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 Posted: Tue May 01, 2018 3:40 am
Now she was back out in the rogue lands, lost and alone, trying to make sense of the sudden turn her life had taken. She felt guilty, knowing she had left behind her brother and sisters.. but she slowly came to terms with the fact that she would never see them again. She never wanted to. Her whole life had been a lie, she was a pawn in her father's revenge, they all were.
But.. what was she supposed to be without that?
Bedraggled and exhausted, she had wandered until her path had led her to where she now rested. The world was wide open around her, there was no place to hide but she couldn't keep going. So she stopped to sulk, paying no attention to the creatures around her.
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Posted: Sat May 05, 2018 5:25 pm
" Leta?" It seemed unlikely to meet the same fair lioness that he had encountered months ago on a chance but the sight of her pale fur and the bright dapples of bolder fur that marked it was almost unmistakable. When one spent a night relying on the good judgement of a stranger there was always a connection formed - hunting created a bond like nothing else, to that he would always attest. One really came to understand the intricacies of another soul when it was survival and concentration that ruled the thoughts. Certain, at last, that it must be her after all, he moved closer. Yet, the closer he came, the more concerned he became with the look in her eyes and the expression that stretched across her face. His own smile faltered then. "I'm sorry, I just.." he paused, worrying himself, and then chose to dip his head in what he hoped was a decent enough apology. "I just wanted to say hello, I didn't realize it was a bad time."
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Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2018 7:30 pm
When her world fell apart around her, so did the mask she wore so well for the benefit of her father's psychotic plan. She didn't even react when she heard the name Leta, she wasn't even sure if Tisiphone was her name now.. but when Narayan was close enough to see her sullen expression, there was no missing that she was being spoken to. She looked up and was surprised to see a familiar face.
"N-narayan," she stammered.
He had been her last chance before everything fell apart. The tempting lifeline that could have spared her this misery if only she had been brave enough to walk away from her father. She knew now that he would never have survived to turn his obsessions to hunting her next, but at the time..
"You apologize too much," she said, looking down at his paws, "You did it before, too. I'm the one who should apologize."
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Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 3:15 pm
"Ahh, but I'm not the one that looks about to cry." The smile he offered her was a poor attempt to make her smile, a splash of charm against the sorrow that was pouring out of her in waves, but his tone was soft and gentle. "You needn't apologize to me." He did sit though, confident now that she did not want him to leave, and let his dark tail curl around his pale legs before it settled across his front toes. It was hard to know what was wrong and harder still to know how he might dissolve some of those feelings without prying too deeply but he would try to pick his way through it. She was too pretty to be so sad and he was too gentle hearted not to do something about it. "I would apologize for apologizing but that seems a little redundant," he chuckled as he spoke then, even as his eyes roamed her face and posture to try and reason out anything that might give him a hint. "Maybe you'd just like to talk instead, hm?"
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Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:47 pm
The lioness didn't look back up or answer him right away. Did she owe him an explanation? Not really, her deception of Narayan was among the least of her crimes.. and it was entirely possible that she had saved his life by directing him away from her family and not revealing anything about herself or them. And all of her time under various names, in various places, spying on behalf of her father.. had she truly done any harm to anybody but herself?
It didn't matter. She felt as if she had to apology for merely existing.
"My name isn't Leta," she said, choosing to confess and still keeping her eyes on her feet, "Or Kalypso, as the Pridelanders knew me.. and I'm not sure it's Tisiphone anymore, either."
A list of names didn't explain much, but it was at the core of her distress.
"My father lied to us," she said, "He trained us to hunt and to spy and gather information, and he never really told us why. And then he led us to our deaths."
Dramatic but it felt truthful to her. Taking them to a diseased pride to pick a fight with family they never knew was now clearly a death wish, not just for himself but for all of them, too.. and she had run away, leaving behind her sisters and her brother..
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Posted: Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:51 pm
At first, Narayan opened his mouth to speak but could not find the words to say in the wake of a lifted veil he had not even seen before she withdrew it. Not Leta? Not Kalypso? Was she.. Tisiphone? Or not? It was so hard to tell what she meant through all the hysterics and the flood of information. Without remark, he finally closed his mouth and instead opted to very slowly bring himself to his haunches and then all the way down, careful and deliberate, to his belly. It let him settle his chin on his paws so that he could stare up and across from himself at her distraught face but for a long time it was only that. No words, only silence and contemplation. When he finally found it in him to speak, it was direct, if soft. "Are you crying because of what your father did to you or because you are ashamed of having believed him so completely?" It wasn't that he didn't have any questions - in fact, he had many - but simply that he knew raining dozens of question down upon her would not help her claw her way out of the pit that had opened beneath her feet.
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Posted: Sat Jul 28, 2018 9:34 pm
She could feel his gaze upon her, saw in her periphery as he moved in and slowly laid down across from her to watch and think. She didn't look up, but she felt her heart begin to race as if he had started demanding an explanation. Though his question gave her pause, she found an answer easily enough.
"I'm ashamed that I had any faith in him at all," she said, "That I ever wanted to please him, that I let my fear of him keep me tethered to him even when I knew something was wrong.. that I doubted myself more than I doubted him."
Suddenly, her brow furrowed and she finally lifted her gaze from her paws to his face. Did she really regret that she hadn't put more faith in herself? She didn't even know what name to call herself at that moment, but those were the words that came out when she tried to explain her grief. She shouldn't have doubted the feeling she had that something was wrong.
"I ran away, finally," she said, "But not from him. I ran from my brother, my sisters, my nephews. He was already dead, and rather than face the lions who killed him or stand by my family, I ran."
She wanted to say she was ashamed of this too, most ashamed of it.. but she couldn't get the words out. Thinking on it now, she wasn't sure that was the truth. She wasn't ashamed to have escaped, she was relieved, even through all this turmoil.
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Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2018 1:56 pm
Narayan could not have said if prompting her to keep speaking was helping her or not - at the very least it was keeping her focused and pushing her mind down the proper channels. He knew all too well what could happen to a lion that did not know how to surface from their grief and though he did not know her well enough to console her, he could at least do what he might to rouse her from the bottom of the cavern that had begun to swallow her whole. With a heavy sigh, he lifted his chin from his paws, "It's pretty obvious that you don't really know what to think right now and I'm not going to tell you that being ashamed and guilty is wrong. I think healing from this means forgiving yourself and you don't.. have to do that right now." His tail flickered for a moment as he considered her and how he, a mostly stranger, might help her with something beyond his experience. He didn't want her to get through this just to get over it, he wanted her to know that being lost was okay. "I come from a place where our parents choose little names for us and raise us until we can survive on our own. Then, when it's time, we go out into the rogue lands alone to figure out who we are." Narayan didn't have to tell her that he had never gone home, that he was eternally figuring himself out and had taken so long doing it that he never even got to go home to his family, his pride. That was his own tiny, quiet burden to carry. "It can take months or years sometimes but eventually, when we go home, it is because we have grown and become someone new. We take a new name, one that we choose for ourselves." A weak, sad smile tugged at his jowls as his tail continued to waver back and forth, flowing in an idle arc. He seemed to realize that he had been rambling about things that made no more sense to her than her sins did to him but he had a purpose, long-winded as it was. "My point is that you don't have to know who you are right now, it's not important. You made a choice, for better or worse, so now you owe it to yourself to grow from it. Whatever you feel right now is just the start of your story."
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Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2018 8:46 pm
Dealing with the confusing muddle of emotions that surfaced as she tried to talk her way through what happened, it was surprisingly comforting that it was a stranger she was explaining herself to and that offered her such kind reassurances. She didn't know enough about him to know what experiences shaped his perspective and it didn't matter at that moment. She was too busy doubting herself to doubt him, too.
At least if he was lying or manipulating her, too, this was something she wanted to hear.
And then she was distracted by his story about the place he had come from. He had her full attention, even as she struggled to imagine life like that and what point he might be making.. but she knew most of all in that moment that names carried a lot of weight. She'd been careless, giving herself so many before.. and she knew more than anything that she didn't want to be Tisiphone ever again.
"Thank you, Narayan."
Then his words and how they applied to him finally sunk in. This obviously wasn't his home, they were in the middle of nowhere.
"Does that mean.. you haven't figured out who you are?" she asked.
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Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2018 3:24 pm
A small sense of pride lodged itself just above his heart as he realized that he had done some small favor in calming her down from the point of hysterics. He knew the pain would not be banished by something so insignificant as a gentle speech from a stranger but he hoped, maybe, that this was the root of something that she could nurture and blossom from. Of course, he should have known that exposing such a seed to her would allow her to dissect it and find the truth. "Ahh," he laughed, or sighed, the sound was nearly one and the same as it died on his jowls. His gaze traveled away from her and up to the sky instead, examining it distractedly, unseeing. Then, at last, he offered her a sad smile and let his gaze find hers once again. Lying to her now would be a breech of this small trust and a betrayal of the bit of truth she had offered to him. He would not avoid it, either. "I thought I knew, it took me years but I thought.. I figured myself out." He wanted to look away from her and focus on anything other than her haunted eyes but couldn't. They were dual blood moons, bright and knowing and impossibly beautiful for all the sorrow that they held and he realized that they called to the ocean of guilt in him, drawing it forward like the tides. "But then I went home and there was nothing left but the remains of a wild fire. No family, no signs, no anything." I admit that I do not know who I am meant to be anymore and so.. I am just what my parents called me: Narayan, the path. An eternal pilgrim."
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