"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
She has kept to the common lands, or at least, what she has deduced are common lands. The other lands she has observed from the sky, but some unnamable caution had kept her from touching down. The initial exhilaration of discovering this place had worn off, and reason had slowly taken its place. The realization that perhaps strangers were not welcome in the kingdoms had settled in her mind, and now she could not shake it.
She had tried to leave. Had taken to the skies, only to find that the clouds led her in circles, and that every spot of land she discovered after flying for what seemed like hours across the glittering surface of the sea ended up being this same place, over and over again.
Allaire is not sure what kind of force is keeping her here, and while she tried to swallow away that trapped feeling, all it did was sit like a stone at the bottom of her chest.
For now, she lingers on the edge of the meadow. The sun had slowly begun to sink behind the hills, the heat of the summer gradually cooling off to a more tolerable temperature. At least, it would have, if she was not treading along that area where rolling meadow gave way into sand. She had flown across this red waste of desert before, had seen the canyons and the winding river from above, and of all the places here, it intrigued her the most. Beqanna, from what she had seen, was mostly lush and beautiful, but this place—the one she stares at from just across the invisible border—seemed harsh, unforgiving.
In the dying day the light that trails behind her as she moves glimmers like a beacon, shimmering along the edges of her blush-pink wings. When she catches movement from the corner of her eye she grows still, turning her pale head to find the face of a stranger, and her heart leaps into her throat.
-- my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i’m covered in you allaire.
02-09-2022, 10:13 PM (This post was last modified: 02-09-2022, 10:21 PM by Fyr.)
I'll settle for the ghost of you.
He had not visited the ruins today. Needing a break from the pressure in his head and the stifling heat that was even starting to get to him… He had decided that a long soak in the river was overdue. Overall it had been a good decision, the cool water over his sweat-drenched back had been remarkably refreshing despite the amount of gnats and mosquitos buzzing in the shallows. Luckily his flames came in handy yet again, smoldering coals that hovered over the water’s surface and sent up enough smoke to keep them away. There had been a moment when he had caught the sea in the distance, where land had once been. He is quick to turn his head and keeps that view behind him for the rest of his visit. Until he knew for sure, he couldn't stand to look at it.
The sun had just started to fall towards the horizon when he finally removed himself from the rushing water’s embrace and began the short trek towards Pangea. It would have been easy enough to let fire run along his body and wring out his coat but he decides on the natural air-dry method instead, wanting to cool off just a little longer. By the time he hits the meadow, it’s as if he had never been wet at all.
He had paused amongst the congregated but a quick glance tells him there isn't a familiar face among them, he quickly moves on. There is a tiredness that seems to be catching up to him, similar to when he had woken up on the Isle’s beach. All this searching with nothing to show for it… It registers at the corner of his yellow eyes and wrinkles his forehead. Signs that someone so young shouldn’t be wearing. Sickle had been the only one he had come across and his hope was beginning to spark out.
His frustration and growing dread have him distracted, his gaze downwards towards the well-treaded path before him as he fights the creeping darkness that begins to envelop him. That little voice that reminds him that he should have always expected terrible things to happen around him. Bad luck follows the terrible. It hisses and then that pounding at the back of his brain that makes him see stars. That force that just wants to COME IN. You know who you are. You know what you ARE.
At first he thinks the flickering of light is from that blinding pain behind his eyes but then a figure comes into focus, gentle light shimmering around butterfly wings. He halts, pistons slowing in motion as his daggers churn into the earth, just as she turns to look at him and judging from the expression on her face, he thinks she might be more startled then he is. Uncertain flames leap up along their familiar path down his spine as he looks at her, not knowing what to say. He hadn’t been expecting to run into a stranger tonight. The jaguar stallion glances behind her, where the bone-dry canyons lay tantalizingly close. Yellow orbs flick back to her as he offers a faint smile in the last of the dying light. Not realizing how fiendish this may appear with the fire dancing across his back. “Are you…” He pauses, trying to get his thoughts in order as he tosses a tendril of crimson-brown forelock to a less obstructing position. “Are you headed there?” He finally asks, his muzzle gestured towards the desert wasteland behind her.
02-15-2022, 04:08 AM (This post was last modified: 02-15-2022, 04:12 AM by Allaire.)
i can’t stop you putting roots in my dreamland --
When she first notices the flames that scintillate along his spine her instinct is to recoil. Fire meant danger; she has seen what a spark gone rogue can do, the way a wildfire can eat up a forest in what felt like a single breath. It was destructive and ruthless—it showed no mercy for anything that stood in its path.
She has never seen anyone that could harness fire themselves. There is magic where she comes from, that much is true. But it is a limited kind; flight and healing, shimmering light trails and other things that might inspire wonder, but not fear. Her time here has been short, but she is learning quickly that Beqanna is not the same. The magic here stretches further, and she stands there staring at the fire-laced stallion before her, she realizes that it goes further than she had initially thought.
The thought of leaving crosses her mind, but she does not.
Her sheer wings shift uneasily, causing light once again to shimmer along the edges of them, as if she is debating flying away—the way a deer would fly from a wolf if it could.
But he smiles, and she finds her suspicion and fear growing into more of a curiosity. She does not move closer to him, and does not quite relax, but her lavender eyes begin to focus more on his face rather than his flames, and then on the bright yellow eye that reveals itself from the tossed aside forelock. “No,” she responds cautiously, willing the stammer of nerves that is trying to override her steady tone to stay away. “I was just looking,” this is spoken with a bit more conviction, since it was true—she had been looking, and hadn’t really planned on going.
Her delicate head angles away from him, sweeping her gaze across the barren desert landscape—a sea of scorched red dirt that seems to stretch on for miles. “What is that place?”
-- my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i’m covered in you allaire.
02-15-2022, 05:58 PM (This post was last modified: 02-15-2022, 05:59 PM by Fyr.)
I'll settle for the ghost of you.
He had always been an observant creature and there is no missing the way her gaze lingers on his flames, even in the encroaching darkness. An expression he hadn’t seen since his time in the Den. Memories of whispers begin to infiltrate his head (Dangerous, abnormal, terrible) and he swallows hard as his nervous tic intensifies. Smoke and flame coil higher towards the sky and catch in his mahogany mane as his own shame and uncertainty spirals. Forcing himself to move his point of view from her face to the trail of light that shimmers from her sheer delicate wings, his smile flickering as it becomes more strained then natural.
Before he can skirt around her and give her the wide berth he assumes she wants (head held high the way Aela had taught him), her voice draws his feral gaze reluctantly back to her own lavender one. No, she had only been looking. He gives a slight nod in response, once more uncertain of what to say. The same whispers in his head begin to turn into that familiar dark voice, the one that says if she’s going to be afraid of him then perhaps he should give her something to actually be afraid of. The nod turns into a violent shake of his pale golden skull, crimson enflamed tendrils flying in a disarray, and by the time he looks at her again she is focused back on the endless sea of wasteland that he now calls home.
The need to prove that he was in control of his own destiny and choices outweighs his embarrassment and unease, enough so that he only hesitates a little longer before slender pistons carry him a few steps closer to her, just enough to get a better look at the desert while still giving her some space between them. “That’s Pangea, you know… The land made by Carnage, the Dark God.” Anyone born in Beqanna would know that, bedtime stories told to sleepy foals from century to century and one his mother had loved telling him to the point where he knew it by heart.
“I can show you if you want, I live there.” He finally says, the fire curling along his spine still flickering with nerves. “I’m Fyr by the way.” He offers quietly, studying her features as he pronounces it in the way of what flares around him. Despite the white sheen of her coat that is somewhat smilier to Lillibet’s, he doubts this girl will find humor in the other delivery of his name as she had.
That her initial uncertainty had been written too plainly on her face, and she can feel her chest begin to tighten. She was too new here. She did not understand all the different brands of magic, did not know that someone could wield something like fire without intending to use it for harm. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes to him in her soft, breathy tones, her light colored eyes alight with the worry that she has committed an irreversible offense. “I have never met anyone that could make fire. It—a lot of things—are new to me.”
As if to further prove that, his explanation of the desert spread before them elicits another confused stare from her. The single sentence is full almost entirely of words that make no sense to her: Pangea, Carnage, Dark God. Wordlessly, she shakes her head, almost ashamed to admit that she isn’t sure what he’s saying. It was spoken as if he expected her to know, as if she was ignorant to some knowledge that everyone else already knew. “I’m not from here,” she says quietly, uncertaintly finding his gaze from behind a wispy curtain of blush-pink forelock, hoping that her explanation will earn her the forgiveness she thinks she is seeking.
When he offers his own name she feels the knot in her chest loosen just slightly, a quiet sigh breathing past her lips when she gives him hers in return. “Allaire. My name is Allaire.”
She tears her gaze from him — from the fire that dances over his skin, as if the jaguar-spots are embers—to look back at the desert. “You said it was made by a Dark God,” she begins, trying to think of how to phrase the questions that are blooming inside of her in such a way that she will not offend him anymore than she already has. “But what does that mean?”
-- my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i’m covered in you allaire.
Her apology smothers some of his own worry and softens him. The dial turns down on the voice in his head as he finds the concern in her gaze and feels the need to chase it away. “It’s ok.” He reassures her, as if he hadn’t been bothered at all. The faint smile flickers again across pale lips, his curiosity taking over the uncertainty when she mentions she isn’t from here. His mother had told him that sometimes outsiders found their way in but they could be rare these days.
It makes sense now, her fear. Her own hesitance. The jaguar stallion hadn’t realized her wound up he had been as he releases the tension in his muscles that he had subconsciously been holding. Although it feels unnatural to him, he tries to smother his flames as well until only a small flicker of flame can be seen and smoke curls around him in ghostly ribbons. An attempt to put her further at ease.
It seems to work when she offers her name in return. “Welcome to Beqanna, Allaire.” He says with that same faint smile. “I’ve never met an outsider before.” He admits quietly, looking at her now with open inquisitiveness shining in his strange yellow gaze. He wouldn’t have guessed, not with the pretty wings across her back and the shimmering light that follows her. Where had she come from? Why was she here? He has endless questions but he had already overwhelmed her once and so he holds back, for now.
Instead, she asks about Carnage and he looks past her in the direction of the desert that she asks about. “My mother told me the story when I was young. For as long as Beqanna has existed, so has the Dark God. Carnage. The lands use to be different here, a long time ago. Different names for the lands, different kingdoms. Then came something called The Reckoning, it broke the world and remade it into something new. It stole magic from its people, believing them ungrateful. It hurt Carnage too but not enough to steal the God’s magic. It only made him sick and angry. Carnage was furious at what had been taken from him, his old kingdom and his tainted magic. In defiance, he went to the Mountain with his followers and with his power… He created what you see now.”
It surprises him, how much of the history he had retained. Aela had always spoke of the Dark God with such fondness, any tale of Carnage had been his bedtime stories whispered to him as he was lulled to sleep. “He called it Pangea, after a world that once was.” He says thoughtfully and wonders what the Dark God would make of his creation now. Of who ruled it, who lived within it. There was more of course, Pangea had also once fallen underwater like the South. He doesn’t tell her that though, not wanting to overload her. It sparks a thought in his head though. Pangea had risen from the sea. Could the South be saved as well?
Hesitating for a moment, he glances back at the newcomer. “Are you living out here, in the Meadow?”
She is certain that he must find her incredibly ignorant, or perhaps it is only her own self-consciousness showing its teeth. Her old home was not woven with the same lore as Beqanna, it seemed; they did not have gods, dark or any other kind. Their magic was simpler, too, and she is beginning to feel as if she had been robbed of some fundamental foundation that everyone else seemed to have—an intrinsic understanding of how magic worked and how it fit in the universe.
She did not know where her magic—small and unremarkable though it is, for her wings and her trail of light seemed to pale in comparison to the fire the jaguar-spotted stallion could conjure—came from, or what the history of it is in her birthplace, and as she listens to Fyr’s recount of Carnage’s history and how it was entangled with Beqanna itself, she hopes that he does not ask. Was there such a force in her old home that could have stolen magic from her, too? Her wings shift, as if subconsciously reassuring herself that they still exist; that she had not committed some offense that would have them stripped from her here, too.
“That’s incredible,” is all she manages to say at first, her voice hushed with a hesitant kind of awe. The story is incredible, if not a little frightening—the idea that someone in this place is powerful enough to create an entire land. She looks at the stretch of red sand with fresh eyes, but the trepidation remains. “I don’t think anyone had that kind of magic back home,” she says with a small frown marring her pale face, shadowing her lilac eyes with a thoughtful kind of worry. “Does he…still live there?” she asks, cautious, as if this dark god might hear her, might materialize out of thin air at the mention of him and recognize her as an unworthy intruder in this land and smite her where she stands.
Fyr must be a brave creature, she thinks, to so willingly live where danger lurks, and though the look she casts him is an admiring one, she does not voice these private thoughts.
Her attention is drawn from Pangea at his question, and she cannot explain why, but she feels a small flame of embarrassment when she glances at the meadow. “I suppose you could say that, yes.” She turns back to him, an almost sheepish, yet hopeful smile at the edge of her pearlescent lips. “The meadow isn’t so bad, though. Perhaps not ideal, but it seems safe enough.” Though after his story of the making of Pangea, she is becoming less sure that anywhere in this land is as safe as she had initially thought.
-- my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i’m covered in you allaire.
