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 Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 10:09 pm
January 2025 - Death (WC: 1000) - [x]
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Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 10:13 pm
Prompt: Quote: It's a new year in the Kawani lands! Winter is in full swing and much of the land is covered in snow. Does your soquili do anything to acknowledge or celebrate the new year? Are they part of a herd or family that has a tradition or ceremony? Have they made a promise to start the new year with a clean slate and change themselves for the better?
Or did they simply try to stay warm and wait for the snow to melt and spring to arrive?  Spring had never been her season. New life, fresh green shoots springing up from the mud, long-legged babies stumbling through the grass. All things that were completely out of her wheelhouse, things that didn’t belong to her.
Yet.
Summer was better. Droughts, hungry predators, mothers trying to keep their young fed. After the initial shock of spring, cooler temperatures and milder nights, the heat of the summer was a welcome friend. She didn’t have to work as hard as in spring; the blistering sun did the work for her, sapping energy and burning the grass to a crisp under her hoof.
Autumn was a season of celebration. The nights were frigid, and the days—oh, the days. Leaves falling from trees, the insects going to ground, dying off in droves. Violence among the creatures of the forest, fighting for rapidly declining resources, for shelter, for mates. Autumn was a time to be the carnal beasts they were always meant to be, selfish and cruel in the face of what was to come.
Winter. Oh, winter. The frost took the weakest creatures quickly, too fragile to survive long. As snow blanketed the lands, she would find those who couldn’t gather supplies in time, those who hadn’t found shelter from the storms, covered in a fluffy layer of white. Preserved in the cold, spilled across the land when another creature came to take what it needed to survive.
This time of year—just after the new year, when the nights howled with a bitter wind and no matter how long one stood in the sun, one never stopped shivering—was her favorite. Despair filled the air like a sweet perfume; supplies had run out. The grass that crunched under the snow devoid of nutrition, and the careful layers of fat and insulation whittled away by a body desperate enough to consume itself to survive. The beasts that relished in this season were of another world, fueled by instinct and a moral code that would make the average Soquili shudder.
But not Death. Death blended in with the snow, her pale coat barely visible, a ghost in a blizzard. She didn’t have to work so hard in the winter; while the summer sun picked off the weak, the winter moon claimed the unlucky, the ill-prepared, the careless. All it took was one night below freezing temperatures, and a watering hole reduced to ice, to claim a life. All it took was the wind blowing in the wrong direction, or a biting wind, or an avalanche.
All it took was a predator, so focused on its own survival that it would risk its life to take another.
Many of the Soquili she had stalked during the rest of the year had fled the lands in search of winter grazing, places to shield their expectant mares and ragged elders from the elements. The ones who stayed behind were thinner than they were the last time she saw them, whittled away by the howling gales. She could see the heat dissipating above them like steam, their tails tucked as they turned with their backs to the wind.
All she had to do now was wait. She didn’t have to manipulate winter to take a life; winter claimed what already belonged to it without deigning to think of what it cost.
But, as entranced as she was by the season, as much as she reveled in the beautiful violence of it, she, too, was mortal. She curled up at the edge of the forest, tucked away behind foliage dense enough to block the worst of the wind, as she watched the herd in the distance.
Soon, one would drop. One of that year’s foals, perhaps, or an adult past their prime. Then she would rise from her bed, stalking across the plains to guide the poor soul across. To where, she could never be sure, but it had to be somewhere kinder than here. She would sit with them until she was sure every last whisper of their memory was gone, and then she would move on to find another, and another, and another, until the first green shoots of spring signalled the beginning of a new life.
Years passed this way. She was a loner by nature—one had to be when one was the usher of lost souls—but this year felt different. Lonely. Hopeless in a way she had never felt before.
Soquili were not meant to be alone. Herds ensured continued survival; sharing body heat, passing provisions between them, being protected by stronger, more capable herdmates, kept the weaker ones alive despite the chill in the air. She lingered on the cusp of life and death every waking moment, so close that all it would take to send her over the edge was a gentle push, but she had grown tired. Weary.
As close as she was to death herself, she wanted to live, if only so the poor lost souls of the land would always have a kind and gentle hand to guide them home.
She longed for a family to call her own. Someone to protect her when she was weak, someone to look after when she felt like her only purpose in life could never be fulfilled, someone to keep her company on the long, cold nights. There was only so long a lone Soquili could survive without outside assistance. She could only stare into so many blank, lifeless eyes before she found herself wishing that they would stare back at her, to see her as more than just an apparition in the snow. To see her for what she truly was; grief, and love persevering. Kindness. Mercy.
As soon as the moon began to set, the new year upon her, she made a vow. This year would be the year she found a companion, someone to guide her in the realm of the living while she helped souls cross over into the next.
After all, every year was just another year closer to Death.Word Count: 1000
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