The original idea for this one should be credited to Farawyn, also the title *g*
~*~Shieldmother~*~
He loomed before me, a Thing unbidden, undead, unseeable. I breathed him and he filled my lungs as the smoke of perdition and I knew. Choking, I gazed into the channel of his lust and beheld a vast funnel which culminated in the pit of utter nothingness that awaited my cringing soul. I saw my name crackle on the spiraling stairs amid the shrieks of lunatic love that rode the boiling vortex descending. I saw an Eye that discerned my locked casements and echoing stairwells. I knew then what I could be as my image writhed in the flickering, jellied blackness of its all-knowing pupil. And even as I smote his ruin in desperate abandon I fell motionless as one must before such a likeness each string that suspended me from the light severed entirely.
And even now, as I lie in my bower by the side of my lord and my babe a domain of freshness surrounding, a mantle of stars overspread; even in our most joyous coupling and sweetest afterglow, from time to time I lift my eyes and see the canopy of the Shadow and hear the rising screech in the stillness of the furtive hall that lies even in the palace of blessedness and taste the foulness I inhaled so that you, my newborn, my jewel, my princeling, my own, softest bloom of my once withered heart might breathe the tender air and race down white slopes that lead only to fields of delight and gaze into dancing waters where only the day’s Eye may show you what you might be. I would do all again if need be. I am your shield yet. He may haunt me still but conquer, never for I am no man and he knows naught of the true bastion of motherhood.
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