"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
“Yer funny!” Oop shouts, dodging the twigs she fires at him in rapid succession—all except one. It passes harmlessly through his chest, of course, and lands somewhere well off the beaten path never to be seen again. He huffs indignantly, fighting back a grin as his friend nearly falls over herself laughing. She is a child no more, and while the thought makes the bright pink ghost pixie a little sad (his appearance nearly starts to rot), he is happy she has grown up without being as… damaged as the rest.
Aside from her fear of the dark, of course.
“Youse gots pretty good at that!”
“And you have gotten pretty good at that,” Nereza teases, referring to the pixie’s almost child-like way of speaking things. He’d asked her to help him some years back and she had worked with him on it ever since. In exchange? He had tried to teach her to fight. Tried to, but pixies had an entirely different (and more civilized!) way when it came to combat than the horses in Beqanna—that is of course, a tale for another day.
“Youse—“ Oop rolls his eyes when Nereza shoots him a glare “—youreally likes those things, huh?”
Nereza blinks, wondering what he’s even talking about, until she feels something prick at her leg and noticed the roses creeping up to wrap around her legs. They sprout from her hair, glowing red embers that somehow compliment the glowing white parts of her mane, and she smiles sheepishly. “Sometimes I wonder what my life might have been like,” she admits, sighing softly. “If I hadn’t been afraid, of course, and ran away from them.”
“Hm, probably terrible,” Oop snorts.
“Ah, yes, because living life like a feral hermit is so much better?” Nereza snorts back.
“It hases it’s perks.”
“Does it?” Nereza grins, shaking off the roses as they begin to wilt and finally dry up. “Because I seem to recall being hunted by wolves, stalked by a cougar—chased by a ball of fireflies after disturbing their nest.”
Rune never likes it when Reave ventures into the forest, though Reave rarely pays him any heed. He knows it’s because the bird can’t see him from the sky. He pretends it’s for protection, but Reave knows better. Now more than ever he needs the bird’s guidance, even if he does not want it most days. Something important had splintered inside him when he’d returned from the mountain to find the south fallen into the sea. Something that hadn’t been returned to him in the form of a giant raptor like it had last time.
Instead of taking to the sky, the harpy eagle has chosen to perch on the bone jutting from Reave’s hip, a silent sentinel as he bobs with the stallion’s every step. Reave hardly notices, too used to the bird’s weight to pay him much heed. He had grown into maturity now, and the bones’ growth had finally slowed so his skin no longer splits as it once had. He knows one day very soon it would freeze entirely, caught in the timelock of his immortality.
It’s the one-sided conversation that catches his attention first. Sound carries strangely in these trees, so at first he isn’t quite certain what he hears. But as he sends his senses to find the small eyes interspersed liberally through these trees, he soon locates the source. A familiar source.
How curious.
She had chosen not to follow either of them all those years ago, but Reave doesn’t care about that. After all, he has spent much of his time running from his own demons. Yet even after all this time, he still finds himself wanting to know more about the spotted mare. There is something there, lingering beneath the surface. Something he hadn’t been able to uncover in their short conversation in the field.
And if ever there was a weakness Reave possessed, it’s that of curiosity.
He doesn’t hide his footsteps as he approaches, nor does he hide the roguish grin that curls his lips when she comes into sight. “Hello Nereza,” he greets, blue eyes gleaming behind the carved bone of his glowing mask. Carvings that tell the story of his recent hubris. His gaze skims over the roses creeping around her, idle amusement in the roaming stare. “You’ve been keeping yourself busy, I see.”
02-24-2022, 10:44 AM (This post was last modified: 02-24-2022, 10:49 AM by Nereza.)
So tell me why my Gods look like you?
“Oh,” Oop narrows his ruby red eyes, grumpily muttering under his breath.
“Someone we know?” Nereza grins, though the list of who-they-know is spectacularly short; Oop had kept her hidden, he says, for her own safety—she hadn’t minded, of course, so long as he kept her distracted with history lessons and lectures on practical uses of her strange new abilities.
The spotted mare closes her eyes to focus, tucking her scaly wings in tight to her body and drawing her chin up close to her chest. The position angles the horns along her snout defensively, though she has never had to use them. Whenever something bad happened—the wolves trying to hunt her down, for instance—bizarre things happened. Unbeknownst to her at the time, Nereza had launched them back into the trees, twisting and dismembering the others, their bodies mangled beyond comprehension.
The cougar?
Well, Nereza prefers not to think about that one.
His voice nearly causes her to shiver, though she manages to contain herself. Not so long ago, she had been intrigued by his offer—though the fae who had approached her had planted doubts in her head. She’d been a child back then, indecisive, afraid of being wrong; today, however, is different, and Nereza wonders if he will invite her to his home again.
Rather than opening her eyes or acknowledging him directly, she smiles mischievously, visibly relaxing while the trees around them start to change. The brown bark strips and peels itself away, something fresh and green coming to take its place. The dying leaves come tumbling down all around them in a pretty shower of red, yellow, and orange; in their stead, something bright, and red, and glowing sprouts from the trees’ new green fingers. The smell that fills the air is sweet and familiar, unmistakable to anyone who has come across a rose before. Beneath the two horses, the dull mossy ground ripples, swiftly changing into soft pink and white petals. Taking a deep breath, Nereza exhales slowly and then finally blinks, carefully inspecting her work. A small patch of forest made up entirely of giant roses.
“You have no idea.” She flicks her tail sharply, ignoring Oop who again mutters something else incoherent before disappearing. “You can call me Rez, though. We aren’t in the Field anymore. How’s life been treating you, Reave?”
Oop’s head appears beside hers, his expression torn somewhere between angry and sulking. “Just be careful!” He snaps.
Nereza resists the urge to glare at him, not wanting to disturb the stallion. The pixie’s head blows a loud raspberry at her before vanishing.
They both had been barely more than children when they first met, but Reave had not felt so young in a long time. Of course, it is difficult to cling to childhood when one is forced to watch their mother die in their first breaths of life. It had been the first and cruelest lesson of his life. One that had shaped his future and infused reckless disregard so deeply into his soul.
The carnivorous garden he enjoys so much had eventually brought her back to him, but by then his fate had already been sealed.
His blue eyes spark as he watches the bark peel from the trees and roses bloom so ferociously between them. His grin widens with delight, though there is something almost feral to that wicked curve of his lips. He should undoubtedly be more cautious, but he would not be Reave if he were. Instead he stretches forward, muzzle brushing the petals of one large bloom.
When he pulls back, his eyes lift to hers with an intensity that serves only to sharpen the smile on his lips. “Oh, I have many ideas.” His eyes shift away to scan her handiwork with a deceptively idle curiosity. When he speaks again, his low voice is threaded with amusement. “Ok then, Rez." He smirks. "So, no longer a weed, are you?”
He tilts his head, considering her with open curiosity, lips still tipped up at the corners. He’d been brighter the last time they met, but now there is an undeniable threat of ruin coursing through him. A dark story written into the lines now carved across his exposed bone. Her question had given him pause, but not for long. “That depends on your perspective, I suppose,” he replies thoughtfully, eyes gleaming. “I wouldn’t say poorly, but you might disagree.”
03-13-2022, 04:40 PM (This post was last modified: 03-13-2022, 04:48 PM by Nereza.)
So tell me why my Gods look like you?
Nereza tries not to laugh, but a loud snort betrays her when giant dandelions start springing up around them in haste—they begin to morph from yellow to cottonball-white, and when a breeze blows through, their clocks take flight. Rather than continue in such a state, the seeds turn to red rose petals, and she finds herself admiring them, albeit absentmindedly, while they billow down around them. “A rose, when left to grow wild and unchecked, is simply a pretty weed with nasty thorns. I’ve played with flowers long enough to know that,” she offers, her wings subtly shifting position.
The spotted mare fights the urge to grit her teeth; she hates becoming overly aware of her wings, unsure of what to do with them or what position they should be in. They don’t feel comfortable anymore, they won’t until she finds something to take her mind off it, and so she settles on trying to just stop. They rustle slightly again.
“I spend my time wandering around with nothing and no one,” Nereza shrugs, her roses shrinking and sliding back down into the dirt and the moss. As if they’d never been there at all. “What right do I have to say you’re doing poorly?”
“No one?!” The ghostly imp hisses from the ether, though he chooses not to reappear and won’t for at least a fortnight this time. As he tends to do whenever she says something that upsets him.
“I don’t suppose your offer to go to Nerine still stands?” She asks, cocking her head. “I think I’ve sated my wanderlust enough for a decade, at least.”
Reave’s humor is a dark shadow to the brightness of hers, despite her attempt to quell it before it escapes on a snort. His eyes flick to the large yellow flowers that sprout rapidly, betraying her disbelief. They flow from flower to seed in the span of heartbeats before the cottony heads gust away. His grin only widens as his gaze returns to her, his delight clear behind the dim glow of his mask.
“An argument of semantics,” he replies easily, feet shifting beneath him, as restless as her wings. He has never been very good at standing still. “In the end they’re the same thing with different labels.”
A lesson he had learned long ago. The same lesson she’d been set to learn at their last meeting when this argument had first begun.
Tilting his head, he watches her thoughtfully as she continues, the giant roses shrinking back into the earth around them. Memories flit around her of a time spent with little more than a capricious companion for company. One nothing like his own steadfast companion, constantly whispering advice in his thoughts. Constantly impressing his lost morality back onto him.
It’s nearly a lost cause. One that Rune despairs of far too often, in his gruff, irritating way.
Lifting one brow at her self-effacing question, Reave argues, “As much right as anyone has to an opinion, I imagine.”
Her next question surprises him briefly, but just as quickly brings a grin to his lips. There is something decidedly devilish in that expression, beneath the pleasure that suffuses it. “You are always welcome in Nerine,” he replies, then he chuckles. “And it even has the benefit of not being underwater.”
