Title: Awake
Rating: K
F.Type: Vignette
Summary: It's just a mountain. A sentient mountain. A wide awake, thinking, feeling, motherly mountain.
Author's Note: Inspired by khriskin; her 'Atlantis Alive' drabbles are stunning.
Awake
-Vignette-
When Cheyenne woke, she woke slowly. The first time she opened her eyes, roused by the sensation of something within her, there was pain. Fire burned with a brightness and fierce hunger she reremembered from before time, and though she wept with agony, her violators did not stop carving out their passageways within her. So she retreated, withdrawing from those-who-were-not her children.
The second time Cheyenne left her sleep, the ones-who-brought-pain were gone, and the ones-who-left-and-came-back lived in her now. As she watched them go through the not-of-Mother-Earth ring, Cheyenne felt a warmth other than fire fill her. Slumbering in darkness for the eons that her brothers and sisters had been creating and caring for their own children, she was the last survivor of Earth's first creations. And these- these- they were her progeny.
So, with the patience born of waiting for millennia, Cheyenne began to care for them. Little things, mostly- coaxing a metal construction to tilt slightly this way, so a falling machine would miss one of hers. Resisting the pull of a black hole just a second longer, allowing a child to survive the explosion. Throwing the force of the universe against one, a thousand, a million who would kill her children.
Most times, they did not notice.
But she reremembered fire, and her birth- brought to life by clashing continents, hot magma, cold air. Cheyenne had not forgotten her molten rock beginnings, and so she watched over they-who-were-fire. And slowly, gradually, she came into her own power.
One day her children would speak to her- one day she would be able to speak to them.
fini