Chapter Text
At the top of a hill, the frigid breeze of the northern winds billows and blows through the gaps in the wooden planks and windows of an old brick cottage that stands alone. In the solitude and silence of the walls of this home, the sound of wood creaking echoes through the space as a mother hurries from the kitchen to her son's bedroom, bringing with her a full bowl and a small cup of crushed medicine.
She nudges the door open gently, floating through the room with grace and urgency as she sets the tray down at the table next to the bed at the center of the room. Pulling a chair back and sitting down, her first priority is her son.
He'd never been one to believe in gods. To him, there has only ever been one.
"Mama..."
There were better days when she could remember his healthy, rosy face, now gaunt and stricken white by this ailment no doctor they could afford could cure, and no medicine they made on their own could affect.
The ends of his nerves were freezing off, his bluish-purple veins bulging out of his skin like a network of rashes. Even under multiple layers of blankets, the boy shivered from that feeling of ice lining his skin.
"Lie on your side, Iliusha." She urged quietly, her voice breaking slightly from the sight of how much he had deteriorated from just a week ago.
"I- I can't move..." He groaned weakly. "Can you help take off my socks..?"
With hands as gentle as the winds that tip-toed and barged into their space, she put her palm against the boy's forehead. She may as well have been putting her hand against snow. A rattling inhale, an unsteady pause, before she reached under his blanket and released her breath in song to calm more herself than him:
"Dormi cara, columbula..."
The voice stabbed into the silence like a glass knife. Ilya curled deeper into his sheets, burying his face in the linen and taking deep breaths as his body fought off the cold.
"O columbula mea..."
She quietly tossed his socks aside and rose from her seat so as to not startle him, cracking the door open and sliding out into the hallway as she continued her lullaby, slightly louder this time that her son would know that she was still there.
"Splendeat fenestra, adsint somnians flora."
For once, the thin and dilapidated walls of their home served her as she opened the door to her own room; a sparsely decorated room with peeling wallpaper and an overturned stool, with a bed in the middle that once held two souls. With deft, cold hands, she took the folded blankets from her own bed and strode back to the boy's room.
"O cara filia lunae."
As she draped more blankets over her only son, the boy groaned as he tossed and turned, his arms putting up tents in the linen as though he was struggling to push them off of himself. She lowered the blankets below his armpit level so his hands were free. Ilya could only let out a weak moan as he put an arm over his eyes.
"Neve plumam pulvis foedet tuam..."
The mother fingers went up to her neck, pressing a silver crescent against her own skin as she found the necklace given to her by her sisters in creed. Though the other Snezhnayans may have considered them cultists... The Scions were the only group in Nod-Krai who accepted her as one of their own. In what she knew very well could have been her final gesture towards her son, she unclasped the necklace and crumpled the chain in a fist.
"Nec iam complexum alma."
Eevi put the crescent moon necklace into her son's hands and closed his fist for them, hoping against hope that in the coming days, perhaps the coming hours, or even the coming minutes, that something, anything, would happen, and that Columbina Hyposelenia would bestow some kind of kindness that her son never knew from the world, the same kind of kindness that found the Moon Maiden.
"Capias bona, somnias a luna..."
She'd long lost her ability to communicate to her via the Kuuhenki, but please, anything...