"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
still trying to feel her out, so please excuse horribleness!
Despoine
Despoine was quite lost without her parents’ guidance.
They had been separated after the events that had transpired to change the world. She had found some lingering resemblance of the Valley through the sight of some of her fellow kingdom members, but they were not the ones whom were most important to her young, frail heart.
She dearly wished to know where her Daddy and Momma had gone to. Despoine was an outwardly independent spirit, but yet she actually depended greatly upon her familial bonds. She had only ever known the safe little bubble that the Valley had been. But now the world had been turned upside down and she had been thrust into a whirling dervish of chaotic change.
The yearling passed through the huddling masses that made up the meadow – many of them had a great fear of the unknown. Despoine had made her decision to follow the Valley’s guardian to the new land of Tephra. If she couldn’t find her parents, then Eight’s presence would still lend reassurance to her. She needed all the reassurance she could find.
Her recent addition of golden wings was still taking some getting used to. Her back muscles weren’t strong enough to fully keep them folded along her sides. Instead, they dragged along beside her, and she half-heartedly attempted to keep them from becoming terribly unkempt. The removal of her fangs and the addition of wings were rather disconcerting. But Despoine appreciated the symbolism of the wings, for they were stark reminders of her moth-like father.
Before, she’d simply spent her time bumming around the Valley, keeping her mother company and occasionally popping out to bother her father. It’d been a quiet life, but a good one. And she’d never wanted anything else.
Now she doesn’t have a choice.
The Valley is gone, the kingdom having been destroyed in the fairies’ wrath. Her father is … somewhere. She hasn’t seen him since before the change. And her mother … oh her mother. The removal of Karris’ aquatic traits had been a traumatic experience for the poor mare. As much as Karris’ lamprey-like traits had frustrated her, they’d also been a part of her - an important part of her. And to have them so suddenly and viciously removed?
At this point Min is just glad her mother hasn’t thrown herself into the sea ...
And more than glad that the mare is at least sane enough to take care of her baby sister. No way Min knows how to look after a kid!
And as for herself? She still can’t get used to the damn teeth.
Min’s mouth - with it’s many toothy bits and anticoagulant saliva - had been hers, just as her mother’s odd traits had been her own. She’d loved her diet of mammal blood, loved the looks of shock and horror that had crossed other horses’ faces when she’d waggled her mouth parts at them (especially if she’d just fed). Now she just has these … block things. Clunky flat bits that are only good for grinding grass and foliage. Ugh.
At least she’d kept her colour. It might seem drab to others, but to her it’s the perfect combination of her parents - the brown from her father, the grey from her mother. A good reminder and representation of her own history.
But she still wants her damn mouth back. And have it back she will … whenever she finally figures out what the damn fairies want when horses petition them.
For now she wanders the meadow, keeping close to her mother’s lair on the watery border between the meadow and Tephra (though she still tries to avoid the mare and baby Ichor). Despite her physical changes, the little mare still feels connected to the water, to the sea, and she’s stuck to the lands close to the water in an attempt to retain some sense of normalcy. Min understands, but she’s never been as attached to the sea as her mother (lacking her mother’s former gills and hairless, slimy skin), and so she traverses the meadow every day, looking for something, anything to occupy her.
And today at least, she finds such a thing.
As she’s reaching the crest of a grassy hill (she’s never been so aware of how much damn grass there is everywhere, ugh) she spots a young girl, possibly a yearling, standing by herself in the meadow. There’s something … familiar about the girl, though she can’t quite recognize it. Like the child reminds her of someone but she can’t figure it out. So instead, curiosity peaked, she approaches, eyeing the golden wings that trail along the ground at the girl’s sides. “Those’d be a lot cleaner if yah kept them off the ground y’know.” God, even her voice sounds different. She needs her damn mouth back soon.
Min
... considering this is my first post as her, and I usually churn out 200 word posts, I have NO idea how this became so long. o.O
Ichor misses them too; longs for the cocoon of her mother and the river that rocked her in Karris’ womb. She longs too, for the familiarity of Elysium’s face - so like hers, though she saw it only once before the Mountain cast them all out of their original skins and made them like this, painfully plain. Gone is her moth-attributes and the gills that allowed her to breathe beneath the river’s fast currents, and Ichor feels pitifully normal. No - she feels bereft, stripped of her strange gifts, but can she blame the Mountain for its anger?
(Maybe.)
(She harbors a smidgen of anger at the Mountain for the things it has stolen from her, how rude!)
She has soft fur instead of flaky scales for skin; horse eyes instead of a moth’s compound eyes though the color of them is still black; and her throat is uninterrupted by gills. Ichor knows that she is supposed to be something other than the thing that she is now - a tiny horse on matchstick legs. She knows too, that she is not the only one of their ilk - there are others that bear the mark of lamprey and moth, and it is them that she knowingly seeks in tottering determined steps.
(They seek her; blood calls to blood after all.)
The first is the spitting image of her, kind of.
Slim and slender in her gold champagne dress, and Ichor is almost instantly envious of her because she is tiny, thin, and all legs. She fails to recognize that this is how all foals are in their earliest stages of life, because Ichor is desperate to evolve back into her moth-form and thinks that it will afford her a loveliness that she is lacking, albeit a garish loveliness of course.
(How she knows that she was something else in Karris’ womb is a mystery, but she knows she was never wholly a horse like she is now.)
She squints; there is another horse but she recognizes this one! The mottled brown is Min but she looks different, funny somehow, because she is missing her lamprey mouth and now she just looks.... Boring. Ichor mimes a sigh but little to no air actually leaves her mouth, it just opens then closes all in the same instant. Besides, Min has been avoiding her as of late…
Ichor has to bite back the laughter that bubbles up on her tongue; Min sounds positively hilarious trying to talk around all those normal dull grass-eating teeth! Of course, it’s not like Ichor has tried to talk now that she lacks her nectar-seeking tongue that did not hold the same shape as a horse’s tongue… She also bites back the urge to well, bite Min. The filly feels like she has to chastise her somehow for avoiding her for so long. All Ichor longed to do was tag along after her sister, and harass her like all annoying little sisters do. But Min was crafty, and quicker too! Ichor never could catch her, and she was often reluctant to stray too far from Karris’ milk-giving side for too long.
(Yes, it confused her that she needed milk but feels the prompt to seek out nectar from the sweet sleepy heads of flowers that nod hello to her when she walks by them, almost like they know they can tease the memory of her moth-self from deep inside her plain dull horseflesh.)
Ichor narrows her eyes and looks between the two of them; there are similarities that each of the three of them bear towards one another and most importantly, towards Elysium and Karris, the fountainheads of their unique line. “Mehbe she c-can’t?” Oh look, Ichor has trouble talking too! Seems she even developed a slight stutter as she tries to fathom speech from this foreign mouth of hers.
