"Lullaby"- Seladon and Brea
Seladon wakes to a weight on the bed, the tug of tiny hands on her sleeve. It is dead silent- even the insects chirping outside have gone to sleep, and she opens her eyes blearily to find Brea’s little face mere inches from hers, eyes too big for her tiny face blinking through the pale cloud of her perpetually unkempt hair.
“What do you want, childling?” she mumbles, managing to mostly keep the irritation from her voice.
“Can’t sleep,” Brea whimpers, pulling the blankets over her small legs. Seladon sighs, pulls herself up onto her elbows.
“And what am I supposed to do about that?” she retorts with a frown. “Shouldn’t you bother Mother with this?”
Brea shrinks away a bit, the hurt on her face obvious, and Seladon feels the hot tug of shame in her chest. However she is feeling about their mother right now, Brea is too young to understand or perceive it. “She...has to meet with the Sifa at the first sunrise.” Seladon has to be at that meeting too. She is dreading it, dreading how closely she is scrutinized when in the presence of another maudra, but she doesn’t have it in her to demand that Brea return to her own room, especially not when she whispers, “...I had a bad dream.”
“What did you dream?”
“I was...in the mountains by myself,” Brea says, tucking herself into the crook of Seladon’s arm. “I was lost and it was snowing too hard to see and it was so cold and-”
“Shhh,” Seladon soothes, smoothing back her hair. Maybe no more trips up to the hot springs until she was a little older. “That would never happen. The only thing you’re liable to be buried under is books.” She loves them already, loves the smell of the pages and the bright pictures, even though she cannot read them yet. She is likely to become a fiend for them once she can. Brea giggles at that, so she has done something right. “Would you like me to sing to you? I learned a new lullaby the other day.”
Brea nods vigorously, the motion making a mess of her hair again.
Seladon is perhaps not meant to know this song-and had not meant to learn it- but one of the visiting Stonewood merchants had had a fussy baby with her and had sung it half a dozen times before she would sleep. The tune is off, but Brea won’t know, won’t care. She will just sleep as well, imagining new lands she has never seen, lands gentler than the high, unforgiving mountains. Maybe someday she will see them.
“Rest, my babe, as a flower in the shade,
Close up your petals, hide your face away…”