"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
Arcane was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to sneak out. He was, in fact, pretty sure he was breaking all kindsa rules, but Mom was caught up tight in dreams and hadn’t moved in a g e s, and he was bored and knew clever tricks. Or at least one clever trick that worked pretty well while she wasn’t paying attention.
With a sneaky grin, he shifted, fading his body into nothingness and letting his spirit slip out of the tie that bound them together. Never quite completely, he kept a sneaky little cord of energy attached to the big shiny dragon so he could find her again. It wasn’t her fault she was all tangled up in dream world and couldn’t find her way back. But it sure wasn’t his fault he couldn’t get her back, and he was b o r e d out of his mind waiting forever.
He didn’t shift back to solid ‘til he was well away, just in case it’d wake her up. Which well of course he wanted her to wake up, but not while he was off getting into trouble, okay? She should wake up when he was tucked away in her belly like he was supposed to be. Look, he had this under control, it was fine, he’d just sneak back when he was done adventuring, no big deal.
Totally got this.
Also look it was way easier to go far as a ghost-shape, okay? He could zoom where he needed to be instead of creeping slowly on four boring feet that could only go as fast as they could move across the ground. Nah, ghosting it was way better, and even though he’d started worlds away it was so, so easy to find the world where Mom had been born. And then it didn’t take a whole lot of trying to find the place where the most people tended to wander through. Figured that was his best shot for an adventure, he did, so he settled onto the ground and let his body drift toward solid again.
He couldn’t go all the way solid, but enough to be seen at least! Like a halfway-not-ghost shape? Or maybe just heavy enough to keep his transparent feet on the ground. He was at least trying to be visible, but he picked up some snow and made it linger in the air all sparkly white stardusty-looking, so he could dance through it and make it whirl some and show his almost-shape. There! Probably better! Plus fun!
Actually, a lot of fun. He got super distracted playing with the snow, dancing through it and making it whoosh and swirl and shimmer in the air, and completely forgot he was looking for somebody to call friend.
There was a day back in autumn that had changed her.
A day when she had left the side of her soundly sleeping sister in the early hours of morning, and only allowed herself to look back a single time to see Nerine, the kingdom that she had always loved, become nothing more than dust in her wake; it was an incomprehensible pinprick on the horizon, shrouded in the darkness of twilight. It isn’t something that she’d thought she’d ever have the courage to do, but the truth is that Nerine had felt less and less like home with each passing day, even if it hadn’t rationally made sense in even her own eyes when more of her family than ever was coming together there at last.
Perhaps the changes were just too big for her.
Regardless of the reason, Agapi’s world had always been so stable, and that night in particular it had felt like everything beneath her feet was shifting with some colossal, cataclysmic event — and when that happened, she hadn’t known how to keep on pretending that everything was still the same.
Nothing was the same.
And now, Agapi had not been home in weeks.
Perched in the gnarled, ancient boughs of a leafless oak tree she is sleeping, restlessly, in her sparrow form. The biting winter air means that her feathers look plump and ruffled from the effort of their vain attempts to keep her sufficiently warm. She isn’t stupid. She knows that she would likely have more luck sleeping and staying warm as a horse rather than a sparrow (quite frankly, balancing on two legs is not something that comes easily to her, especially several feet above a cold, hard ground — she’d learned a few times), but something about the trees had been making her feel safer lately; as though she is invisible up here, quiet and forgotten.
And despite having wanted the opposite of that in Nerine, here in the meadow quiet and forgotten is how she has come to like it. Strange things had been happening since the first snowfall — the kinds of things that Agapi did not want to involve herself in any more than she was forced to.
Because at first it had been loud, and sudden. The first week she’d heard screaming in the thickets beyond her, sometimes crying, or wailing, or some sick, sad combination of both. It had scared her enough that she hadn’t bothered to leave the safety of the bramble, not even come nightfall, to return home to her family. The plan, initially, was to wait for things to settle down — but they didn’t. The second week she had taken to the skies to survey the meadow in a bold attempt to strategize her exit, but the view had been chilling. Wailing had become quiet sobs. Some were bleeding from their noses and eyes, some were nearly bald, all were emaciated. Agapi had made a hasty retreat back into her thicket. It wasn’t safe.
By the third week there was nearly no one left, and that in itself had stopped her in her tracks.
Home didn’t feel like an option anywhere, not with what had been happening.
So, when he comes she is still ruffled in the gnarled boughs of an old oak tree. The sound of his play obliterates what restless dreaming she had been enjoying, and Agapi cracks a single tiny eye to find him there beneath her branch under a gentle dusting of snow.
“Are you dead?” Perhaps it’s wrong to give herself away, but the safety of her perch overhead makes her bold combined with the fact that he is the only seemingly ‘living’ soul she’s seen in weeks (nevermind that he is transparent).
Arcane laughed and danced through the swirling snow, keeping it suspended in the air and just letting it shimmer and dance right along with him as he frolicked through it. It swirled around him with a happy little swoosh and swoop and sway, and just generally delighted him with its sparkly, twinkly beauty. Oh! Until a tiny little voice from up above made him stop and look up, eyes wide with curiosity.
“Oh, hello! I didn’t know birds could talk!” Could he hover like this? Oh probably, so he gave a sassy little hop and hovered straight up to the branch the bird was perched on. “Hi, good question! I think right now I’m only kinda dead. But I’m not quite alive yet either, or at least not independently alive! But my heart beats, when it can. I don’t think it can like this, ‘cause listen!” he invited, with a nod at his chest. Not that she could press her ear to it anyhow.
Did birds have ears?
Well nevermind that! “Hey, hi, so I’m Arcane! Or at least I mean that’s what Mom dreams my name as sometimes, and I like that a whole lot better than Who The Hell Are You and AHHHHHWHATHOW? so. Arcane! That’s me! Do you got a name? Do birds get names? Ooooh, I could name you if you need one! Something pretty, huh? ‘cause birds are real pretty, especially your kind. I like birds! Do you like not-birds? Specifically not quite dead but not quite alive yet boy not-birds with four legs and two eyes and a tail and a nose and look I got a tongue too,” he stuck it out and crossed his eyes, trying to look at it, but his nose was in the way.
So he shrugged and uncrossed his eyes and added, “Least I’m pretty sure I got one. Hey, do you? Birds have tongues, right, or how did you talk to me?”
All at once the twirling ceases, and when it does and a silent stillness creeps through the wooded meadow’s edge she is almost sad to see it go, regardless of it rousing her from her troubled sleep.
Because as she watches the snow settle, sadly, into the ground she is thinking about how not so long ago her and Agave had been almost the same as he had just been now, writhing and squirming in electrified spirals. In their little bodies they had held the same obvious obliviousness to the world and it’s dangers while dancing pirouettes through the meadow and conjuring stories of kings and queens and monsters in their minds. However foolish now, it’s a quality that she admires because she doesn’t know if it’s a time that they will ever get to revisit — dancing, and dragons, and fairy tales.
It all seemed so far away now, that carefree happiness.
There is hardly time to dwell on it though, because in the next moment he is speaking, and quickly, a flurry of words, chipper and exuberant, that seemingly have no end. No longer so bold in the boughs of her tree, Agapi flutters backwards on her branch and ends with her winds poised and quivering at her sides, ready for flight as he assaults her with his friendliness. Before long he is even up in her branch, and Agapi can almost not hear him for the slam of her heart up against her ribs again and again and again as the first firm grasp of fear takes hold of her.
He doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, because he persists while gesturing here and there in the hopes of her participation that she refuses with still-ruffled feathers and tiny eyes far too wide now to ever truly belong to a bird.
The answer he shares with her, when he does get to it, comes in the form of a cacophony of discordant and jarring thoughts that Agapi isn’t certain what to do with, however, somewhere in the time that he starts and ends talking she’s decided pointedly that in spite of his relatively spooky appearance he’s not a threat (perhaps even when his eyes are crossed and his tongue is out, a bemused expression of childish wonder wrung through every contour of his face).
“Birds have tongues, right, or how did you talk to me?”
That’s what she hears when she is tuning in again. Agapi pauses a moment, ruffling her feathers and pushing her tiny tongue around inside her closed beak, then says after she has confirmed it herself:
“Well, of course birds have tongues. In any case, I’m not a bird I’m a horse, too. I would show you, but I don’t want to come down.” Although, she would debate it heavily again to avoid another onslaught of words.
“If you’re not dead, and not alive, what are you?”
As soon as the words are off her tongue she remembers why she’s here in the boughs to begin with, and she takes another few quick hops backwards as though a matter of inches is what will save her from the contagion he could be expelling into the air around them.
“Are you sick?”
