Ni'Srilan: The Desert: sammael or anyone; when we were kings (or queens)

We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,
out of hiding.
- Louise Erdrich
“Tick?” she had called in a hush to the brazen morning that shone thick against her drowsing, drooping eyelids. When there was no answer, only the fierceness of the sun that rose over the mountains, only then did she feel the first stirrings of panic in her breast. Not once had they been separated, not from the moment of her birth and now… Now…

Where was he?

She implored the creatures of the earth to use their eyes to look for him, their ears to listen for him, and their noses to pick his scent from the passing winds. But no sparrow, no hare, no frog in the pond had seen his passage from this earth and she feared that in the night, in her dreaming (or his), that her brother had become a ghost. She took to imploring even the insects to alert her to any sign of her brother, to any small track or trace of fur that might belong to him. But Nettle knew, deep in her breast, beyond her heart where the ache first began, as if her soul had finally split in two, that not even the tiniest ant would find a hair of him here still.

That was when she knew - truly knew - that she was alone. And alone, she set off to complete her teacher-given task within the desert. Her feet did not care for the shifting, tricky grains of sand that slid underneath her hooves. Her fur did not care for the hot, hot heat or the humid air that made her perspire and glisten from the sweat that slicked her breast and her armpits and the bit of neck just beneath her hair. But here she was, in search of a colt (or was he a stallion now?) named Sammael, and in search of someone else too - perhaps some remnant of her brother, but no, it wasn’t him. She had to meet Sammael and a stranger to finish her task.

She had to do this, she just had to - for herself, to learn to be alone (to always find that his shadow didn’t touch hers, nor did his flesh).