Noctisardor Bypass tagbleinken

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for @Dinah, other tags for ref! leaving it aw for *spying*<3

what good was this wealth of natal land if there were not stewards enough for it?
a day's foraging had at last brought up a frozen haunch of elderly caribou. heda had breathed upon the ice and chased away the birds, and had broken the meat from the ground.
she carried it home for her daughters and for @John, declining any portion until they had all eaten first.
when the frosted night had fallen and she had put @Ava Amara to bed in the den she shared with her girls, heda had then drawn dinah to silencepine for a communion that could be only them.
"we have a decision to make, dear girl," the haggard mother whispered as her ears listened to the lagoon. "there are packs in the valley. we could join one of them. we could try to make it across the mountains, the other ones, and see what we can find."
her teeth chattered. the elements and her own gnawing, daily hunger had begun to slowly separate heda from reality, albeit slightly. she tended her own and returned each day; but now she stared off with soft golden eyes at the figure of caracal which had stepped from the shadows to join she and dinah.
"your father would have gone back. well. he would have never left. but i don't want to go back, sweetheart. we could stay here. but i don't think that's safe. so what do we do, dinah?"
her voice lacked insistence, sing-song as her brow furrowed and she stared at caracal, trying to make out what he was saying.

i... i don't know, mom.
they were starving. they were helpless. rivenwood was bleak and wrought with shattered souls, and dinah was tired.
her face had become sunken in with tired, puffy eyes; she dragged around a needle drawn figure that should be filling out with adult muscle. her voice lacked intonation.
on her shoulders she carried two heads. she, and the world around her, seemed to forget that she was still just a child.
h-how do we know that the packs around here will even like us? or if we'll like them? dinah's shoulders tremble as her gaze finds the distant, shell-shocked face of her mother. how much had she aged in the passing months? we could-- we could go back to those hearthwood people. or try and find gramma towhee, or something, or,
she could not continue her sentence. she began to fizzle out, her ears bending sidelong as her head sunk between her elbows.
i'm so tired.

heda's inhale shook in her throat.
"all right, dinah." her arm slid softly around the thin shoulders. "i'm tired too. and — i never should have taken you from the island." as if to punctuate their exhaustion, snow slowly filtered down through the beautiful silent canopies of rivenwood.
a breath. another.
"we could go back, dinah. are you r-ready? to go back?"
that was not something she had allowed herself to consider. ever. and inside her was a dragging sickness to think of it all, that caracal's death and her mad flight and the dissolution of her children had been worth nothing if she returned now.
but pride did not fill the belly.

no.
no, no, no — no no no no
dinah began to tremble fiercely, eyes snapping wide and pupils pinpricking with terror. immediately she felt flung backwards in time. the bristling autumn air against her back as she clung to the cold, stiff, unreal figure of —
i-i am not going back there. you will-- i can't. you can't make me go back, mama, no. soon she begins to feel saliva build in her mouth. the meal from hours before threatens to come back up, and dinah forces it back down.
breathing, shallow, torn.
i'm not letting us go back there. that's not our home anymore. it hasn't been in-- a long time. swallowing, dinah forces her gaze to fix upon the snowfall instead of the wretched face she no longer even recognized. we should go somewhere no one knows us.

"all right, all right, dinah, shh, shh, baby. we don't have to go back." not she, not ava, not john. but heda was bound to return if only to beg her sons. "we won't go back," she reassured again, resting her temple against the side of dinah's face, kissing the trembling ear.
"i've never gone too far south," she said, thoughts catching at the darkness she had only glimpsed beyond the rising sun, beyond the taiga in that direction. "i know this entire place. but i don't know what's south."
warmth, she hoped; the cold sucked all of what she had from her bones and each day that the winter intensified, she began to fear that she would wake to find one or both of them —
"if we go south, i'm not sure we'll — see gramma towhee again, at least for a long time. a place no one knows us has to be far." 
a place where god did not follow had to be farther.

Mature Content Warning

This thread has been marked as mature. By reading and/or participating in this thread, you acknowledge that you are of age or have permission from your parents to do so.

The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: emetophobia warning

south. dinah did not like the thought. what could be south, if this land too was south of the isle? she pictures a barren tundra and the withered, frozen skeletons of herself and her family. a hollow cry reaches from within her.
why don't we go west? she thought of hearthwood, of how pitiful it would be to crawl back to their doorstep. we failed. or-- the packs here, i know there's... swiftcurrent creek, i think, and something called var-sheen, swiftcurrent creek was where mae came from. and var-sheen; she knew nothing. hopelessness swallows the girl as she begins to weep silently, hot tears trailing the reddened cheeks.
i-i don't know what to do, mommy. i don't know anyone like you do, or where to go, or-- or who would even accept a group of fucking refugees, dinah snivels. b-but we can't go back, and we can't stay here, and, and--
warmth suddenly began to flood the upper half of her body, followed by a low pain in the pit of her stomach which rose then to her chest and her throat. before she knew it, her dinner was sprayed into the snow.
dirty and frail, dinah dissolves completely at the whim of her own desperate misery.

even as her own gorge kicked up, heda held dinah until the spasms of a sour gut had passed. her heart fluttered; "i've given you too much to carry."
all of what she had once surrendered to god was now heaped upon dinah, and heda did not know what she might do to shift the weight hanging like a millstone around her girl.
"here's what I'm going to do. in a couple of days, in the new year, i-i'm going out there and i won't come back without finding us a home, all right? but I will come back. i promise."

heda i am so sorry

don't you fucking dare.
the petrified voice rang hollow, scorned, truly devastated; the back of her wrist meets her mouth as she begins to wipe sickly green strands of saliva from her lips.
you're just gonna leave? you're gonna leave us here? alone? with john? again? dinah's heart pounds so hard in her chest that she fears it may stop in the oncoming moments. she surprises herself with the harshness of the shove that she gives to get away from the motherly embrace. you're not gonna leave us here. either we all go, or, or-- we split up, you and i go. but if you leave me alone, i will never fucking forgive you, do you hear me?
we will starve or freeze if we don't all work together, do you understand? her voice raises to an alarming decibel, puny lungs trembling with the intake of frigid air. i mean, fuck, look at yourself, mom. look at me! look at us! we-- dad and judah are dead. they are dead, mama! they are fucking dead! and i need you to get that through your fucking skull and get your shit together because i feel like-- i feel like i don't even have a mom anymore!
daddy and judah had taken her with them.

<33333

"then don't forgive me, dinah."
the first breath that passed through her lungs felt like shards of glass ground beneath a carpet. dinah was wrong and she was right and she was wrong and she was so right.
her body felt bruised in the way dinah cut away from her.
"i've lost six children." there was no way to convey how this felt, how this felt like the bleakest failure that ever came to pass. "yes. judah and daddy are dead." had she ever denied it? but even if she had not, there was resistance in her — for judah.
  i feel like i don't even have a mom anymore
this twisted in her chest, her heart.
"yes. they're dead. but we aren't," she hissed, suddenly seized by a paroxysm of anger at dinah's complete lack of understanding. "so yes. i am going to leave you and ava with john. i am going to find a place where we're not freezing and starving every single moment of the day. i am g-going to sacrifice more. i am not dragging you into the world to be ... hurt. harmed! do you understand, dinah!? this is the only place that is safe. never think i want to leave. never think for a moment i want to do this." to be this. "i have no one else. just you. just him. i will be back, because i have to be. because i want to be."

the anger that came hurling towards her was shocking for one moment, and in the next it was not. in silence, dinah's eyes found the faded gold of her mother's own and she saw herself in them; saw herself, truly, in the rage, in the flick of her tongue and the heady grief that did not seem to ever leave them alone.
mama had no one else in the same way that dinah herself didn't. mama had lost them too.
she had to go.
through the blinding tears, dinah hunches over and curls at her mama's feet; she squeezes her eyes shut, for she feared that if she opened them and saw the clench of her mama's jaw again she may collapse in on herself. she tastes the bile in the back of her mouth still, and it almost hurt.
can you sing to me? a quiet request, only loud enough to be heard by a mother's ears. like you used to when we were little. it was the only thing she could think of that would make things feel normal again.

"yes;" yes, the hymns, and — and she had no anger left in her, and was horrified that she had allowed dinah to see any part of what she carried. and in the next, heda was desperately glad not to be alone in such a crushing burden before.
she stooped, wrapped her arms around the crying girl.
for the eight children, scattered.
for sweetharbor.
for caracal.
for a god she no longer understood, but one whose love she sought.
she sang.