Redtail Rise red

As soon as she’d come back into his life, here, now; she was gone.

He watches as the breath leaves her lungs and the fire seems to die beneath her skin.

All he feels is hollowness. 

It was a distant kind of pain he feels. Once she had disappeared from his life all those months ago, he never truly got her back. Now, he’d never get the chance to know her again. And that was the painful part. The bulk of the mourning was already finished, way back then. 

As he stares at her body, he begins to feel a simmering rage at the dirt marring her features. Avicus would be disappointed in dying looking unpresentable. The boy, his face stoical, begins the work of cleaning the excess away. To restore what had been broken.

Once the job is finished, he regards his mother’s, now pristine, face for the last time. It was the first one he knew,

now, maybe, his was one of the last she’d known too.

Silent, the boy leaves her side, finding and embracing Redsky, Carrion, and Watcher.

He’d never abandon the Rise. 

He wasn’t born a coward.