THE BOY I LOVED LEFT ME FOR A REVOLUTION
WE WERE NEVER MEANT TO GROW OLD
Everything happens at once. Time had ceased to exist; but in a hairsbreadth moment, when a large striped stallion grabs the relic, the sun shudders in the sky and the world around them begins to collapse.
Boudika does not reach the relic. In her striving, her yearning, she falls short and feels the shifting sands beneath her hooves. It does not take long for her to realise the End is unavoidable, and her bargaining chip may have been her life. She does not want to think too harshly as to whether or not she had gambled too steep a price—she runs past where the relic had been, bursting through the trees and out, out, out, but everywhere she finds the island is breaking beneath her, and just beyond the reach of her long and powerful stride the sea gleams like a savour.
The waves do not crash as she had expected; instead they swell upon the beach, engorged. It is as if they are gnawing at the island and after a moment the red mare begins to realise that they are not rising, but the very earth beneath her is sinking. Great chasms of sand open up and she leaps around; in her fury and her flight she finds herself running among a small gathering of strange and magic creatures.
A wildcat with antlers and faceted black opal eyes snarls as she passes, and nearly lunges—but then a tree crashes atop it, and yowling it is left for dead. Horses, deer and gazelle, wildcats and gemstone birds—all overrun the fallen, all push out toward the sea. Boudika discovers chaos at the disintegrating bridge and, already, monsters swarm where great chunks fall off into the sea. She tests her luck, surging to the forefront of the crowd. She makes it to the bridge, barely, and finds herself lunging from rock to rock while they remain atop the water.
When she had first come to the island, she had been stranded there for days; afraid of what it would mean to leave. And now the water calls to her as if to save her—where once it had been her sole fear—and when Boudika misses her stride and tumbles into the waves.
Somehow, she is not immediately torn apart by the writhing sea-monsters. She struggles for a moment, and then instinctively begins to kick toward shore, discovering a strange fluidity and grace to her movements—her lungs fill with the water and she hears the islands heartbeat throb far, far beyond.
She has never seen such terrifying sights as dragons and tentacled leviathans; there are long-necked, long-teethed sea-serpents and a plethora of strange, prehistoric beasts. Boudika is surprised to see them tear at one another, as if the islands beating heart has begun to drive them mad—she does not linger, and instead she embraces her newfound nature and pushes toward the shore. She can taste the blood in the sea and she wonders, if perhaps, everything is dying. But that cannot be, because
the sea is singing, singing, singing,
and it is a song of life, and death, and—
she cannot explain it.
Boudika stumbles to shore and her legs do not want to belong to the land. The air enters her lungs and it tastes foul. She stumbles, and seashells break underfoot, with saltwater streaming from her flanks and hair. There is something amiss; yet everything is sharper, everything is brighter, and it feels for the first time in a long time as if perhaps, perhaps, she did not need a favour from a god. Something surges within her as wild as the collapse she has left behind; something surges within her that reminds her of the wildcat as it ran, and she shakes the water from her head like a dog. Then, Boudika screams.
It is a keening, piercing call—and it does not belong to an equine but instead, to the sea, to a water horse.
She keens, and keens, and keens, and somewhere her heart aches for an answer. She thinks of writhing water monsters and wonders if Amoraq made it out alive. She wonders what favour she would have asked a god and decides, strangely, that this is it. Her teeth taste like copper, and her keening cry reaches a crescendo, heightening, heightening, until she lets it break off as if waiting for an answer—
Boudika feels the tension, she thinks there is an answer, there is an answer, waiting to draw breath, but the silence stretches out and out and out, and all she hears is the sea against her heels going
shush, shush, shush
and the island’s dying heart in her hooves, going
beat, beat, beat.
STAFF EDIT***
@Boudika has rolled a 2! They have been awarded +250 signos.
