call to announce their return. A glimmer hope lingering at the end of the howl.

ofc! <3

was that —?
skaigona grew very still. impossible. she was mistaken. 
her mouth ran dry. like the boy in the storm speaking to the man who had left so long ago to find him, skaigona tried to make her voice louder, singing between the grey clouds.
i'm here!

“No! We’re going to Rivenwood!”

A rasping voice, throwing up its own thunder to the deafening cloud-cover as the cry comes again, a hopeful change to the darkness in the sky.

His tears are the work of torrential rain, but nothing in nature would secrete the shake in his breast, nor the violent quiver of a lip that had so long ago formed the shape of “mom”.

But he knew, and his feet were moving quicker than his brain– a brain which had not readied himself to see her again; to forgive her, to hug her, to love her. His body had no care for the intricacies of the mind, it threaded between wood, churning through sopping mud, fighting earth, stone and tree to reach that call quicker, and all the while the heart which beat between head and feet chanting:

Let it be her. Let it be her. Let it be her.

In the blink of an eye, Judah lurched forward, descending the mountain, and before John could even speak in return.

John, after readying himself, ran behind Judah, his feet carrying him like wings. The journey down was much less strenuous as opposed to the ascent, yet John took some degree of caution, so as not to slip and fall on the wet rocks.

A forest they ran through, mud, brush. By the time John would reach the end, that stone arch welcoming him home, he would have sticks and leaves stuck in his fur. But, it was all worth it, to return to Heda, to his found family. In his hopeful mindset, all else was blocked out, as he kept his eyes on Judah.

her call was unanswered — and then it was not. skaigona had turned back to ezra, searching for some way to soothe her son when a second, a first, burst from the wet foliage, his eyes, his eyes —
a feral cry of pure relief broke from skaigona before she realized she had screamed at all; she lunged away from the stone ledge to complete the remainder of the journey at the end of the small clearing.
her arms trembled to embrace him, and when she looked over his shoulder, john was there also — skaigona began to shake with sobs, and rejected any notion she should thank god for what that hallowed man had accomplished.

Is it really you?

Judah can’t trust his eyes. They’d come a long way from the island, past the borders of remote places through the land of oblivion. For so many nights he’d dreamed of her, this sensitive look, her tender touch, the way her arms wrap around him in so much affirmation… in love.

“Momma!”

She is not a dream, or a figment. She is here and he’s holding her and squeezing his eyes shut, weeping into the lilies of her chest and kissing her cheek over and over, just to make sure she wouldn’t vanish.

“Don’t cry, Momma!”