"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
Arachna wondered why every time she looked into the webs she saw only darkness. She didn’t understand the meaning behind the blackness. She simply assumed that something had gone wrong with her ability to see. Or that the questions she had been asking were simply wrong.
Now she understood.
Now that the present was draped in darkness, she understood that she had indeed seen this strange future. The monsters, however, evaded her sight.
With newfound confidence in her abilities and complete ignorance of the threats in the shadows, Arachna made her way towards the meadow. She was a child no longer, but still so young - so naive.
She picked her way carefully through the darkness. She had seen her fair share of strangeness in Beqanna in her short lifetime, but she knew that this pushed the bounds of even Beqanna’s standards of normalcy. The meadow, however, was unchanged aside from the darkness. She’d spent most of her life lingering in the shadows of the common lands - blending in wherever she could.
She was somewhat disappointed to find the meadow empty. Her orange eyes flickered across the expanse - expecting to find something or someone but finding nothing. A frown tugged at the corners of her lips. And then she heard something rustling in the brush. She turned, narrowing her eyes when again she found...nothing.
01-30-2021, 11:21 PM (This post was last modified: 01-31-2021, 10:52 AM by Dretch.)
DRETCH
... and from your lips she drew your hallelujah
Something primal drives me awake, my eyes snapping open. Our wolf pack sleeps with us this night, many of them piled atop my wolf form like so many dogs, sweat pooling between my side and the cave’s floor. The white beta’s fur tickles my nose and I resist the urge to sneeze as I try to shift into something small enough to extricate myself from underneath them without waking any. Muscle and bone rend and twist, my ribcage shrinking, muzzle changing shape as I exchange fangs for blunted rodent teeth. I grit my teeth together against the deep ache that takes hold no matter how many hundreds of times I change, now struggling to remove my mouse-self from underneath the wolf. Thankfully, he yawns and rolls over, snuggling deeper into the pile as I slip away on silent paws. I do not look back as Set’s golden yellow eyes follow my fleeing figure, nor do I pause when he echoes a warning in my head not to roam too far.
It is not yet morning, though I do not know how I know this. Perhaps it is the nocturnal creatures I harbor somewhere in my head, each waiting for their turn in the figurative “light”. In any matter, skittering about the forest as one of the smallest of prey creatures is not recommended. Once at the cave mouth, I run up the wall, finding a small jut of rock to rest on. I close my eyes and gasp with the pain of another change made so quickly after the last, but in moments I am flapping off into the darkness on leather wings.
I weave through the close, twisting corridors that make up the Forest, the quiet filled with little more than the flutter of my wing. My clicks bounces off something hulking, a great scaled thing that takes a swipe at me as I twist away. A narrow miss but I still chitter angrily at it as I retreat. As if the eternal darkness is not enough, these monsters that stalk these common lands I call home are a relentless pestilence.
I discovered at an early age that eating in any form – wolf, bear, bat, what have you – translates to satiety even in my true form. I wing toward the openness of the Meadow, echolocation making my travel easy. I swipe a hearty, bitter-tasting moth from the air, finishing it off quickly before snagging an unidentified insect, this one sweet and juicy on my tongue. It only takes a few minutes to have my fill and I find roost in a gnarled oak on the southern edge of the Meadow, wrapping my wings around myself for warmth in the pre-dawn (though it seems I’ll never see dawn again) air and falling back asleep.
Hello? The inquiry startles me awake and my eyes flutter open to meet narrowed orange ones. From my upside down vantage, I can barely make out that it’s a young black mare whose discovered me. I quickly take her in, what I can see from here, in the dark, my gaze catching briefly on what looks like webbing across her chest. “I like spiders,” I blurt, claws tightening their hold on the branch. Growing up with Set and Niklas has its disadvantages, one of which is my lack of social skills.
Arachna’s orange eyes immediately flicker upwards at the voice, not suspecting the bat dangling from the limb to be the one to answer her inquiry. But perhaps she had been foolish for thinking there was something rustling in the bushes. There were many animals trying to make there way in this new, dark world that could have explained the noise. It didn’t necessarily mean something sinister. So Arachna was happy to have her attention diverted. A smile tugs at her dark lips at the nature of this unexpected encounter.
“They’re my favorite,” she replies, as if the answer wasn’t literally written all over her body. She’d been born with the webs covering her body and only later in life had she realized what she could do with the actual webs. She hoped one day she’d find a way to create the webs herself – that was the weakness in her ability. In order to draw the future out of them she had to find them first. Thankfully, Arachna always had a good idea of where to look.
She hadn’t peered into the webs for some time – not since she thought that her ability had ceased working. But now that it was obvious to her that this wasn’t the case – she was curious as to what, if anything, they would show her now. Her glimpses of the future weren’t always accurate, as the future was subjective and always subject to change, but it was better than seeing nothing at all. Of course, she imagined divining in the dark would be a challenge in itself for the best time to find the webs had always been the hours just before dawn and just after dusk.
Arachna, having grown up largely in isolation, also suffered when it came to social skills. ”Are bats your favorite?” she asked her new companion, unsure at what point this line of questioning could be interpreted as rude. But she was genuinely curious, having never met a shifter before. ”Or can you become other things too?”
They’re my favorite,” she replies, and I breath out a sigh of air that I did not realize I had been holding. I do not encounter many others in the dark - especially when Niklas, Set, or either of their minions rove at my side. Of those, fewer still are friendly, and none of them females. I twist my head to the side, trying to bring her in better focus. It is a somewhat fruitless endeavor in this darkness, but a habit I’ve yet to lose. I blink dumbly at the friendly smile she gives me. The curiosity shining in the titian depths of her eyes is one that mirrors my own. Are bats your favorite? she asks, and I loosen my wings from where I have them wrapped around my small body.
I have never before considered whether or not I have a favorite. Set says I came out of the womb an alarming mess of creatures, my shifter’s gene tempestuous and undisciplined. I grin faintly as I recall his description of my mother’s initial horror, an expression that slowly fades as a darker memory follows on its heels … Or can you become other things, too? The follow-up question snaps me back to reality and I smile wide.
“Oh I can do lots,” I say, my bat’s voice a bit squeaky and colored with unmistakable pride. There is little else I care for above shifting, in spite of the fact that with every change comes pain as molecules rearrange themselves.
Still upside-down, I spread my wings even wider and search my mind for the creature I am looking for. My claws grip tighter when I find it and I initiate the change, muscle and bone shrinking, changing, until I have eight legs and blink at her with eight different eyes. My orb-weaver’s body clings to the side of the branch for a moment. “See!” I shout, but she will probably hear it as barely above a whisper – spiders are a rather quiet sort. Delighted to have an audience, one who is genuinely curious rather than forcing me through my paces, I scuttle toward the ground and through the leaf litter left over from last autumn. When I’m clear of the mare and the brush, I shift again, closing my eyes against the vertigo as I become a horse once more. Just close enough to make her out in the darkness, I twist and dip my head a bit. “I’m Dretch,” I introduce myself. “What are you doing out here?”
There’s no hiding the awe that alights in the girl’s eyes. The idea of shifting into a different skin – a different body – is not something Arachna had ever considered. She takes a moment to consider what it must be to take the body of something else – something that could soar above the trees or creep amongst the leaves unseen. At the very least it would certainly make existing in this new, much darker world so much more interesting...
But watching as the girl so effortlessly switches from bat to spider sends a thrill of excitement through her unlike any she’d ever known in her short life. Arachna’s orange eyes widen as the wings become tiny legs – eight tiny legs – and she cannot contain the smile that now seems permanently etched across her dark lips at this well, wonderful, turn of events! She watches carefully as the spider scuttles on her way, and she is careful not to move as she is well aware of how delicate the creatures are. Arachna has made quite a study of various varieties of arachnids and the different types of webs they weave.
And then the girl is equine, and Arachna beams at her, clearly enjoying the show. “I’m Arachna,” she offers, in response to Dretch’s introduction. “And I guess I don’t really have anywhere else to be?” She adds, a little lamely, for she really didn’t have a reason for being here other than she was, well, always here. The common lands were as close to a home as she’d ever had, really.
“Well… I used to go out hunting for spider webs,” she says, quietly, as if divulging one of her greatest secrets. And in a way, she is. She’s never told anyone about her ability to read the webs. “It’s harder to find them now in the dark, but sometimes I could see things in them.” She doesn’t tell Dretch how she had thought her ability was broken when they had shown her the darkness, and how now she craves nothing more than to find one again now that she knows that they had been right all along. Would they show her more darkness now? Or would there be a flicker of light in the future? She burns to know. But divulging her secret is more than she’d ever told anyone before. It seems right – given that Dretch had shown her what she could do.
Arachna doesn’t really understand what it is she can do – the intricacies of looking into a glimpse of the future. She doesn't understand the subtleties. Or the dangers. But she does know that she is ravenously curious about it in the same way that she is intrigued by the way that Dretch can slip into the skin of any animal she wishes.
