To Feel The Rain: Chapter Three

--- o For the Spooktober Prompt #14: Mother o ---

   ❛ If I don’t move, I won’t be seen. ❜

   Similar thoughts plagued her mind, racing musings distilled anxious nausea that caught both breath and step, hesitating shaken hands that tenderly touch upon cracked stone through a thin veil of frost. Bravery eluded her, rejecting her need —her want to run away; feet glued firmly to the ground and eyes unable to relieve themselves of what she witnessed. Could she choose between fight or flight? Or be trapped as she oft found herself in that of freezing; much like the evening chill, she was so accustomed.

   The absence of a pendant, her pendant, broke her trance as she instinctively reached for it as she always would when anxious. Finding nothing to hold on to, she frantically looked around for, but it likely fell from her hands during her panicked hamartia to flee from her earlier pursuers. It fell, as it was, at the feet of this stranger who now gingerly kneeled to take it in hand, inspecting it momentarily before scanning the area around them. She ducked to hide, hoping the woman had missed her and passed on to elsewhere so she could make her undiscovered escape yet found she could not do so.

   ❛ If I don’t move— ❜

   She only blinked. Barely enough time for someone to turn on heel and approach her, yet this person — This woman, now stood before her, even before the word she spoke died on the breeze. She didn’t even make a sound,  she was just there, leering over the half-wall the child hid behind.

   Her heart sank the moment their eyes met, as if the woman knew she had been there from the start. And she, the young girl —knew who this person was the moment they did, even if she didn’t believe it. She opened her mouth to speak, but naught a whimper escaped.

   Before her; a stark mirror image to fractured memory; absconded of expectations of warmth and maternal embrace she so desperately yearned, she found in its place an enervated haze and darkened sunken rings set upon her unhurried.

   ❝ L’Gosstyn? ❞

   Blunt, indifferent and uncharged. A word she did not know in a strong a brogue hinted with the ghost of staccato, one she found all too familiar. She gazed levelly at the lone child, an unreadable expression painted around empty, exhausted eyes.

   ❛ Mother? Mother! ❜  There were many words she wanted to say, but her lingering hopes were long since stifled despite remnants of a hopeful smile that faded just as quickly as it came.

   The stranger said something under her breath, but just as quickly pondered as to why she did but pursed her lips. A fleeting look of recognition, brief flashes of glassed eyes and inexplicable melancholy, once more plunged into the jaded depths cast down upon her.

   That moment stuck with her, the cold sweat she felt as the hairs on her neck stand on end, a monumental pit in her stomach she had seldom felt. The lack of recognition in her eyes, and the flat detachment of her words robbed her of what little hope she had left.

   But it was not fear nor relief — No, rather it was an acute mix between an all-consuming sadness and hiraeth. It was of a hope crushed as quickly as it came, the knowledge that this was not the person she so desperately needed, but it wasn’t a mocking imitation either. She was too young to understand they were in a world that she was yet to exist.

   ❝ Ya’ lost? ❞

--- o ---