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+---- Thread: [private] too much pressure just to make it (/showthread.php?tid=30415)
too much pressure just to make it - Malik - 10-17-2021
He can make no sense of what his mother tries to teach him. He feels very confused, even days later.
Malik is unaccustomed to lessons of any sort, having been left to his own devices for most of his childhood in Hyaline. While most of what Mazikeen has taught him recently has been welcome (how to shift more quickly, how to modify his coloring for camoflauge) the unexpected emphasis on tolerance and self-restraint during their recent wyvern hunt has left him feeling rather shaken.
Rather than dwell on it any longer, the young colt has chosen to pursue something more physical, something that would take up too much of his attention to allow him to focus on anything else.
He’s going to go hunting.
---
The branches of the leaves overhead are the same shade as the western clouds, brilliant orange slashed here and there with red and gold. Malik, standing in the shade of a thick elm, is difficult to see. He is watching the passing horses, quiet and still, waiting for one worth following.
Nothing.
The sky is growing dim by the time he turns away, scowling in disappointment. He’d wanted one shifter, that was all. Just one, to see if he was right. To see if he could gain their powers by killing them the way his father does. IF he can, Malik knows, he will prove his mother wrong.
The stallion shakes his horned head, the antlers grown to an impressive length as fall had drawn nearer. The motion does nothing to dispel the thoughts, but the sound of movement nearby has a far better effect. Malik freezes, and in an instant he becomes a dark furred jumping spider. All but invisible in the leaf-litter, but with eyes good enough to watch for any further movement, he waits to see what had spooked him.
@Sickle
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Sickle - 10-19-2021
@
Malik
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Malik - 10-20-2021
Of all the skills most necessary for a successful hunt, Malik has struggled most with patience. Even now, as he stands half-hidden beneath the red leaf of an elm, one of his eight feet is tapping softly. It keeps the local insects at bay - they know a predator when they see one - but does risk attracting the notice of a hungry bird. Remembering this, Malik stills his wayward toes just as the blue leopard appears.
Of course, to Malik it is only a large blue shape, but he knows that it is the source of the noise that had startled him. He cannot make out what it is from this distance and with these eyes, so the black spider becomes instead a black leopard, the shape one of his favorites.
With his slit-pupiled blue-and-orange eyes, Malik can see that the other creature is a leopard as well. A strange coincidence, even in their world of magic, so he frowns a little, the expression made more stern by the wicked curve of his glowing horns.
Something about her feels almost familiar.
Malik is not sure how he knows it is a her even before a puff of wind brings that, along with the smells of wood and earth and something vaguely floral. He knows it the same way he knows she is a shifter and not a true leopard. Even in Hyaline the colorful animals don’t ever wear such deep shades of blue, he reminds himself, while simultaneously being sure that it is something more than suspicion
Malik tilts his black head, and can feel that he sports some of the feathers of his equine shape. They meld with his dark fur, ending just before the glowing stripes along his sides and back begin. He cannot find a face like the leopard’s in his memories, but he scrutinizes it nonetheless. Perhaps if she were a horse? Or even another shape?
He doesn’t say anything, just stares and tries to puzzle her out, an instinctive habit he’d inherited from the father they’ve never known.
@Sickle
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Sickle - 10-21-2021
@
Malik
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Malik - 10-24-2021
Malik might have stared at the almost-familiar leopard for a much longer time, attempting to decide if they know each other out without saying a word. That possibility ends, of course, when she says his name.
More than that, she loses her shape entirely, shifting through a myriad of sizes and colors. It is both an impressive and puzzling display, for some of those shapes were far beyond his skill, and some of them he is sure he has seen her wear before.
But who is she?!
A young mare, near his own age, with the same sleek blue fur and black stripes that she had worn as a leopard. She has a mane that runs the length of her mane like his father and Myrna, and eyes that are a mirror image of his own. They search his skin as she asks if he is okay, and confusion deepens as the unanswered questions pile up.
Why wouldn’t he be okay? Why is she so surprised to see him?
Surprised, and excited, and she comes toward him quickly.
Malik, accustomed to dodging blows, sidesteps her hug at the last moment. He loses the last of his grip on the leopard shape when he does, because the uncertainty of this meeting has begun to increase the rate of his heart, and the feathers along his crest fluff out in an unconscious attempt to make the boy look less vulnerable.
“We know each other?” He asks, but despite the question, it is clear he is asking her for confirmation. He had known her, but he does not know her anymore. Are there others that he has forgotten, Malik wonders? His memories have been often touched with magic, and gaps are not uncommon. But forgetting someone entirely is different that forgetting an afternoon or a few days. Especially someone who seems to know him, and be so excited to see him.
“Who are you?”
@Sickle
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Sickle - 10-24-2021
@
Malik
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Malik - 10-24-2021
Her wide smile vanishes and Malik feels inexplicably distressed. He has developed little empathy, raised by a cursed father and an unpredictable mother, and thinking only of himself is how he has survived to his present age. What little affection he does feel is toward those same parents, by merit of blood and their constant presence in his childhood, as well as toward the only sister he knows.
Myrna looks little like this young horse who calls herself Sickle. Yet as Malik allows his blue and orange eyes to travel once more across the mare, he sees what he had missed before. She looks like horses who are familiar to him, like his mother and father and sister and even himself.
Sickle’s voice is small and weak, and the glittering tears that pool in her eyes make him uncomfortable. He caves easily to Myrna’s tears, but tells himself that this is different. She’s a stranger to him, and surely if their parents had thought her worth keeping around she would have been living in Hyaline.
But she had shown such a skill at shifting, and Malik cannot fathom that such an ability was not worth keeping within the pack. Shifters get a choice, his mother had said. Had she chosen to leave, maybe? But when? She looks only a little older than Malik, and surely he’d have been told if he had a twin who was sent away. His father might have kept that from him, but never his mother. Even at the worst of her cruelty, she was honest with him. Viciously so at times, and so he is quite aware of how much better Sickle’s shifting abilities are than his own.
He sees the horror in her eyes, and hears the inexplicable pain in her voice as she asks ‘What did they do to you?’ Does she mean their parents? Had they been cruel to her as well? Myrna has known only their mother’s sorrowful tenderness, leaving Malik often wondering if his memories had perhaps over-exaggerated the fears of his childhood. Sickle’s expression suggests that he has not, and it causes something uncomfortable and sharp to tighten in his belly.
“I’m fine.” He says. He has no more scars than a young warrior-in-training might, scuffs from mock battle and sparring matches with the other young colts in the pack. He’s still frowning, but as he sees the shimmer of unshed tears in Sickle’s eyes, he experiences once again the concern he is accustomed to feeling only for his family.
“Why don’t you live in Hyaline?” He asks. “Did you leave? Or did you get kicked out?” If he knows why his parents had not kept her close, perhaps then he will understand better how to feel about her.
@Sickle
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Sickle - 10-25-2021
@
Malik
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Malik - 10-31-2021
A chill gust of autumn wind brings with it a flurry of golden leaves, but Malik’s bicolored eyes do not turn to watch them in the near-darkness. Instead, his attention remains on his sister, and the tale she tells of an entire childhood that he does not remember.
How can that be? He remembers his childhood. He had grown up in the mountains of Hyaline, scaling cliffs and keeping clear of his parents, following Bolder and playing with Raum and Anath and Vital and the other foals. The name Wishbone isn’t one he knows, but he knows - just by the way Sickle looks at him - that he should.
He recalls the days that he would wake, expecting to be larger than he found himself. He’s always attributed it to strange dreams. Was it possible it was something more? Something magical?
He wishes he knew.
And then he does, seeing instead of Sickle, an image of the past. A brindle magician stands in the deep snow, a half-buried black leopard beside him. Something is happening, something Powerful, and Malik shivers. Light is pulled from the leopard and tossed into the stars, and into the hollow space that the light left behind flows the black shadows emanating from Gale.
Then the leopard grows smaller, younger, shrinking not much differently than the magic that Malik’s father had used on Ripley. Gale picks the mewling black-striped cub up, carrying it into a cave where Malik somehow knows his mother waits. The image Malik sees does not follow him into the darkness, but instead turns to where the light from Malik’s soul had been tossed.
The light has solidified into a single glowing orb that slowly drifts downward, drawn back toward the earth by the same genie that had granted her descendent’s wish for knowledge. It settles just outside the mouth of the cave, and when it does it has become an oblong black egg, one that cracks open to reveal a mewling iridescent griffin.
The image vanishes.
Malik has always known that his companion had hatched at his birth, and now he looks up to where the griffin had perched in the golden-leafed tree overhead. He has always called the creature Birdbrain, lamenting its refusal to speak to him, and has questioned where he had come from, and where his griffin parents were. That Birdbrain might be the embodied essence of the goodness that Malik’s father had taken from him after also stealing a year of his life had certainly never occurred to Malik as a possible origin for his companion.
He still does not recall that first year, the one that Sickle says that they had spent in Tephra. His father must have taken it from him.
Malik begins to nod.
He is sure she is telling the truth, even if he is not sure why. More than anything, Malik trusts his instincts, and they tell him that this young blue mare that he has no memory of at all, would not lie to him. She is his sister, and he knows that he would not lie to Myrna, and so Sickle would not lie to him.
“Dad’s not there anymore. He left, and Mom is...” Malik pauses, choosing his words carefully, “more laid back than she used to be.”
@Sickle
RE: too much pressure just to make it - Sickle - 11-05-2021