The Mother in Green fought against the massive black spider’s remaining legs. She knocked them away one by one and stepping inside its guard, lying her hands on it.
“Where are you injured? Let me heal it.” She demanded, her aura glowing green against his black body.
“Girl.” The spider said in its whispering voice.
“Take it, take all of it. I don’t know how your body works, but here!” She shouted, the light from her palms growing brighter and brighter as it spread over the spider.
“You have nothing left to give. You will leave yourself hollow.” The spider insisted, struggling to stand on his seven legs. He brought one down and struck The Mother in Green square in her chest.
It knocked the lithe woman back onto the ground and the expression on her face twisted into something savage and furious.
“Let me fucking help you!” She shouted, slamming her balled fists down onto the rocky ground below her and leaning forward onto the balls of her feet. She crawled over to the spider on her hands, her black hair hanging wild around her.
The spider threw its front legs up into the air and exposed its long black fangs. “I do not wish for your help. I was ancient before half of you Mothers were born. It has long been my time to die, I have held it off for your sake only. Should I waist away in my burrow until I am blind like Izez? Do you wish for me to age until I can no longer hunt like Shuck?”
“No, but. . .how am I supposed to go on without you?” The Mother in Green said, her voice shaking.
“How you do is irrelevant. You will. Keep your eyes open, Gwyn Ar Temis. Remember what I have taught you over these long years. ” A whistling hiss came from the spider and his legs gave out under his weight. He slammed down to the rocky ground, his voice growing quieter.
“Girl,” It spoke to me. “You must care for her until she returns to herself, but it can not be done here. Take her, leave this mountain of anguish and flee.”
“Why?” I answered, my voice rough and ragged from all of the screaming I had done.
“I am a titan, girl. When something like me dies, it is not without an aftermath.” The spider answered.
Titan?
With a final hiss, the spider rolled onto its back and its massive legs curled inward towards its body.
The green glow of The Mother in Green’s Aura began to fade as she threw her arms around the unmoving spider and cried. It was not dramatic. She did not wail or scream. The only sign of her grief was the one sided embrace and the tears pattering to the rocky ground beneath her.
I do not know how long I sat and watched her. Every few moments, a part of all the strange things that had happened to me since I had fallen asleep in Anna’s arms would come to the front of my mind. The shift, the lake of clear fire, and the death of Schwarz were not some elaborate part of my second punishment.
Her tears seemed real enough and the spider had not moved in quite some time.
All of it had been some unfortunate turn of events.
With her aura growing ever dimmer, The Mother in Green lowered herself to the ground and pulled her knees to her chest. Her long black hair draped over her like a veil when she settled. One of her hands had been burnt, either from the clear fire or the flames that had burned Schwarz’s leg, but she seemed not to care.
New light caught my eye. So small, I thought I was imagining it, a pale blue mote floated up from the tip of one of the spider's black fangs.
Opa. I thought, remembering the times I had seen the same kind of light coming from the owl spirit that lived inside Arthur.
Like a swarm of blue, more and more motes rose from the massive black body until they formed a glowing blue swarm.
You must care for her. Schwarz’s whispering word’s returned to me. I did not know how old she was or how long they had known each other, but by her emotion alone, I could tell that the spider had meant very much to her.
I could not heal her. If I was capable of that, my hand would no longer be broken.
There was someone who had shown me what being cared for meant. I was not her, but I could pretend to be.
With a pained grimace, I ducked my head out of the bandage that held my broken arm and pulled it from the rest. All of them were dirty, torn, and hanging loosely, but the one around my neck was mostly clean.
Standing was a struggle. I finally crawled to my feet and took slow steps towards her. If her afterglow was anything like mine, I did not want to scare her into attacking me.
“Hey,” I said, trying to mimic Anna’s soothing voice. “You are okay.”
I squatted down and gently took her burnt hand in mine, careful to not touch the places that it was injured.
The Mother in Green flinched at my touch and the last remnants of her aura turned to dust in her hands.
“You are okay.” I repeated, using the bandage I had taken off to wrap her wound.
“This,” She flinched again. “Wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“You are okay.” I repeated again, tying the bandage off with a sloppy knot. I didn’t know how to make it look all neat like Anna did.
The motes that rose from the body of Schwarz, the little blue lights that took tiny pieces of him away as they left him, had reached a number that I had to swat them away with my hand. It felt so strange trying to comfort a Mother. Not very long before, she had stolen me from my bed as I slept and had proceeded to hunt me in the shapes of all manner of terrifying monsters. Instead of punishment, she had been left in my care by something that called herself a titan.
Mother’s help her.
Maybe, if I could distract her from the way she felt, she would come back to herself sooner rather than later. Thinking that it made enough sense for me to attempt it, I asked her a question.
“Where are we?”
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“A volcano. Vowkeeper’s Anguish, I think.” The Mother in Green answered me weakly after a big sniffle.
It worked! I thought, looking around the mote filled air. They had begun to settle on the ground all around us like a dusting of pale blue snow.
“What is that?” I continued, a little more confident than before. Had Schwarz been wrong? The Mother in Green did not seem angry at all.
“I don’t know,” She sniffled again. “She won’t tell me.”
That was when the ground underneath us cracked.
A low roar, like what I had heard before the shift had dropped us in the sky, filled my ears.
“No, no, no,” The Mother in Green shouted, kicking herself back from the spider’s body. The crack in the stone had appeared directly under it and the roar made it feel like the ground was shaking. “It’s happening. Oh fuck. Sisters help me!”
“What is happening?” I asked her, standing and helping her on her feet.
Her hair hung down to her hips and I was surprised to find that we were close to the same height. After Azza, I had begun to expect all of The Mothers to be much taller than me.
Her eyes were wide and her lithe legs shook as she walked backwards from the crack.
“A split. It’s what happens when a titan dies. I have to get away from here.” She whispered, her eyes darting from me to the spider to the pale blue crack in the rocky ground.
With a breaking echo, the crack widened and Schwarz’s body shifted downwards into it.
Sudden heat blew up from the broken stone, breaking my whole body into an instant sweat. The clear fire from within the volcano bubbled up through the crack and began to burn the spider's body wherever it touched.
“I’m sorry.” The Mother in Green whispered. Without another word, she spun on her heels and dashed away. She ran straight down the mountainside, leaving me standing alone on the cracking ground.
“Hey!” I shouted after her, the shock of her flight leaving me unable to move.
The sound of liquid caught in a rolling boil brought my attention back to the widening crack. A clear bubble that was growing entirely too slow bubbled up from the crack and burst, sending small droplets into my legs and feet.
“Fuck!” I screamed, taking quick steps back and slapping my skin wherever it had been burned. Pain streaked through my broken hand when I smacked it into my shin.
The ground shook so violently that it nearly took me off my feet as the crack split once again. Schwarz’s corpse burned away as it dropped further into the bubbling fire. Pale blue light, in streams instead of motes, flowed from the spider like upward streams. The breaking mountainside was stained with the color and the sky had begun to darken from the black smoke that billowed from the lake within it.
I went the way of The Mother in Green, locking my eyes onto her long black hair and running as fast as I could after her.
There was no part of me that knew what a split entailed. If there was, I could not remember. However, I knew from the small beginning of it that I had witnessed, that I did not wish to learn about it through experience.
“Wait,” I called after my should be punisher. “Mother Gwyn, wait!”
How is she that fucking fast? I thought, watching the distance grow between us no matter how hard I pushed myself. Every stride she took carried her away from me and she seemed to have none of the trouble I did with running over the loose rocks and shaking stone.
She’s abandoned me. I realized. Somehow, that thought hurt worse than the memories of her terrifying me before the shift.
“Mother Gwyn!” I shouted again, watching her leap down from ledge to ledge. Her feet touched a big white rock that jutted straight out of the side of the mountain the same moment that the ground shook again. The crack I had left behind me closed the distance between us and continued on its way past me.
In one long jagged line, it ran up the big white rock just as The Mother in Green bent her knees to drop to the next ledge and split in half underneath her.
She fell.
Straight down into the newborn fissure, she vanished.
“Mother Gwyn!” I shouted, moving as fast as I could to where I had watched her drop. Every step brought sharp jabs of rocks digging into the bottoms of my feet. Her bandaged hand appeared over the edge of the rock just as I reached her. With my unbroken hand, I grabbed her and threw my weight back, dragging her out of the crack and over the top of me in one quick jerk.
She rolled off of me and the two of us lay on our back, looking up at the smoke filled sky and trying to catch our breath.
I felt her looking at me, and turned my head to meet her eyes.
They went wide and she pushed herself away from me.
“You. . .You have The Well.” She whispered, looking at me the same way I had looked at her when she had been any of the three monsters she had hunted me as.
Schwarz had not been wrong about her afterglow. I had been wrong expecting it to be like mine was.
The Mother in Green was not filled with blind rage, she was filled with fear.
“Yes, I have The Well.” I said, sitting up and trying to look as harmless as I could.
As soon as I moved, she threw herself back and ran away from me for the second time.
Terrified or not, I could not let her abandon me. Her afterglow would pass eventually and she would take me home. Which was something that I was completely incapable of doing on my own.
The longer I waited to move, the farther away she would get from me. So, I rolled back to my feet with a pained groan and ran after her.
“Why are you running from me? I am no danger to you!” I shouted.
“Because you’re chasing me!” Mother Gwyn shrieked back, her voice shrill and shaking.
The rocky mountainside gave way to the first of the dark red desert I had seen when I had been falling from the sky. Every long step she took, white sand that lay underneath the red went flying into the air behind her.
Too strong for me to stay upright, The volcano shook me off my feet and I went rolling end over end into the red sand.
I crashed into something and slowly came to a stop, my eyes swimming and my stomach turning.
Able to focus just in time to see it, the mountain exploded.
The sound cracked inside my ears and everything rose into a high pitched ring. Clear fire and black smoke spewed straight up into the sky like a geyser. Fissures, glowing pale blue, broke down the mountain in the jagged shape of lightning. Everypart of me shook from the force as the white sand rose up and mixed with the red.
Only, neither colors were sand.
The white was ash and the red was the glimmering dust that I had only ever seen aura turn into after a working.
Something broke through the black cloud above me and streaked towards the ground.
Impact, heat, a wave of broken stone and dust.
A rock that was burning with the clear fire had slammed into the ground not very far from where I had rolled to a stop.
It had only been the first.
More, of all shapes and sizes, rained down from the sky and ravaged the splitting mountainside.
Mother Gwyn ran over and ducked down behind me, cowering against my back. “Save me, you have to save me!”
“How am I supposed to do that? You’re The Mother!” I shouted back at her, unable to do anything but watch as Vowkeeper’s Anguish began to crumble in on itself.
Another molten rock slammed into the ground, much closer to us than the first, and we were blown back from the impact alone.
I landed on top of Gwyn with a pained shout as my hand slammed into the ground.
Concentrated shadow darkened my face.
A piece of the mountain, as large as the well house behind the manor, broke a hole through the smoke above and came falling straight towards us.
We would die, both of us.
Even if my power had not been sealed away in part by the same woman that was using me as a flesh shield, there would have been nothing I could do.
I was too weak.
Just before the burning stone turned us into a wet spot on the red dust, shining sand streamed all around us and formed into a golden hand.
It caught the stone within its massive fingers and squeezed, sending small rivers of molten gold streaming towards the ground.
“Fortune Favors,” A figure stepped in front of us as I felt the ground beneath us started to move. “Both of you have called and so I have come.”