â - a memory of a relative
Mother Adaar was a large woman.
Not just tall â fuck, she was Tal-Vashoth, there were no short Tal-Vashoth to begin with â but fat. It was what her lifestyle had produced, and she loved every inch of her body with a reverence that bordered on worship. There had never been too much food under the Qun, only ever enough, exactly the right amount for them to stay healthy and well, but never enough to gorge on.
Once she told Unica that everything in her old home had been counted â every ounce of flour, every piece of bread, every egg, every morsel on her table. Sure enough, Mother Adaar had never gone hungry then â which they now sometimes did, in long winters or during times of prosperity and peace when work was hard to come by â but, Mother Adaar said, she had also never known fullness. Feeling as if her body nearly burst, as if one more bite could rip her stomach open. And hunger, she said, just made indulgence even sweeter â even though she hated to see her baby girl go hungry, her little cup who was too young to understand the nuances of pain, of suffering. But hunger, she told her, made you appreciate food more, any kind of food, and it made you stronger, like every kind of suffering did. They would always eat again â sometimes there would just be more time in between their meals.
And Unica nodded at those words, even though she sometimes, in dark, cold nights, when her horns had still been nothing but fuzzy stubs, had found herself wondering how it would be to live in the Qun â to live without hunger, like her mother had described it, but without freedom too.
And so hunger became freedom, and indulgence became bliss. Unica admired her mother, everything she did, everything she was, every ounce of fat and every string of muscle and every purple or white or red scar that littered her body. Her mother had turned her body into an instrument of her own freedom, had made it broad with fat and muscle, and whenever sheâd laugh, whenever sheâd yell, whenever sheâd fight, that large, fat, strong body of hers would quake like mountains about to tumble.
And at night, when the blood and the grime of the day had been washed off, her motherâs strong arms, thick like trees, would pull Unicaâs twiggy, puny body into her embrace, and while they sat by the fire, while her mother talked and joked with the other mercenaries, Unica would fall asleep against her soft, warm bosom.