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+--- Thread: AW I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. (/showthread.php?tid=11322)
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. - Nazli - 4/25/2026
morrigan's eye, kingdom of avon, blushed meadows.
midnight—the witching hour.
most icons are links to original threads.
midnight—the witching hour.
most icons are links to original threads.
They were brought together as a family this one last time. Senmut kissed her, kissed Aiesha atop the head, and was away again - seeking the forefront of this gathering, melding Akashingo and Muat-Riya.
Aiesha moved to go to him and Nazli had to stop her.
He is doing his work, come now,The mother murmured as she ushered them along. It felt odd not to be included in this holy moment - but she wasn't yet expected in such a role, not so freshly returned.
The words bellowed from her beloved soon after. Thoughts of Tavina held against her will; a memory of Toula's birth, and tending to Treva when she was queen. Remembering the many hours spent being tutored or treated by the woman - and to think, someone could be so horrible to her! Senmut was filled with resolve; as he spoke the God's truth, Nazli felt emboldened.
She was about to mutter something coyly to Aiesha when the earth groaned. The walls shuddered! As Senmut went on with his accusation it was as if Akashingo answered - and Nazli looked for Aiesha again, this time fervently, wanting her close, and saw her trying to mingle among fellahin, and her pseudo-siblings. Greedily Nazli grabbed for her and pulled her close -
In time for the world to shatter around them. Hurried! Panicking! Scrambling first towards her daughter and then towards Senmut; he was shouting - the air was thick with red dust. Where could they go? She knew the catacombs - but where was Aiesha?
Tremors forced her low against the earth. Nazli scrambled after bodies as they too ran like rats in a maze. She saw a flash of red fur red dirt red blood red —
AIESHA?!
Voices were screaming around her. The earth opened, swallowing the unfaithful and devout alike, and Nazli fought for each breath and each glimpse of any life - and grappling with anyone she could, she moved with the masses even as Akashingo devoured them all.
Nazli awoke not with a start, but with the slow unfurling of something long held tight within her chest. The grass beneath her paws was impossibly soft, cool and alive, carrying no trace of the hard-packed earth she had known for so many seasons. She stretched, expecting the familiar protest of an aching back accustomed to bending for prayer—the dull throb in her hips from bearing of her daughter, and burdens alike—but nothing came. Only ease, a lightness that felt almost wrong in its perfection. She lifted her head and breathed deeply; the air was thick with the scent of sun-warmed blossoms and distant rain, and the sky above stretched endless and unmarred, a deeper blue than any dawn she had ever greeted at the Muat-Riya cenote. Beauty surrounded her, serene and absolute, yet it stirred an ache she could not name. Was this the Field of Reeds, the promised place where labor ended and the heart rested at last? Or had she merely slipped into a gentler dream, one that mocked her with kindness?
She rose and padded forward, each step deliberate, testing the reality of this place. Her coat caught the golden light, her ribs gleaming like polished stone, while the warm cream on her cheeks and belly felt almost luminous. The small white bone medallion swung gently against her chest— Senmut ’s hands had shaped it, his careful teeth and tongue etching patterns only he understood—and its familiar weight grounded her amid the strangeness. She thought of him first: the quiet strength in his gaze when they worked late into the night together, the way his presence had made even the heaviest tasks feel shared. Then Aiesha, all bright eyes and fearless curiosity, the small life that had cracked open Nazli’s rigid world and let something softer spill through. She remembered the temple of too, every etching she had laid with care, every chant offered to the lioness goddess in the cool shadow of stone walls. And Nwt—great sky mother, vast and enveloping—who had answered her deepest prayer with the gift of motherhood when Nazli had believed herself too bound by duty to receive such grace. Here, in this tranquil expanse where pain had no purchase, those memories rose not as wounds but as quiet questions. Had she served enough? Loved enough? Was this reward, or only respite?
A soft breeze stirred the acacias overhead, their leaves whispering secrets she could not yet decipher. Nazli paused in the dappled shade and sat, curling her tail neatly around her paws as she had been taught long ago in the fellahin dens. Tradition had always been her compass: serve without question, endure without complaint, find worth in the labor given to those above you. Yet here, with no master to obey and no task demanding her strength, the old certainties felt thin, almost fragile. She lifted her eyes to the flawless sky and searched for signs—an ibis winging overhead, a lotus pool reflecting eternity—but found only endless green hills and the distant, contented calls of unseen birds. Doubt snuck in like evening shadow. If this was not the afterlife her people had promised, then what? A dream sent by kinder gods? A test of the heart she had spent her life shaping to fit the mold of service? She closed her eyes and let the names of her beloveds rise like incense: Tavina. Makono. Each syllable carried a different weight—joy, longing, gratitude, surrender—and in their quiet repetition she felt something shift inside her. Perhaps peace was not the absence of pain, but the courage to feel everything without flinching.
For the first time in years, Nazli allowed herself to simply be. No offering to prepare, no stone to place, no expectation to meet. The savanna rolled out before her in gentle waves of green and gold, wildflowers nodding in the breeze as though inviting her to run, to chase the horizon, to remember what it was to want without shame. She rose slowly, muscles coiling with an old, athletic grace unburdened by fatigue, and took a single step toward the open plain. Whatever this place held—crossing-over or borrowed dream—she would walk it with the same steady heart she had always carried. Service had defined her once; love had redefined her later. Now, in this beautiful nowhere where nothing hurt, she wondered if she might finally learn who she was when both were set aside. The medallion tapped softly against her chest like a second heartbeat, and she smiled—just a small curve of her dark lips—before she began to move forward into the light.
And then she was not there.
The savanna folded away like a dropped hide. No slow fade, no final glimpse of Legend's wide eyes or soot-dark shoulders. One heartbeat the world was green and gold and trembling; the next it was nothing—weightless dark, silent except for the fading echo of that scream slowly unraveling into a single, small sob. Nazli floated—or fell—suspended in the void between dream and waking, the medallion at her throat the only point of warmth left. She could no longer feel grass beneath her pads, no longer smell wildflowers or warm earth. Only the memory of a voice that had once been hers to soothe, now distant and distorted, calling from somewhere she could not follow.
Somewhere, very far away, the rumble quieted to a murmur.
A stomach settling.
A child hushed at last.
Nazli hung in the nothing, alone with the question she had not dared ask aloud: if she could not remember her daughter's face, and if the dream had taken even the sound of her laughter and turned it to scream, what part of her was still mother? What part was still here at all?
The dark pressed close, patient, waiting for her to decide whether to reach back toward the light she had lost—or to let the scream become silence, and the silence become sleep.
And then in the waking world, her eyes would open.
The world was no longer composed of darkness, for as she woke she beheld the stars overhead and knew she was alive in the belly of Nwt. She felt the stone plinth at her back. The wind tasted sweet, perfumed by wildflowers, and it was cold enough to make her fur stand on-end with the shock of it; but there was a hidden warmth there, too.
Nazli gasped, awed by the power of her goddess—to behold Her, to be saved by Her, there was nothing else but this moment. The stillness of the night gave rise to Nazli's self-awareness: that she had a heartbeat, where in the dreaming she did not think to listen. That she could hear the wind in among the trees—that there were trees! The night obscured them. Of course the Lady of the Sycamore would place her devotees in to the heart of a forest!
Slowly, an ache had spread through Nazli. She only felt thankful as it did. To know her body was sore—that it lived! That she could feel it all! She laughed; the sound broke the quiet of the night and knowing this, she laughed harder! Sliding from the stone tableau and to her feet, she felt her toes in the dirt and the ground, solid, beneath her.
There she stood, alive, and wept.