14 Spring 515 AV
"Mom."
The word slipped from her mouth as a whisper, an echo of a world that was both all too near and exceptionally distant. It was a world she'd left behind. A world she'd renounced. Yet it was a world that was staring her in the eye, with a hand on her cheek. It was comforting, warm, and everything that she did not want. Or so she tried to believe.
Marion had always been told she looked just like her mother, though she had never quite understood the sentiment. Angela Kay was brown-haired and brown-eyed. A mousy little woman, with an almost sickly kind of fragile disposition, despite a healthy glow to her skin. But above all, she was beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world, in her daughter's eyes at least.
To Marion, her mother had been everything she never was, and everything that she would never be. She was steady. Marion was not. She was genial. Marion was not. She was light, warm, pure, devoted, loyal, humble, kind. Marion was not. She was successful, and she was happy, and Marion was not.
Still, even as she thought this, Marion recognized something in her mother's face beyond simple familiarity. She saw herself, older and more experienced. Wise, even. Marion saw her her future, or one possibility of her future.
But before she could analyze this point, her mother spoke and the tenderness in her voice froze Marion in place.
"Marion mouse."
It was a nickname she had left behind, bestowed by a woman in a world she had left behind.
"Mom," she repeated, like it was the only word she understood. It sounded too small, too young, too foreign to her ears. Motherly fingertips brushed her temple.
A steady wind blew across them from some indistinguishable source. There was nothing around them, neither light nor darkness. No walls, no fields. Just nothing.
She waited for the woman to say something, anything, but all Angela Kay had to offer was silence. Not a spiteful silence, Marion knew from the softness of her expression. There was a sadness there too, and it struck Marion in a place she did not comprehend.
"Are you disappointed?" The words were a breath, broken and delicate. Her jaw was trembling, she realized after a moment, and had to bite her tongue to make it stop.
Her mother's brow furrowed upward in uncertainty, and her hand dropped to Marion's shoulder. She opened her mouth as if to say something, and closed it again after a moment's hesitation, and Marion felt a quiet anger flare up at the idea that her mother either couldn't or wouldn't speak. But after a moment of what must have been internal deliberation, she did.
"Yes -- No? I don't... I'm not sure." Pretty lips pursed into a frown that Marion felt more accurately highlighted their similarities. "I think I am," she nodded slowly, "but not for the reasons you have in mind."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean... I understand the need you feel, the call to," a searching pause, "duty." The corners of her mouth flicked up in a small smile before vanishing into a pursed line of thoughtfulness. "Things would be easier, I think, if there were a right way and a wrong way. But there isn't. We can only choose what feels right to us and hope our dedication is enough.
"What disappoints me is that you never said goodbye. Not even a letter. Where are you? Are you doing okay? Are you hurt? Are you even alive? Your father and I, we worry about these things. But I understand where you're coming from. He doesn't, not so much."
"He's still waiting to be saved," Marion realized, and it was true. Her father loved Ionu, but he had never felt it reciprocated, and he owed the god nothing.
Her mother nodded her agreement. "He doesn't quite understand the calling of it, the faith and the devotion."
"And you do." Whether it was a statement or a question was unclear.
"I do. And I understand that you answer to a new mother now."
A spot of movement snagged Marion's attention, and her eyes were drawn past her mother to a rift that seemed to have just appeared, despite the fact that she was deeply certain it must have been present this whole time. There was a swirling darkness, swallowing space and fraying reality at its edges. Inescapable. A door to oblivion. She could see the air warp around its slowly-turning mouth and knew what she would find on the other side of it.
A knot formed inside of her, a rigid tightening in her chest, an indecipherable feeling. Dread. She could recognize it only abstractly. She understood what it meant, like reading the word on a page, but the only feeling it elicited was an empty echo where fear used to be -- and a childlike admiration.
The wind, which had died down to a nearly-imperceptible breeze,suddenly picked up once again, more violent than before, tearing at their bodies and threatening to rip them apart. The only thing keeping mother and daughter bound together was the caress on Marion's shoulder.
One moment stretched in time. Her mother smiled a sad smile that felt too much like goodbye. The wind screamed in Marion's ears. Louder louder louder.
And then a release.
Silence.
The pressure of her mother's hand lifted, and just like that the older woman was gone, spirited away through that maw of darkness and dread.
Marion felt strangely relieved.
And strangely devastated.
Whatever she felt, one sound broke the silence, and Marion felt distantly aware that it was her own voice, her own mouth, her own throat raked by the word her lungs spat up:
"Mom!"
Marion flinched awake, limbs tangled in crimson sheets and a fine sheen of sweat, eyes eyes met with the wooden boards of the ceiling. There were walls here. There was no all-consuming darkness, but a steady stream of daylight filtered through one street-facing window.
It was just her, the steady rise and fall of her breath, and some light footsteps outside of her room.
"Mom," she mouth silently, fists tugging a blanket back up to her face despite the fact that she was already too hot. "Sorry."
