- Sundew Scion is a living confluence. Through her cross many travelers, and their journey's marks are left indelibly upon her. But there are paths that haven't been taken in so long that the brush has overgrown in her heart. Weeds threaten to take it. The soil cracks beneath her paws.
She selects one for a personal day to prune and tend to. She is, after all, a gardener.
The graveyard is a newer addition to the Court, but a necessary one. Sundew understands what making the intangible tangible again does to a wolf, but the hurt too is also necessary. A bone healed wrong must be broken again to set right. A memorial to the fallen is only fair to those that were lost - and to those that would one day join them. It, too, is its own confluence--where dead and living can commune. Or so she hopes.
There are those she has accepted have moved on. Her father and mother had been taken much too soon, and she had leaned on Snapdragon more than she wishes she had to. In this new land, Sundew has taken care to let her sister be again; she wonders if old wounds have healed yet, if Snapdragon has flourished without her source of envy. For Sundew's part, she has tried to manage it with her garden, seeded with new plants and old ones from their parents' personal garden, believing that the commingling is a sign of moving on. Acceptance of what is and what may be from now on. Or perhaps it is yet one more symbol of Sundew's inability to let go of the past, as if the roots of old and new can never be separated, only transplanted. She was a gardener back then, too. She is still a gardener, but it is so very different now.
And then there were those that were not of her blood but family regardless: her terran sisters, all cut down by Trolls as their invasive population grew. Some had placated. Some had rebelled. Some had simply existed in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sundew visits their grave markers one by one, sending her thoughts to the sisterhood the way a human might have written a letter, though she would never know it. She tells them about her days in the Murkwood Court, how the new terrans are getting along, about the reintroduction of terran-blooded males, about the Great Feast they had held. About Beechbone and Petals Open to the Moon and their children, about the cheerful gossip she has seen around Snapdragon, about Fern and Bramble, about Roachspeak and Shaded Amaryllis. She tells them about their families, if they had any, or tells them that she hopes they are well and at peace if they too have passed. She talks to them like she can talk to no other living soul, and guilt creeps upon her. Why should the dead listen to her woes when they are beyond the problems of this world? Is she not strong enough, capable enough, to handle herself by herself?
No.
The rumors that had swirled before about her single status had pained Sundew more than she had let on. She had never been one who ascribed the idea that one was only ever truly half until another or more was found to piece you together. Her mother had been strong and unwilling to be with anyone who could not keep up with her--metaphorically or literally. Snapdragon now heads the hunters and is similarly independent. And the pack...Sundew was certainly needed, yes, but wanted? It isn't like her to think about things like this--she runs away like a deer in the chase more often than not--but in speaking to her sisters about the others...
Her paws p***k upon hidden thorns as she walks. Blood trickles into the cracked soil and nourishes it like water. What was once thought dead is now revived.
There is one more headstone to greet.
[ wc 662 ]
