[open] your string of lights is still bright to me

[Gale]

Gale it's hard to keep a straight face when i just want to smile -- starlight crashing through the room, we'll lose our feathers Though he desperately wants to tell Tiercel that Eyas hadn’t meant what she’d said, he cannot bring himself to lie to his brother. Their sister might very well try, and while Gale is certain he could stop anything from escalating, he is equally certain that he does not want to. So instead he avoids them both, and decides instead to seek out Isilya, and seek the aid of the queen in finding a solution to this darkness. He leaves Erne behind, uncertain but hopeful that his newly discovered skill will translate to Erne’s night vision increasing as well. As he flies, he practices, looking first one way, then another. By the time he lands four heavy hooves on the damp earth of Tephra, he’s manipulated his vision enough that he is able to see as nearly as clearly as if it were day. With this clear vision, he realizes that he is most decidedly not in Tephra. Instead, he is in the Meadow (or perhaps the Field), and to the far north the Mountain makes a dark shape in the sky. Gale huffs an irritated breath, knowing he’d been blown off course by wind. Usually correcting such a flight error is a minor thing, but he had not bothered to look down as he’d flown, and instead has landed far from his true destination. His throat is dry, so Gale moves toward the smell of distant water, doing his best to keep clear of the few horses he sees in the distance, and ever-watchful for another of the eerie creatures that he’d seen before. @[anyone]

[Hourglass]

— and how long must I stay, will I lay by your side
just to say that I'm yours and you'll never be mine —

Despite how much she hated to be alone, Hourglass had isolated herself in the days before the eclipse. She did not understand how her friendship with Aureus had unraveled so quickly and suddenly, but it was an injury to her heart like she had never experienced before. She almost swears that if she could open up her chest and see inside that her heart would bear the spider-web cracking that she is imagining – like glass beginning to break.

She hated realizing that she was just as fragile as she has pretended not to be, and so she only allows herself a brief amount of time to gather herself together and return again to the meadow. The darkness that has descended made it easy to pretend to not see him, or anyone, and she uses her infrared vision only to avoid the largest groups of horses. The warmth of their bodies stands out like flickering flames in the dark, and soon she finds herself along the outskirts, following the sound of water rushing over rock.

She walks to the edge, exhaling a sigh as her vision shifts back to normal, allowing herself to be enveloped by the darkness. Between the dark and the rushing of the water, she is able to, if only momentarily, forget the way her heart still ached, and divert her mind from the confused thoughts that still lingered.

With a front hoof, she scuffs idly at a small rock, laughing quietly to herself at the ting sound it makes against the glass before dropping into the water. A sound to her right makes her freeze, though, having been so lost in her thoughts that she did not realize anyone else had been there. She has not yet come across anything strange in the dark, but the fact that it remained for so long was enough to make her uneasy. Something wasn't right, even if she didn't know what. But she soon sees that it is just another horse – a normal one (she thinks) – and the previous tension melts away when she releases her anxious breath with a quiet, “Oh.” She turns toward him, lilac-colored eyes seeking him out through the shadows when she apologizes, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone else was over here.” She pauses, knowing she should take her leave since usually when someone is alone it is because they want to be, but instead she extends to him with a clear hope in her voice, “My name is Hourglass.”

hourglass

— with this love like a hole,
swallow my soul —

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you “You’ve no need to apologize,” Gale replies, reassured by the colorful warmth that radiates from her. He trusts his eyes above most other things, and he is sure that the soft-voiced creature near him is not one of the shadowed monsters. There are no details about her that he can see at all, but he does recall the easy way she’d moved, as though the world were more visible to her than it is to his currently equine blue eyes. Perhaps she had a gift like his, he muses, or perhaps she has another gift entirely. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get the sun back would you, Hourglass?” He asks, his voice soft and too full of hope to be anything other than purposefully dramatic. Her name is full of soft sounds, which makes Gale curious. As delicately as he can, he plucks a single image from her mind, a rippled reflection of a time she’d glanced down at the water. Half a heartbeat later, he replaces it just where it came from, remarkably confident in his ability to manipulate without feeling like anything more than a brief itch. She’s a chestnut mare, with the stars on her chest. One of the Dark God’s many progeny, Gale assumes. Perhaps the question that he’d asked earlier in jest might actually have a helpful answer, but Gale is a realist. They are all stuck in the darkness, he thinks, and he might as well introduce himself. “I’m Gale.” @[Hourglass]

[Hourglass]

— and how long must I stay, will I lay by your side
just to say that I'm yours and you'll never be mine —

She is immediately put at ease by  his amiable tone, and she again feels warmth spread inside of her chest. For a moment the ache in her heart doesn’t seem as strong— the crack suddenly not as deep. She hadn’t realized how badly she craved interaction, until this moment. How she needed to hear someone’s voice, especially in this newfound darkness, because she couldn’t bear the sound of her own thoughts. She isn’t the type that fares well alone, she has come to realize that, and the idea unsettles her.

“That’s good, because I didn’t really want to leave,” she says with a quiet laugh, and she closes the space that had existed between them. The dark has left her feeling overly exposed and she is grateful for friendly company — or any company at all. She turns her eyes to the sky at his question, as if she has not already looked for the sun a hundred or so times. She shakes her head with an apologetic smile, the copper-colored strands of her hair swaying easily across the smooth glass of her neck and along the angles of her face. “I’m afraid I don’t. Has anyone tried asking it nicely to come back?” She teases, but it is clearly forced — her gaze is still angled upward, where the moon continues to fully block the sun, and she feels the dread begin to settle like ice beneath her skin once more. She is young, and this was the first strange event that she has witnessed happening; she is learning that she doesn’t like the unknown, or the way the darkness feels like hundreds of eyes watching her.

“Gale,” she repeats his name, and she likes how light it feels in her glass mouth. It brings a smile to her lips, and through the dark some of the worry fades from her light-colored eyes when she looks back to him. “Why do you think the eclipse is lasting so long?” she asks him with a cautious optimism, searching for a single thread of hope to cling to; that maybe this stranger in the meadow has the faintest idea what is happening.

hourglass

— with this love like a hole,
swallow my soul —

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you She comes nearer, and the gentle waves of color that emanate from them both reach across the space that remains between. It’s heat, Gale has learned, and it is carried away by the cool air when it gusts around them. Has anyone asked the sun nicely? Gale laughs aloud at the absurdity of the suggestion, but that doesn’t stop him from immediately doing that very thing. He asks very nicely for the sun to come back, but after a few pregnant seconds of darkness, he shrugs his shoulders in a gesture of futility even as he smiles. When she brings up the eclipse again, this time in far less a playful manner, the smile beings to fade. He has a great many thoughts about why the eclipse has lasted this long, but no way of knowing which of them is right – or if any of them are. “Probably the monsters,” he answers with a shrug, which takes with it the last of the humor from his expression. “They appeared right after the Alliance.” Gale continues, thinking of the darkness that rose around the shadow creature and has never released its grip. Would this have happened if he’d won? Gale shakes his head, displacing his long white forelock and along with it the uncomfortable thought. There is no changing the past.  “The darkness hasn’t been entirely bad.” He says instead. “None of the mainlanders have managed to start a war since this all started.” She’s a mainlander, Gale knows, and so he tries to make it clear he’s only joking with a quickly-returning smile. @[Hourglass]

[Hourglass]

— and how long must I stay, will I lay by your side
just to say that I'm yours and you'll never be mine —

His answer is not what she had hoped, but something in his own uncertainty was reassuring. The idea that no one seemed to know what was happening was almost unifying, in its own way. They were all at a loss, but they were at least confused together. There is still a part of her that thinks someone out there knows exactly what is happening, but perhaps they like the world being plunged into darkness. It keeps the unease fresh in her chest, that constant worry that the dark was being used to subdue them, somehow.



But he speaks of the Alliance, and she gives a curious tilt of her glass head. “The Alliance?” She has heard the word, just in passing, but did not entirely know what it was. Hourglass did not live in any particular land, and had never made an attempt to settle into one, either. The Alliance had piqued her interest, but being made of glass she had forced herself to push it from her mind. Perhaps in a different life she could have been a fighter. In this one, though, she has resigned herself to the fact that she is too fragile for such things. “Did you fight in it?” she asks him with the faintest hint of admiration, her glass-heart quickening just a little at the thought.



She laughs good-naturedly at his teasing remark about mainlanders and war, and her glossy, copper shoulder rolls in a way reminiscent of a shrug. “I don’t live in any of the lands, but they do seem to have a fondness for fighting.” Catching onto the way he had referred to them, she comments curiously, “You must live on one of the islands, then?”

hourglass

— with this love like a hole,
swallow my soul —

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you He nods at her first question, and again at her second. Her voice had changed, just a little, and while he is sure it is a positive change, Gale is not quite savvy enough to pick up on the admiration. “I did,” he adds, because he is rather proud of his success despite the final loss, “Second place.” Her laugh tells Gale that she is amused, and while Gale knows that one can fake such a sound, he’s sure enough of his limited social skills to be sure that this one sounds real. So he smiles, and when she asks if he lives on one of the islands, he nods agreeably. “I do. Islandres.” With his navy muzzle, he points toward it in the darkness – east and north. He is thinking of others things even as he does, things like Hourglass’ strange admission. She doesn’t live in any of the lands? Well, he supposes, she is in the Meadow, at a time when Monsters roam, so he supposes if she had a better place to hide she’d likely be there. Or perhaps she is like Aela, too young and bold for her own good, wanting to face the monsters and the darkness in some effort to prove herself. But no, Gale decides, she does not seem that sort. He doesn’t doubt that she might hold great powers, but her physical body reminds him of ice at the surface of a moving river. Strong, but fragile if struck without thought. “Have you always not lived in any of the lands?” he asks curiously, “What’s it like?” @[Hourglass]

[Hourglass]

— and how long must I stay, will I lay by your side
just to say that I'm yours and you'll never be mine —

“I wish I could fight,” she tells him a little wistfully, but she looks down at her glass legs as she says it and her face falls. She was not as fragile as she felt, and sometimes it was easy to forget. Hourglass has never been timid or shy—as a child she bordered on reckless, and the tighter the hold her mother had tried to keep on her the more she had fought against it.  She wanted to see how hard she could push herself, wanted to see how far she could go until she felt like she might break.

It was never as far as she would have liked.
No matter the ferocity she might feel inside of her chest or the heat of the blood in her veins, she had not been given a body that could withstand it.

“I bet I could have won,” she says with an exaggerated tone of faux arrogance, and the smile on her lips is a teasing one when she adds, “I mean, if I wasn’t glass, I think I could take you.” With her delicate head tilted upwards at a haughty angle she still cannot keep up the charade for long, and it falls away with a lilting laugh. “Maybe next time.”

Her eyes follow the direction that he points, and she realizes that not only has she never been to the island he speaks of, but she’s never even been to that side of Beqanna. The furthest she has ever gone is the autumn woods of Sylva and a little bit of the Pampas. “I was born in the meadow,” she answers his question, scanning around her, knowing that somewhere beneath all that shadow and dark was the land she was most familiar with. “My mother grew up in Pangea, but she didn’t want my twin sister and I there. So she kept us here, and I just never really had a reason to...live anywhere, I guess.”

Her mother and father were in Pangea again, last she had heard, but Hourglass has never been tempted to rejoin them. She has grown too accustomed to freedom, to no borders and no one to answer to. “I don’t mind it. The meadow, the forest, the river—I just drift between them all.” Her expression turns pensive as she grows quiet, before finally admitting softly, “It can be lonely, but I don’t think calling a certain land home would fix it.”

hourglass

— with this love like a hole,
swallow my soul —

@[Gale]