The Sentinels all hope in eclipse

written to this

he was a child again, though it was not a memory that the man had ever held. there was the sussuration of a heartbeat roundabout him; there was the touch of a murmur upon his senses, and his countenance held a raw sort of peace upon it. lasher did not hear those around him, nor did he feel the touch of his wolves. their frenzied voices formed a backdrop of undifferentiated sound for the slow tumbling of the man.

there was a quietude to the gentle plunge into a deepening world, as if the druid had opened his eyes beneath the seawater and beheld the silent landscape below, safe from the churning of the ocean, safe from the storm that roiled o'erhead.

but he was no child -- this was no belly in which he nestled. suzanne, suzanne! she beckoned, and taltos gasped aloud, writhing, arching in the grey arms of clouds which brought forth the thunder, and the lightning forked about him, and he wept to be born again, to be cast down as lucifer from the heavens, to strike the ground and lift himself a mortal astream with tears and with rain and with the scent of his own birth sweet upon his withers.

mother, suzanne! lasher cried to the summoning witch, she who stood with embrace laid bare for him, for him alone; he ran to her over the reverberation of his own heart, and stood sobbing in her arms as he had that fateful night in donnelaith, in the glen, in the very throat of the storm.

and all around him, witches; deborah, charlotte, angelique, julien -- they came to encircle him with their layering of magicks of of wickedness, of love for their lasher, for their taltos, and they whispered to him in the downpour, and they spoke to him of things he had always cherished but ne'er heard.

he was a lost lamb, and they his shepherds, guiding him from one embrace to the next, kissing his wet cheeks and wiping the tears from beneath his eyes. he felt his tongue curl around the glen-tongue, then french, then the creole of the old city; he spoke and cried out audibly to those gathered around him in the real world, but knew not.

julien stood aside then, and smiled, and taltos knew he must follow. and yet he held back, for his hear belonged to his daughters, and he spoke of them with a wordlessness his old lover understood. but the sweetness of julien's kiss, and the relief it wrought in lasher was not to be denied, and their bodies mingled as lasher felt himself pulled inexorably from the last moorings of the barren land into the rich heaven of his witches.

beneath lucani's body, the druid's breathing stirred no more.