"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
05-21-2021, 10:12 AM (This post was last modified: 05-21-2021, 10:12 AM by Wrenley.)
let it all come out and burn like a fire
She had never really believed dad’s story about the shadows making him into something different. Had scoffed at the idea of them ‘consuming’ him or whatever nonsense he had said. She hadn’t believed him then, but she most certainly does now.
If pressed, she would never be able to truly describe what had happened. She doesn’t think it had been something quick. No, the change had come slowly, a little more every time she wrapped them around her to delve into the secrecy they offered. She had always avoided the sun, of course, but with the eternal night, it had been very easy when shadow had been everywhere. Now, with the sun back, she had found herself using the dense darkness of the shaded groves even more, disgruntled by the brightness elsewhere.
But this time, when she had emerged, she had been something else entirely. She could feel the change through her entire being, subtle and intoxicating. And as she stares into the mirrored waters of a still pool, she is entirely pleased. It is very difficult not to be, especially for one as vain as Wrenley. Her once ebony features had faded until she mirrored the sunset in the most glorious of ways. Her hair had grown long and thick, the soft strands redolent with the perfume of the cherry blossoms woven through them. And her eyes, once a dark brown, now stare back a pale and silvery lavender.
By any standard, she had grown impossibly lovely. A fact that brings a vibrant, self-satisfied smile to her lips.
There is simply no way she could remain hidden in Taiga any longer. It had been easy before, when it felt like everyone and everything was impossibly annoying and didn’t understand her in the least. Now though? Now, she is made to be seen.
Though not by the light of day. Daylight had never been much of a friend to her, and now, she would never need to know her hideous touch again. No, the last rays of a dying sunset are truly her time to shine, and that is when she finds herself on a well worn path traversing the winding length of the river. The water gleams with muted pinks and purples, perfectly complementing her as she strolls rather aimlessly, pleased to be admired and envied from afar rather than approached.
Hyperia has never known change. Has never known anything of another existence. She was born into the water and water is what she became. She had barely taken her first breath before her father had chained her to this river—made her dependent on it, leashed to the wild currents and frothing edges of it.
But she has never minded because she has never known different.
So she lives her life within it. Most days she spend as liquid, racing down the length of it. Sometimes, she turns partially equine once more to stand on its shores, her mane dripping down to rejoin the body of water. Rarely does the young girl hunt out company of any kind. She prefers her own. Prefers to babble at the river and let it talk back to her spurts and stutters—the soliloquies of it soothing her raging heart.
But there is something of the other that calls to her, like to like, and she watches in her liquid form. Seeing without seeing. Seeing as the river sees. A feeling, perhaps. A tug. Her consciousness responds and she twists in the water, curious and eager. She gently glides down the river, unseen as she trails the walking nymph, the edges of her bleeding into the rest of the river as she coaxes it along.
When her curiosity can no longer be sated, she forms herself again.
She rises as a young girl—impossibly delicate, liquid red eyes set against teal. The water of her mane frames her face, splashing down her shoulder as she smiles at the other nymph, a shy twist of her lip.
“Hello there,” her voice bubbles in her throat. “I don’t get visitors in the evening very often.”
If she had expected company, it had certainly not been from the depths of the river. In truth, she hadn’t been paying attention. The falling dusk had been a sweet song on her sunset skin, lulling her into a sense of peace and belonging. It is a rare sensation for her, not because she had never felt like she belonged before, but because it is the first time she has truly felt understood. There is now a breath of welcome and sweetness in the night air she had never known before, and she wonders now how she had ever lived without it.
The girl’s greeting rising from the river, her voice like the babbling of a brook on a quiet spring day, causes Wrenley to whip around, a frown immediately displacing the serenity of her features. The movement is not nearly as sharp or abrupt as one would expect, instead bleeding and blending into the night as it carries her unconsciously in it’s embrace, a wisp of smoke on a very deliberate breeze.
Not that she’s paying much attention to that right now.
A scowl slips briefly across her lips before she schools her features, lavender eyes staring at the watery visitor with a mix of haughty irritation and unwilling curiosity. This girl is, after all, familiar in the oddest of ways. When her words register however, the frown still hovering at the edge of her lips deepens. “Are you trying to tell me your visitors respect daylight hours here?” she asks suspiciously. As far as she has seen, the world just doesn’t seem that respectful. Then she shakes her head, realizing it hardly signified. “Not that it matters,” she continues, voice creeping into a familiarly bored tone. “You’ve never had a visitor like me, I am sure.”
Hyperia is too much born of her element to understand the world around her. She has not yet picked up on the nuances of sarcasm or boredom or disdain. She cannot pick apart these things to tell the greater story they tell once they are weaved together. So it is with the absolute utmost innocence that she stares at the other nymph, her red eyes blinking away the water that streams down her childish face. She considers the question of the other mare for a second, chewing on it before giving an altogether too elegant shrug.
“I don’t have visitors,” she says bluntly, her voice singing around the tide in her mouth. “But people seem to come less at night, if that’s what you’re asking.” A simple upward curve of her lip. “I think that’s because people are sleeping, but you can never be sure.” She certainly couldn’t. She had no real idea of what kept others away during the evening or what drew them here during the day and her hold on sleep was a tenuous thing. She tended to catch her rest in liquid form, floating lazily down the river.
But she is not put off by Wrenley in the slightest and doesn’t hesitate to take a step further.
She studies her intently for a moment before nodding. “You’re right,” she affirms, her voice light and yet weighty, the youth of it carrying the pitch up higher than where it will settle in maturity. “I don’t think I have ever seen anyone like you.” She’s seen plenty around the river. Others with larger gifts or brighter coats. Others markedly more plain. But none quiet like the evening nymph before her, although she is not certain exactly what that has to do with anything. “My name is Hyperia,” she finally offers.
For all her worldly disdain, Wrenley is in truth woefully underprepared for the world as it truly is. She had grown up with the benefit of kind and loving parents, sheltered in their embrace. They had never let harm come to her, and Wrenley, in her youthful self-absorption, had never considered that it was their protection that allowed her the freedom to treat the world as cavalierly as she does.
Her world has always been so very simple, and she has yet to realize it is not as she had always imagined it.
So it is that in her small corner of the universe, night has always been met with a flurry of activity. For a family of creatures who are so unified with the darkness, daytime hours are for sleeping while nighttime hours are for everything else. Which is why Hyperia’s assertion baffles her, causing her to snort her disbelief. It should have been an entirely inelegant action, but somehow it is not. “Those plebians wouldn’t understand if it bit them on the butt,” she replies dismissively before airily adding with a faintly haughty tilt of her nose, “you’re better off without them anyway.”
Wrenley cannot help but be pleased when Hyperia agrees with her, replying that she had in fact never seen anyone like her. She had known it of course, but it’s nice to hear it from someone else too. In that moment, she decides that she rather likes the young water nymph. Which is rare, considering she almost never likes anyone she meets. And so when Hyperia offers her name, Wrenley returns it with a faint, almost friendly smile. “I’m Wrenley.”
Hyperia barely has parents—let alone ones to write home about. Her mother was oblivious to the children she bore, much like she had been to those before the triplets, and her father saw them more as pawns than his actual children. Hyperia though had nothing to compare it against—nothing to try to make sense of it. Her life was simply what it was. She had been born and immediately separated from her sisters and her life was now this river. This water. It began and ended on its shores and even now, standing away from the water, she begins to feel the faint ache that comes from being apart for too long. The fatigue.
But the conversation is too enthralling for her to mind too much.
She is content to suffer the consequences as she tips her head back to watch Wrenley, studying the elegant way that she dips a shoulder and lifts her nose. The easy way that she moves as though the night settled over her shoulders like a cloak. It was fascinating. “I wouldn’t know,” she answers honestly with a shy tip of her lips. “I’ve never been with someone so I don’t know what it is like to be without them either.”
There’s no self-pity in her voice. Just facts. As though she could divorce the ache in her bones away from the fact that she was, as always, all alone. But she isn’t now, she thinks, and her red eyes warm slightly with the thought, the water moving gracefully as she dips her head in greeting.
“That’s a beautiful name,” she says before offering her own. “I’m Hyperia.”
Just as the water nymph could not imagine a life as filled with others as Wrenley’s is, neither could the evening nymph imagined a life so devoid of it. The juxtaposition would be a fascinating one, if she bothered to explore it. Whether she would be bothered is yet to be decided, however.
But the other girl’s answer intrigues her. “Pity,” she replies in an almost offhand manner. It might even have been pitiable had Wrenley been moved to pity. But the word as it falls from her lips is far more dismissive than empathetic. In truth, with little commiseration to be found on the subject, the only interest it holds for her is a purely analytical one. “As annoying as they are, I’m not sure I would care to have no one.”
She preens faintly beneath the praise before eying her slightly askance, wry amusement toying with her sullen lips. “So you said.” The dry tone retreats as easily as it had come however, her attention turning instead to the water that seems to want nothing more than to entice the girl to return.
She steps closer, the scent of the blossoms scattered through the evening strands of her hair folding with the clarity of the night as it curls around her. When she speaks again, she turns the conversation from herself with a clear inflection of reluctance. “If you truly have no one, then how exactly do you entertain yourself?” Her voice is faintly skeptical as she speaks. “It sounds awfully dull.”
Perhaps, in the future, Hyperia will have enough social interactions to learn how to navigate them with grace. She will learn of the shadows that curl around her heart and sink into her bones. She will learn to wield her beauty instead of bend beneath it. But, for now, she is outclassed in this moment and left to simply follow behind Wrenley—admiring and hungry for more. Aching to learn of this world she represents.
“I would like someone,” she admits, not sure how else to word it. How to tell this nymph of how she longs for companionship and how in her heart there is the desire for something else entirely. The desire to find and keep strangers who come to her shores. To tuck them away and never be alone again.
But she swallows these truths and tips her childish head up toward the other. “I spend my time with the river,” she says, turning her silver-touched head back toward the waters from which it came. “It isn’t dull,” there is a slight pout to her words, her lip curling slightly before she drops her eyes.
She laughs a little, the sound fluid and sweet.
“Okay, well it is a little boring.”
She turns her attention back to the older mare. “What do you entertain yourself?”
06-11-2021, 10:11 AM (This post was last modified: 06-11-2021, 10:11 AM by Wrenley.)
let it all come out and burn like a fire
There is a coyness to the youth, though whether it is intentional or not, Wrenley has yet to determine. From her set world view, it could only be intentional. But the innocence and naivete that Hyperia exudes makes her question whether that’s truly the case. Disgruntles her, because she hates questioning her own judgements. And makes her wonder if there is a way she might learn to wield such a thing.
Unfortunately for Wrenley, she would need to learn how to consider anyone but herself (even if only as a pretense) for that to happen.
“So why don’t you?” Wrenley asks, her lilting voice blunt. As though it were a simple thing to have someone to keep one company. Of course, to the sunset mare, it is a simple thing. She has yet to realize that for those alone in the world, finding family or friends is not always so easy. Especially if one is tied as irrevocably to water as Hyperia is. “Certainly you must have passers by aplenty.” she continues skeptically before adding almost airily, “just, get to know a few of them.”
She can’t help but smile when the girl admits it is boring. She is used to being right and is pleased to have her confirm it. Her next question takes her aback however. Not because she does not have ways of entertaining herself, but because, on the surface, she’s not quite certain they sound terribly fun either. So she sniffs, as though it should be the most obvious thing in the world. “I watch others,” she replies, her voice deliberately blithe. “Sometimes I help them and tell them what they’re doing wrong.” She pauses, lips twisting briefly before she smooths them out again. “They’re not always very appreciative,” she grumbles the last before continuing more clearly, “but sometimes the truth hurts.”
