"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
bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
The years have escaped him.
He has watched them, as though behind a veil. Disinterested—disengaged. The world continued to revolve, his family (both distant and close) continued to grow. Enough to feed his power, enough to keep him alive, but those faces that he had known so well had left. They slipped into oblivion, leaving him with nothing but a world he did not recognize, a world that he did not care about. When the afterlife ripped apart, he felt it like an electric shock to the heart, the unbalance shaking him to his core.
But even that was not enough to bring him back.
Not enough to stir him into action.
No—it was only when the darkness came. When the threat of danger became too much. It brought life back into his limbs and he shook the dust that had caked onto the mulberry of his head. He shook his massive head and stepped forth from the place where he had rested, not bothering to entirely remove the dirt that circled his disarmingly green eyes, the way it makes him look so much older than he is.
His throat feels hoarse from disuse, but he doesn’t mind, and he doesn’t bother using magical means to make it feel normal again. He deserves to feel this way—the rust, the creaking sensation of his body coming back to life—and he nearly relishes it. Wonders if this is how Bright felt all those years ago.
How everyone he had ever spirited away in the name of protection felt this way.
(Did it matter? Not to him, certainly.)
Grim, he walks through the shadows—ignoring the way they press into him, the whispers and the slight movements that tell him he is not alone. He walks until he comes upon her, alone, and there is a small piece of him that remembers what it was like to worry about an innocent. “What are you doing out here by yourself,” his voice is roughened on the edges, his worry not great enough to soften it for her.
There is nearly disdain in his voice as he demands an answer. He slices his shoulder open, the blood dripping slowly down his leg to sizzle against the forest floor. Before him a glowing orb appears, bouncing lightly in the space between them—enough to let her see better, at the very least.
“You should know better,” he chastises, as if he knows her.
i've been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night and now i see daylight
She is alone, and she hates it, and yet she does nothing to fix it.
She misses the sun, and she is afraid of the things that lurk in the dark, but she is more afraid of burdening anyone with her presence. They will notice the way she sometimes seems to be worlds away, the way she seems to see and hear things that they don’t, and she still has not learned how to live with this. She is terrible company; despondent and lost, and so wrapped up in her own mind that little manages to draw her out.
She thought about finding her parents, but she talks herself out of that too. She does not want to impose on Anonya’s new family; does not want to be a complication that dampens what little happiness her mother can find. And Plume—she knows that he would break to know that she felt so adrift, that the heaviness that anchored her was not something he could lift.
She is young, but she is learning the art of shouldering things alone, and it’s why when he finds her she nearly flees.
There is a jump to her muscles, but instead of running she finds herself whirling to face him with a breath stuck in her throat. No words come to her, her tongue confused and heavy, but inwardly she notices that the way he had startled her had chased away all the ghosts, too. Her mind is silent and the wavering shapes in the shadows are gone, and she feels the strangest wave of relief.
“I like being alone,” she answers him in the soft lilt of her voice, a tone so quiet it seems to rest on top of the shadows rather than sink into them. She does not see him slice his shoulder open; just sees the orb of light that he manifests into the air. The glow of it casts her face into light and shadow, the red rubies glinting in the dark, and then the remnants of blood on his shoulder. She doesn’t make the connection of course — between his blood and the magic — and so concern flickers in her eyes involuntarily. “You’re bleeding,” she comments tentatively, realizing that he likely knows, but also feeling like she would come across as rude if she did not at least take notice of it.
She watches him with large, doe-like eyes, with muscles still pulled taut and suspicion lining her face. “I’m Narya,” she offers him with a cautious kind of hope, thinking that maybe if she gives herself a name he would be less likely to hurt her.
bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
The darkness is one of the strangest phenomena that he has seen in Beqanna, and the studious part of him desperately wants to study it further. Wants to leave her company so that he can wade belly-deep into the shadows and monsters and learn more about them. Wants to find his relations and pull them into the place beyond time so that he can keep them safe there. But there is something about the innocence in her eyes—and, more so, the loneliness deep within that jeweled gaze—that keeps him rooted to the spot.
When she mentions his wound, he frowns a little, nearly forgetting the price he pays.
He knows beneath the fresh blood and the dust of his time asleep is dried blood, nearly caked in spots. It has been a lifetime of tearing himself open to access his gift. A lifetime of sacrificing himself for it. He knows that there are other magicians who draw upon other elements—those that are so much easier to find. He wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to be one of them. To have magic powered by the sun, or by the flora and fauna. To be powered by the world in a way that he never would be.
Instead he has to pay for each and every gift.
It is no wonder that he barely feels it anymore.
He turns his emerald eyes back to her, nearly amused, but his face still too stern to betray it. “I bleed a lot,” he deadpans, not answering further or explaining it anymore. Instead he takes a step toward her, filling the space so that the shadows cast from the glowing orb are even more severe across his dark face.
“Narya,” he repeats, voice rumbling from deep within his chest.
He doesn’t give her his name—not yet.
“Why do you like being alone?”
He could hunt through her mind, he knows. Could pluck the answer from her as quickly as she could even think to hide it, but he prefers to hear the answer that she would give willingly.
i've been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night and now i see daylight
She has never met anyone like him. She typically steered clear of those that made her heart beat too hard, the ones that made her nerves feel like they are needles against her skin. The cool way that he regards her inspires a faint feeling of fear to crawl up her spine, because she hates the way she cannot read his face. Even with the silver orb that casts light across their faces there is still nothing she can discern from his stern, almost stone-like features, and he hardly blinks when she comments on the blood on his shoulder.
His eyes are such an enchanting green, though, that she forgets her apprehension. She finds herself staring at them, fixing her dark brown eyes to the emerald green of his, searching for any kind of break in the stone that he is portraying. She thinks, for the briefest of moments, that they seem brighter, but set against that unyielding face of his she does not let herself believe it.
Her name sounds different spoken from his mouth like it is wrapped in thunder. It chases the chill he had created with a strange kind of heat, one that flushes inside of her chest. She doesn’t know what it means—this strange tug-of-war, where she is wary of him but all at once fascinated.
She says nothing and only keeps her ruby-lined face pointed to his, contemplating his question. The thoughtful silence stretches for what she is sure is an awkward amount of time (for her, at least—hyper-aware of the pounding in her ears, of the breath that suddenly feels tight in her lungs), before finally answering, “Everything is always too loud for me. Even when I’m alone. But being alone at least makes it feel….quieter.” Quieter, because it is just her own thoughts and the dead, without the jarring voices of all the other conversations of the common areas.
He has not given her his name yet, and while she so badly wants to ask for it she does not, instead asking softly, “Are you usually alone?”
bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
He remembers a girl he had met once who had been haunted by noises that were always too loud, too intrusive—who had seemed perpetually on the edge if splintering underneath the merest breath. In some ways, she reminds him of that girl and he tilts his head curiously, as though he could dive beneath the surface of her to dig up the truth of it. In a way, he knows that he could. It would be a matter of splitting her open like fruit, peeling back the edges of her to find the core and sinking his teeth into the pit of it.
But it’s never quite so interesting that way.
At least, not at first.
(There is no telling what he may do later—what he may resort to when his patience wears thin.)
For now though, he gives the barest hint of a smile. Something like a whisper of it. A shadow that barely curves his mulberry lips and his shoulder begins to bleed again slowly (thick drops of blood that drop slowly down the curve) as he pulls up walls around them. They are metaphorical more than physical though he is not certain that she would not feel them if she was to run toward them, but they muffle the world around them until you could hear nothing but the soft inhale and exhale of the two of them.
It is oddly intimate, and he breathes a little easier, knowing that he has put together a somewhat momentary sanctuary for them both—away from the whispers in her mind, away from the monsters that lurked in the eternal darkness, away from the worries that forever plagued him. It was just them.
“In a way, I am always alone,” he says with that same unchangeable expression.
A pause, something that was half breath and half laugh escaping him.
“In other ways, I can find not even a moment of respite."
i've been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night and now i see daylight
It is noticeable, to her at least, the way the world around them suddenly goes quiet. She does not feel the wall, not from where she stands, but the sudden almost-silence feels like a weight being lifted off her. Like a curtain being drawn shut, like all the noise in the distance has been muted—the hum of conversation, the rattle of tree limbs, and the call of a lone bird in the sky. All of it fades away until it is only the two of them—and the quiet in her mind is suddenly the loudest thing she has ever heard.
“How did you do that?” she asks him with tangible wonder in her voice, and the idea of them being enclosed, together, does not stir the apprehension or fear that perhaps it should have. “You made it quieter,” she continues, her voice ever-soft but her eyes focused intently on his face, questions reflecting in the dark brown of them. “The voices….” she begins, and then abruptly stops. The voices in my head are gone sounds utterly insane, and she at least has the self-awareness to know that.
Thankfully he answers her question, revealing just the slightest glimpse of himself, which despite having just met him she was surprised by. He had pulled her in and yet somehow still seemed entirely locked down, walled up like a fortress that she wasn't sure she was brave enough to try and find a way inside of.
She has never been especially brave to begin with, and she does not understand why this man with the sharp green eyes and the blood spilling from his shoulder had decided to not just simply ignore her, because while she was adorned in rubies and flashed with gold, she was nothing remarkable.
What he says causes her heart to flutter in her throat, and she finds her tongue suddenly simmering with all the words she longs to say. To tell him that she understands because she cannot remember the last time she had any kind of relief from the ghosts in her mind or the ones that flicker at the edge of her vision. That she knows what it is to be alone and somehow never alone, and she wants to ask him if he finds it as exhausting as she does. She wants to ask him how he copes if he had to learn to be hard, or if he had been born that way—if there was any hope for her at all to not always be the unsure thing that she is.
She doesn’t ask him that, though, because all she can work up the nerve to ask is, “Who are you?”
