Rowans Choice

Chapter Forty One- An Ember

Eris had run me a bath and filled it with scent she had felt would be calming, a jasmine cloud of steam rose above me as I sunk down into the hot water. She had sensed my distress the moment Rowan had left me stood there on Aspens branch, when she arrived at my side a moment later.

I lowered into the bath until the hot water kissed my cheeks, pinking them in seconds.

"I'm sure when she returns it will all make sense" Eris tried to soothe as she sat down beside me and peeped over the edge of the tin bath.

I stare into the steam above me and feel my heart sink to the bottom of the tub, the feeling this evoked was not dissimilar to how Rowans absence made me feel that night... five years ago. 

Rowan had left me without word... left me scared again and worried. She hadn't taken me with her, nor explained why she must go or what the hell had even happened. This suddenly felt like I had woken in a nightmare, a nightmare that would soon get worse.

"Call for me when you want help dressing" Eris reminded me, as she leans over and kissed my forehead "it's going to be okay" she promised.

Eris being tender, and taking her time to be gentle with me... it made me wonder how terrible this looked, and how broken I must appear.

I winced as she shut the door. A sharp pain stabbed me beneath my navel, a tug and a... burrowing sensation.

Something taking root.

"No" I whisper disbelievingly. I sit up quick and send the water sloshing over the side of the bath.

I leap out, barely avoiding a slip on the floor, lunging for the side as I grabbed it, dripping onto the floor below me as I wiped the steam away from the floor length mirror. Every swipe of my hand revealing a little more, and each reflection I caught as it cleared, filled me with dread. Sending me back to the days of hell I had fought hard to repress.

A glow I recognised... a glow I never could have imagined having to see again. I covered it with my hand and eclipsed it, like the moon with the sun.

"No" I cry out. The sound that leaves me is a wailing one could go a lifetime without hearing, if they were lucky. The sound of a haunted soul, that once lost a piece of itself, and had to relive it repeatedly... because a soul never forgets life that springs from it, and is lost from it. It reminds you always, that it is in search of it.

There is an ache that forms in a mothers heart, a phantom beat that exists to remind you, that you have beat once for two...and that life you grew, will always be a part of you. The instinct to protect and be close to your young, it is instilled by nature, but nature never taught us how to let go... when we couldn't protect... and we couldn't be close. The ache then, it only exists to remind us... of all that has been lost. My heart and my soul... tortured ... and it started on a day like this... five years ago... with a similar ... glow!

Another life in my belly, and the haunting realisation of how it has got there, and how she must have had got there. My phantom beat, my ache, my secret agony, placed inside of me... by...

Rowan.

The child I lost, the child I had feared in my belly for so long, because I never knew it's origin... it wasn't a strangers, there was no monster out in the woods... there had only been Rowan. That child, she had been created by love, a pure and all encompassing love.

I stifle a sob. The guilt I felt then for fearing my own child for so long because I didn't know how she came to be, it was suffocating.

Grief.

It comes knocking like a friend, you know it well by now, and you sit with it and nurse it... and live with it, but unlike a friend ... you wish one day it wouldn't come back to your door. You wish that it would lose its way, and find another to become familiar with, anyone but you. I felt it now, like hearing a knock upon my door... it's here, it's not waiting for an invitation to come inside, why would it?! We are beyond pleasantries by now, it knows I'm expecting it, and it comes close and holds me tightly, forcing me to break against its embrace, my walls come crashing down and upon griefs shoulder...