*pondering*

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I've never been a very maternal person.

I mean, I was brought up with a man who was known to rob hospitals to acquire the corpses of unbaptised infants for ritual purposes. I spent most of my teens and twenties hanging out with wyrm beasts. I've been involved with dark rituals that featured large scale human sacrifice, although I like to think that by attending those rituals I stopped a great deal more carnage than I caused.

As an aside, why Garou always whinge about my associations with the Damned, even as they gobble up the information on where these Damned might be, is beyond me. Do they expect me to just pluck information out of the air? Do they think Gaia comes floating down from the heavens and just tells the corax where all the bad things are? Stupid stupid wolf-creatures.

Anyway. Me. This is all about me, right?

Except it doesn't seem to be anymore.

Everything changed in the Labyrinth. Whether it changed for better or worse, I am unsure. I simply know that how I perceive myself, and how I interact with the world appears to have been altered in a slightly unnervingly profound way. The man I trusted apparently would have preferred it if we had died tragically together, rather than live imperfectly. This is a slightly unsettling thing to find out. My best friend, who I had thought dead, may or may not be back from the dead, and it appears that Corax Heaven looks a lot like other people's hell.

And above it all, I found a little girl crying in the darkness. That has changed everything.

At first I thought she was some reflection of my own past. The place she was in looked like a fairground, and she was crying by a merry-go-round. When I was her age, that's where I was found by a policeman. I was crying because my mother had left. In my case, my mother had left me for the umbra. She saw the light reflected in the mirrors on the merry-go-round and couldn't help herself anymore. So whilst I was clinging to a brightly painted horse, she stepped sideways, and never came back.

The Labyrinth puts all your nightmares on display. It looked like one more, and so maybe that's why I first went over to talk to her.

And then...

She wasn't me. That became obvious. Who she was, and where she came from is still something I don't know. She clung to me, and asked me not to leave her. No one has ever really chosen me in that way before. Even Tim just toppled into a relationship with me after I crawled into his bed. No one has ever decided they wanted me before. It seems I find it hard to walk away from that.

I talked to Fate. Fate was generous that day, and told me three things.

She told me that the child was more dangerous, and more precious than she seemed. And she told me to care for it. And then my nose began to bleed and I took that for a sign that Fate was done with this particular conversation.

So I picked up the child. Her name was Mary. She liked ponies, and she wanted a mother.

I picked her up and I carried her through hell. I think she saved my soul. Without her, I'd have been lost there. Lost in the dark places beneath the Shadowlands, where you're walking through the dreams of monsters.

Now I'm back, and I'm still carrying her, and maybe she's still saving my soul. I keep an eye on her when she sleeps, and I try and avoid listening too closely to the names she screams in her nightmares. In the day, I look impressed by the pictures she gives me, and I've now found a riding school where I can take her to meet the ponies.

I've not gone back to the rest of my life yet.

I don't know quite how to go back.

I don't know what to say to the man I trusted. I think he and I have betrayed each other, in some odd way, and I don't know where to go from there.

I don't know how to deal with the Amenti, with the Garou, with all the people who expect something of me.

I don't know how to pay my debts and not lose the last bit of my soul, which of course was the point of the price in the first place.

So I stay here, and make fairy cakes with the child and hold on to these amazing sunshine moments.

Maybe that's what she did for me?

She gave me sunshine.

If you're me, that's a precious gift to give...

Comments

[kathminchin.livejournal.com]

Shame you don't know Lucy - Lucy would buy the kid a pony ... just because she deserves one :o)

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

My labyrinth rage all depends on the labyrinth in question. Nephandic or Malfean Labyrinths do not phase me. Black Spiral Labyrinth makes me grumpy, and old man manyskins was ... jdsv...

[Ben is muffled by the Nuwisha Fanboy Liberation Army]