Rosalyn was tired. She was tired of the way her life had gone and the life that it was going. She'd experienced so much loss in her life and things were really starting to weigh down on her. Spring had come and usually that was her best season, and of course she and Bracken were tending to her rose bushes as usual. The roses weren't going to suffer merely because her heart was. Still... It was getting harder to get up in the day. She felt as though she had thorns prickling her heart and mud in her bed, dragging her into the earth. She was slowing down, she could feel the age in her bones. It wasn't entirely surprising, she was getting older and she'd had seven foals in her lifetime, only two who stayed in the Grove with her to this day.
Rosalyn had been getting up later and later in the days into spring more recently, however, and she knew that her family was noticing. Her brother, Ambrose, took up the mantel of working the ground with Bracken and while her mother had fretted over her initially, Rosalyn sent her away. She didn't go out to graze, but her middle child, Roslind, had come with his familiar bearing sweet greens they'd harvested for her. Her eldest, Rosario, was patrolling the grounds and walking the woods, weeding as he went. Her youngest foals, now surely adults in the years that had passed... they'd all gone with their father and had never seen any of them again.
Rosalyn wept, at last. Her life had never been easy from the start and while she often helped others through their sadness, now it was time for her to face up to hers.
She was the product of an affair. Her mother, Rosemary, had been expected to mate with a unicorn kirin hybrid and continue the line of healers through her herd. Instead, in a romantic whirlwind love affair... or a scandal that would shake the foundations of the herd, she had an encounter with a regular stallion with a brown coat and eyes that danced in the light. When Rosalyn's basket arrived, Rosemary and her herd had waited with baited breath to see the value of the bloodline... and when she emerged they all saw the ugly truth: it was poisoned. Rosalyn was a regular Soquili, like her father. She was shunned from the herd and got to grow up on the outskirts. When her brother Ambrose was born a year later, from her mother and the stallion she'd been promised to, he was their golden son, the perfect child. He was everything she could never be, and when she reached her adult size, she was properly cast away from the herd.
She'd moved far from the plains territory that her family called home and moved into the dark forests on the western most region, as far from her birth place as she could get. She found a little grove at the corner where she chose to make her home. With a stream nearby, she worked the grounds with her own four hooves to dig trenches for the water to come and irrigate the natural wild roses and assortment of other flowers. She weeded the area and started to tend to her garden every day. As she worked to make the colors more vibrant, bringing forward petals that would smell stronger, and not just look pretty, she found others were attracted to her garden.
A strong-bodied stallion by the name of Siciro. She was taken in by his thoughtfulness and consideration of her and invited him to share in with her space. When it came time that she bore him two twin colts, he had other thoughts that occupied him and he left the grove with her little Peony, though his father had always called him Caspian. Rosario stayed with her, however, and she was grateful for the company, for even as a young mare, she'd thought her heart was fit to burst when Siciro left her.
She continued to work in her garden. Others would come by to observe the flowers and if they were in need of someone to talk to, to hear and bear witness to their troubles, she would do just that. She liked that she was able to ease the hearts of others, and did not consider until much time later, that this was to avoid the pain in her own heart. She met Bracken in these days of talking, a pesky green rabbit who enjoyed her plants in more than one sense - preferring to smell them up close! With his teeth in the stems. She couldn't have that, so she began to teach him which plants she minded him eating, and which were acceptable: notably, she taught him to eat the weeds.
Those were the easy times, the days of her youth. Rosario believed himself a protector, so he would scan any stallion that walked in, but one managed to slip through both of their defenses. A fanciful flutter by the name of Lord Delacroix DeLuna who sported a pair of wings that matched his vibrant and spritely personality. He enjoyed the fullest extent of her flowers, and she once again bore two boys, Roslind and Rosewynn, who took his father's fancy name and walked out of the Grove with him. Once again, one son left and one remained and Rosalyn's heart became more troubled. She decided that she was going to swear off of stallions altogether - so you can imagine her immense displeasure when the one stallion she hoped to never see again trotted back into her life.
Her younger brother, Ambrose, had fled the confines of the herd. He'd been set up in a political marriage with a mare of a similar background, and had fled, their mother crying her sorrows behind him. He loved their mother, but she had always put so much pressure on him for him to be the very best in the herd, he couldn't stand it - he had to get away! And clearly Rosalyn was leading a happy life, he'd told her, from behind her two sons, who wouldn't allow him to get any closer, to surely he could live one of his own too! He just needed a place to hide until things cooled off.
She should've kicked him out, but her heart was moved by his story. Perhaps he was not in the wrong, but it was truly the acts of her mother and all of their herd, who perpetuated the nasty cycle that had ruined their youth. So, she let him stay with her in her garden - so long as he was prepared to actually get his hooves dirty and work. Surprisingly, he rose to the occasion, and she had to admit, that it benefitted everyone to have someone gifted as he in magical healing.
It was nearly two years of another pace of peaceful living, before her mother found her grove. Her mother had been thrown out of the herd when Ambrose left, her mate denouncing her and pairing instead with Ambrose's intended: gross. Left on her own without any of the resources that she grew up with, she would've lived entirely solo for the rest of her life, if she hadn't heard the rumors and tales of two Soquili in the woods that lived in a rose garden and bore the names of her children. Rosalyn did not let her mother enter her grove, her safe space, her haven for the cast off and forgotten. When her brother tried to compel her to let their mother stay, she told him he could leave with her! But he didn't leave. And neither did her mother. So Rosalyn left the care of her garden to her sons, told them to keep Rosemary out of her sanctuary and begun to spend more time away from home.
It was while she was away, that she met Savva. A blue stallion, who claimed to be a frost giant of the northern lands. His thick accent and humble mannerisms made her smile. He was so different than any of the stallions she'd met, she was ready to bring him back, and introduce him to her family... When he told her that he would need to leave. As things warmed up, he needed to return to the high north, but he promised that he would come back for her. She didn't have much hope, but when he returned to his northern home, she went back to hers, to make peace with her mother.
She didn't forgive Rosemary, but if Rosemary needed a place to stay, she wouldn't turn her out. She set up a her boundaries, made firm assurances and an unsteady peace fell over the growing family of the garden. She had something to look forward to now as the seasons gradually became colder and on Savva's second visit to her, he left her with an unexpected gift and she was more than grateful to have two trained healers to help her deliver three foals. The next winter when their their father returned, she presented the three beautiful foals to him and he smiled broadly, proclaiming that he had to introduce them to his family in the north! She bid them all farewell, knowing that they would come home the following winter.
Only, they didn't return the following winter, as it turned out. And she never saw any of her three youngest foals, or Savva, again.
When she returned to her family, and her garden, she told them of her worries and began to hold onto her sons, and her mother and brother more fiercely. She wept frequently in the few years after the loss of her mate and her foals, but wasn't this how it always went? As time went on, she believed that she'd run out of tears, but really, it seemed they'd been biding their time until she just, couldn't hold herself up anymore.
She wept for a week, nibbling on the greens that her children brought her, and moving only as far as she needed to drink water, before she broke down again moments later. On the eighth day, she truly felt as though there were no more tears in her and after looking at her hollow expression of her reflection, she pressed her lips together. She didn't like what she saw, a pitiful mare crying over yet another stallion. Her children may not be able to return to her, or maybe life simply took them in a direction where they wished no longer to be children of the spring. Very well then, she still had two sons at her side and she had a garden to manage. She wouldn't give her heart away to anyone else, she would keep her existing family close and anyone who tried to woo her would get a swift kick to the rear!
Straightening up, she stood fully and went out to go graze. She had better things to do than mope around. (WC: 1,844)
