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After watching his sister set out on her own (paying a visit to a certain winged acquaintance of hers, no doubt), Ikaro decides to venture forth from the Desert as well. While he is accustomed to having Nao’s constant company – and to her commanding presence – it feels good to breathe his own air, keep his own thoughts, set his own pace.
He makes his way to the Meadow, where everything is damp with the musty smell of freshly-fallen rain. Still, he inhales the lingering condensation with grateful lungs. Though his breeding allowed for him to call the arid heat of the desert bearable, he wouldn’t go so far as to call it pleasant – and so the more temperate conditions were a welcome change.
Lowering his head, the dappled bay grazes a while, the lush spring grasses tasteful and sweet. Without Nao to conduct his business for him, he finds that he is content to simply be – letting the uneven murmurs of distant conversation wash over him, the sound of birdsong mingling with the occasional pattering of stray raindrops, still falling from a greywash sky.
He lets his mind wander then – back to the Beqanna of before. To the father (the sinner, blackened inside and out) who had robbed his sister of a childhood. To Nao, who had done her best to preserve his own. (She had failed, but who could blame her?) To the years that have gone by, blurring one into the next until he loses count, until he forgets that time doesn’t stand still for everyone. And finally, to the mother who had left – the one he could hardly remember – to a blood bay mare named Kagerou.
ikaro
they all need something to hold on to, they all mean well
may your dreams come to reality if all else fails |
 Such was the trouble with silence. It was like a rolling emptiness that erased all else, drawing cracks and fissures and enough holes in one’s mind to allow for thought to creep in. And while thought was not always a bad thing, Ilka found that more and more often that her thoughts were filled with dark things and doubts, cold hands in closed fists too tight around her heart.
She thought of mother and father, of the most tumultuous, impossible love she had ever witnessed, a love that seemed both fated to last forever and fated to destroy itself. She thought of her siblings and half siblings and family she did not yet know existed, thought of them scattered to far corners in a very large, lonely word. It felt like her family was tethered to the ruin, like the blood that burned through their veins was a poisonous promise.
And maybe it was.
Maybe this life, this broken hope sitting shattered in her chest was the only life she deserved.
The spring sun on her smooth black skin does nothing to thaw the numbness spreading inside her. She does not graze, does not notice the small shoots of bright emerald just beneath her feet, clawing their way up through the dirt and towards the sun. Her face doesn’t even lift to see if she can find a familiar face, because that voice in her head, the silence soaked in doubt, it tells her there is no one.
But then the leaves rustle along their branches, the branches swaying in a ragged breeze, and there in the wind is a scent that breathes just a little bit of light back into her dark, lonesome eyes. Her small face turns and she knows it must be etched in quiet dismay as soon as she sees who it is (and who it isn’t), but she goes to him anyway because she’s afraid that the spark will fade if she doesn’t.
“You smell like the sand and the sun.” She tells him a voice just barely louder than a whisper, with a brow knit and furrowed and hidden away beneath tangles of black and white. What she does not say is what that means to her, which memories he coaxes to the surface of a heart that thaws perhaps just a little. A memory of tears and ash and being held against someone’s chest with a heartbeat thrumming in her ear. But she holds onto it like a prayer, like a promise clutched between trembling fingers. “It might be my favorite.”
ILKA makai x oksana
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