You were my halogen, guiding me home
My only weapon when I was alone
She was once the great Winter Wolf. She was once the insurmountable figure that took over castles and kingdoms and patrolled battle fields to pick a good fight with any worthy opponent; she was once the soft touch of a healing kiss who picked up the fallen and mended them back to health. She was once many things that she no longer was, for she was never enough and was bound to fail the name given to her: Rannveig, the once-Queen of two courts that fell in different ways. She couldn't uphold them, couldn't support their weights on her back any longer, and so one she passed along to a girl-child who was too innocent for the cold bite of steel of a crown that sat upon her brow, and the other she only watched as it collapsed to finalize the end of an era for the winter lands of Veteris. She was left crownless, homeless, and seemingly destined to walk the earth stripped of all titles; she was not worthy of any great stories being retold, of having her name spoken aloud, of being seen as anyone but the shell of a defeated warrior.
She had lost her battle, and there was no recovering.
She carried a secret with her as she moved out past the Swamp she once traversed infrequently many many moons ago, where a Champion of Healing had sat beneath the reign of a now-fabled wolf queen. Briefly she wondered if Yana even called the lands home any longer, or if she too had bade her goodbyes and left her hoofprints as the only thing remaining of her existence with them. But the painted woman's mind was filled with other things, and it wasn't but a moment's blink with silver lashes that she instead refused to think anything more of her past. The marsh waters turned into solidified earth but the forest trees remained in place, their interspersed limbs occasionally intertwining with each other and encasing her in a space that felt safe, that indicated that, maybe, she could let everything else go too--the burden of failures, the insignificance of her minuscule achievements and how they dulled in comparison to the acknowledgment that she had let everyone down, everyone including Vespera.
Vespera... how her heart ached and cried to be pulled apart, to have the fine stitching of its fabric be cut undone; what had Vespera done? Rann had thought she alone had hurt the Dusk Court more than anyone, but in the end it was their Goddess that did the most damage. How could she have betrayed them, how could she have put her court through so much tragedy and call it a test of their will, a test of their strength when they had done nothing but prove their loyalty to her?
She stood on the edge of the singing creek, wolf coat thrown off some distance away, her body blurred out by the chilling mists in the air from both the winter season setting in and the excess water hanging around the cheery, small river. She felt anything but as she looked down into the soft curves of the pebbles and smoothed-out rocks, mind lost to the flow of the nearly-transparent liquid running through.
She had lost her battle, and there was no recovering.
She carried a secret with her as she moved out past the Swamp she once traversed infrequently many many moons ago, where a Champion of Healing had sat beneath the reign of a now-fabled wolf queen. Briefly she wondered if Yana even called the lands home any longer, or if she too had bade her goodbyes and left her hoofprints as the only thing remaining of her existence with them. But the painted woman's mind was filled with other things, and it wasn't but a moment's blink with silver lashes that she instead refused to think anything more of her past. The marsh waters turned into solidified earth but the forest trees remained in place, their interspersed limbs occasionally intertwining with each other and encasing her in a space that felt safe, that indicated that, maybe, she could let everything else go too--the burden of failures, the insignificance of her minuscule achievements and how they dulled in comparison to the acknowledgment that she had let everyone down, everyone including Vespera.
Vespera... how her heart ached and cried to be pulled apart, to have the fine stitching of its fabric be cut undone; what had Vespera done? Rann had thought she alone had hurt the Dusk Court more than anyone, but in the end it was their Goddess that did the most damage. How could she have betrayed them, how could she have put her court through so much tragedy and call it a test of their will, a test of their strength when they had done nothing but prove their loyalty to her?
She stood on the edge of the singing creek, wolf coat thrown off some distance away, her body blurred out by the chilling mists in the air from both the winter season setting in and the excess water hanging around the cheery, small river. She felt anything but as she looked down into the soft curves of the pebbles and smoothed-out rocks, mind lost to the flow of the nearly-transparent liquid running through.
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