Andarin: The Mountains: nothing is eternal which may eternal lie; alkonost. --

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper.

- T. S. Eliot

That is alright, she said before she even knew she’d said anything at all.

She wondered if that was how their mother felt like all the time – the words coming unbidden, unspooling out of her mind. Jörmungandr spoke with her own throat and her own voice – a rich, deep contralto, not the whining, squeaking voice of so many mares – but nonetheless, the words seemed to flee her much faster than she noticed them.

Which, of course, was utterly irrelevant, and a castle of cards in face of the hurricane mounting inside her.

She didn’t want to, she said. But he did anyway.

And she hadn’t even noticed the roundness of her flanks until her twin mentioned it, too captivated by the gleam of the antlers and the way they flashed in sunlight and fire alike.

She didn’t want to.

She never wanted to.

Jörmungandr had never been a violent mare. She’d never seen the point of violence; it was too much effort for nothing, for one small moment of ephemeral pleasure. She’d been gentle her entire life because she wanted to be. Even her abilities, when they surfaced, were more protective than anything else.

She wasn’t violent now, when her body locked around her sister’s, felt it and touched it. Alkonost was warm, and solid, and familiarly welcome in a world gone too sharp-edged, too brilliant.

“Don’t cry,” she soothed, and hummed against her twin’s back and shoulders. Blood still dripped slowly from the chip in her skin. Blood welled from her sister’s throat and slid down her flesh. “Don’t cry, love.”

It was simple, so very simple.

“I will kill him,” she said, and her voice was still a warm and full and rich contralto, calm as a sedate summer day. She’d never been and never would be beautiful in the conventional sense, but she had a beautiful voice, one she liked to sing with, in strange tongues only she seemed to know. Alkonost, slender and cervine, almost like a ki-lin or unicorn of lore (though with a much more interesting artefact upon her forehead), was the beautiful one. White and rare and precious and hers.

So she held and touched and kissed and soothed or tried to, in her own way, and her breathing never shifted and her heartbeat never changed.

Inside, the storm grew, and she hated.

***
jörmungandr
there is hope, but not for us