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what had she done whathadshedone
She fled from the scene that seemed to magnify every other poor choice she'd made, brought everything into clear and painful focus. She was lost; her brain was gone and her body. . .
The woman stumbled through the fen, past greens she could not eat and water she could not drink;
Water.
Lilitu had never been so desperate for anything in her life.
It had to have been hours, days, that she spent traveling in circles here, crossing her own path again and again and again and
Mama.
Lucidity, like a bolt to the heart. She stood above an old, mossy cairn, situated near another.
Slowly, she went to her belly and wept into the stones. Breathing hard, as if enough force could summon the smell and spirit of Ibis into her lungs, and bring life where there was only now death.
Mama, can you hear me?she asked, in a voice quiet as anything.
She had wanted more from life than this. She had thought—
Well, didn't you get it?
She'd been royalty, in a palace only done justice by fairy tales. She'd seen the tops of mountains and the deepest valleys; she had felt the ocean's kiss upon her face, the bite of ice against her toes, the sound of thunder roaring in her ears.
She had loved much, and lost even more than that.
And though she had never been called "Mother," perhaps. . .
There were shadows in her periphery, and she thought they each bore the pure blue of a baby's gaze.
Perhaps once. Perhaps again.
As she blinked, the apparitions slipped away, and the last of her mind with them.
The wolf rose with a pained, desperate whine, foam-flecked spittle rolling across her lips and dribbing down her chin, her throat. Splattering on the ground as she lurched forward, looking for
water
water everywhere, and not a drop to
drink, screamed her instincts, drink!
she stood in the shade of a willow, its fronds dipping gently into the pool, and as she sipped and gagged, sipped and gagged, the very worst of images shifted upon the rippling chaos;
consumed as she now was
please,she mouthed, begging for just a drop, just a drink,
she slammed her head down into the depths of the water, sending it into her nostrils; hot and sharp against her lungs;
she could not stop. even as her temple hit a submerged stone with a sharp crack, she persisted.
blow by blow, desperate in her dying,
the flashing lights slowly easing into a darkness that she would not escape.
She lay still in the waters of the fen, submerged to the lobes of her ears. Blood and brain matter blossomed out from her head like a grisly halo.
One last crown for a princess—
If not by birthright, then, certainly, in heart and soul.
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