GIRL WITH AN ACCENT OF BLOOD
Sixty years. The knowledge rang in her ears, hanging heavy like a millstone around her neck. It had been sixty years of time robbed from her, sixty years of everyone she has ever known continuing to live and eventually dying while she had laid asleep in the swamp, sixty years of the Ager rotting away and forgotten. Sixty years while the Ilati had faded away into obscurity, sixty years since her mother had been informed her daughter had disappeared and had died not knowing what had become of her, hidden away in the swamp they had called home where even the Ilati dared not tread.
Sixty years of grief in the span of a few hours, weighing upon her slender shoulders until she felt like she could drown beneath it.
It hadn’t taken her long to find her mother’s grave amongst the family’s burial grounds, and she almost wept at how the moss had all-but-obscured the name etched into the gravestone, the same way history had seemingly hidden her mother’s existence from the world, unable to credit an Ilati priestess for the Halcyon commander who had brought a new era to Terrastella.
She doesn’t feel like that Commander any more, only a child who has lost her mother, and the tears begin to fall as she sets about the task of beginning to clear the gravestone that has been abandoned for decades, tenderly brushing the moss away with a wing.
Oh, momma, what I wouldn’t give to hear your voice again...
Sixty years of grief in the span of a few hours, weighing upon her slender shoulders until she felt like she could drown beneath it.
It hadn’t taken her long to find her mother’s grave amongst the family’s burial grounds, and she almost wept at how the moss had all-but-obscured the name etched into the gravestone, the same way history had seemingly hidden her mother’s existence from the world, unable to credit an Ilati priestess for the Halcyon commander who had brought a new era to Terrastella.
She doesn’t feel like that Commander any more, only a child who has lost her mother, and the tears begin to fall as she sets about the task of beginning to clear the gravestone that has been abandoned for decades, tenderly brushing the moss away with a wing.
Oh, momma, what I wouldn’t give to hear your voice again...
