[private] Everything that drowns me, makes me want to fly

[Leilan]

Leilan

The sky has the color of apricots, roses and peaches when the scaled stallion wanders by the Isle’s western shore. The sun hangs low, as it usually does around this time of the year, a beacon beckoning from far away. It can be looked at now - the sun. The fact that it’s there is part of his own doing, but had put a loved one out of reach; not unlike the ball of fire itself. Unreachable, untouchable, haunting. Taunting him with yet another day gone, time passing by. Time in which she might just stick around and be preserved forever, or time in which she will lose more and more of herself each day, each hour, each second that passes.

He doesn’t often visit the sunset on the western shores, but he does today. He’d have to do something different at some point, he figured - was that walking this way or that, or was it the way he’d tried to reach into the beyond, the greyness, past the veil he had only once been able to reach by? As he closes his eyes he tries to remember how they made it back to the beach, aided by the sound of the waves lapping calmly at his feet. The Isle provides enough ice around him to easily do this, were he not so inexperienced in the magic - but he’d promised, he’d promised not to leave. It would be so easy to make yet another portal, to vanish into that realm he now senses, but there is a stronger emotion tethering him to the world he knows. So now, instead of going, he is pulling - there is no other word to describe what his magic and his subconscious are doing. He’s looking for a friend, a mare, chestnut, slender build…

He stands, from an outside point of view, ossified on the beach. Opens swirling quicksilver eyes (a colour he never had before, one that fades to icy blue in a few heartbeats), and finds himself where he started.

But this time, he is not alone.

something so wrong
doing the right thing

@Lyr

[Kensa]

Grief is a strange and incredible thing. It does not have a single shape and can be difficult to recognize. One can grieve themselves, an idea, a memory, loss of a million different kinds. It can live in every breath, alter every thought, bring an ache to each heartbeat. The longer you live with grief the more it changes you. Like time, wind, and water carve a landscape and alter it forever, grief separates you from who you think you are and leaves no road back.

She is still learning who has been left behind by that erosion. Some days her soul feels raw and savage, less now than in seasons past, but something is still wounded. That must be alright, to be able to find pain when one looks for it, a sign of being fully alive.

Autumn sunlight spills warmly over Kensa’s chestnut shoulders, rangy oak tree limbs, and their capped acorn bounty wave lazily above her as she grazes. Gold trimmed ears flick atop her flaxen draped poll but her posture is relaxed. She is at home in this untrafficked quercetum, an unpresuming strand of oaks belonging to no one. A shiver travels along the sturdy mare’s back and she raises her head alertly. Her topaz eyes do not scan the spaces between the trees marching out around her but unfocus as she recognizes the sensation that has disturbed her. She cannot imagine who would pull her in this way, but it seems she has not yet outgrown curiosity and goes willingly wherever she is being taken. 

The setting sun’s light races over the golden rivers that spill along her sides as she rematerializes on a beach and turns toward the sound of crashing waves. It is cold, and her pale nostrils flare and burn when she draws in a breath of frigid salt air. Wind cuts against her skin, dragging her mane down along the sides of her neck and tangling the flaxen ribbons of her tail around her hocks. Quick eyes flash from water and northern ice to the familiar scaled shape only a few paces away. “Leilan?”

The draconic stallion is different, changed in the way Beqanna changes all of them. Does he still remember her as a friend? “Where have you brought me?” The land around her is unfamiliar, colder even than Nerine when she’d visited Heartfire there. This place is wintry when she knows autumn still reigns. Icicle Isle she guesses, but waits for Leilan’s reply, watching his face carefully. There have been years between her and the lives of those she once knew, there is no reason anyone would seek her out after so long. “Why?” Asks the chestnut at last, and though she never truly left it feels as though she has been thrown very suddenly back into the real world, remembered again, and uncertain if she is ready to be.

Kensa

@Leilan

[Leilan]

Leilan

Magic is a source of power beyond imagination, but also of imagination. And he imagines a lot more subconsciously than consciously, it seems; even after a few years of accidents and practise. His mind goes where his body cannot. Touching this realm and that, a cold one, a dead one, and perhaps a living one or two, he couldn’t exactly pinpoint where she came from. Teleportation had been on his mind, but this is… reversed.

”Kensa,” he replies by way of a greeting, the tone between jovial, surprised, and accepting, of that little flaw in his own ice magic. She looks calm and collected, not unlike him; he thinks they also share most of their inner emotions - surprise, confusion and curiosity. What was it that brought her here, and, did it mean something else, too?

”This is Icicle Isle. Beqanna.” he states it with a wide berth of his head, indicating the cold plains and rocks in their vicinity. She might already have guessed, but perhaps she needs the assurance that this is not a realm of dreams or souls alone. Given time to process that he just pulled her here - instead of someone else - he not only draws the conclusion that the someone else is already in this realm, but starts to wonder how close he is to Kensa, then. That she so easily took her place might say something. Her ‘why’ is not easily answered; he isn’t quite so sure himself, and brushes it off, frolicsome. ”Why not?” Did she have a reason to hide? Did they all?

something so wrong
doing the right thing