take my hand, take my everything; any

[Radiant]

Sylva is a wonder.
She cannot help but marvel at the myriad of colors all around her.  The rest of the world is like this once a year, she supposes, but fall is perpetual here.  They can always gaze upon the kaleidoscope of milky yellows and pale greens and russet reds of the trees.  They can dance in the rainbows that fall down around them, never the same mixture of colors.  Tephra is nothing like this, not even once a year.  The foliage is too saccharinely lush, too choking and full.  Much like the ash that crowds nostrils and lungs alike, making breathing clean air a chore.  It is always the same back home (or what used to be home, now she isn’t sure).  She finds Sylva almost exotic in its differences.

Her red coat is still damp from her brief swim to cross the water between the lands.  The weak light that filters down through the trees does little to warm or dry her, but she is much too excited to worry about comfort.  There is so much else to worry about, to make sure she notices and learns about!  This forest is more like those of her father’s teachings.  Weir was familiar with the deciduous trees and their names and he could list the fauna with even more accuracy.  Radiant sees a robin flutter from one branch to another, its splash of orange chest vibrant even amongst the bright leaves.  “Turdus migratorius,” she meets its cheerful chirp with her own sing-song voice before continuing on.

A part of her hopes to see the intriguing young man from the meadow (and from the playground, when he was just a boy who helped save a butterfly).  When they met again, it felt like he had snatched the same butterfly from the air and put it in her belly, only with his words.  It was the oddest feeling.  But the red girl is rational enough to realize her response is likely from a lack of familiarity with boys outside of her family rather than anything more.  She would have reacted the same way with absolutely anyone, not just the boy who became rather charming as he grew up.  Wouldn’t she have?


ooc: html to come! (it's all broken currently..)

[Ether]

The sun crashed down to the ground,
the moon rose up into the sky bright red,
the dead climbed up from their graves
and fell to their knees saying
"Come one, come all, come see and believe."

It has all become the same to him, those endless rainbow hues floating above their heads, kicked about upon the ground by wind and hoof. Another part of his existence, simply there and not to be marveled. He finds it hard now to marvel, to wonder. To find joy in such a shallow, callous world. All that is left to him are his shadows, his sole friend and ally, the only constant companion he has ever needed. Ever claimed.

Since his world had been turned upside down, since he found the truth of the monsters, the existence of fear, nothing has been the same. Nothing has been as it should. Even his parents cannot impart the comfort they once could. They had tried, but he is not the same. He had come back different, changed. As though a small piece of the dark netherworld had broken off and taken up residence inside his soul. And now, all that is left to him are the shadows and the cracks etching endless paths in his skin.

The last time he had ventured forth, he had returned broken. Returned as only pieces of himself, with jagged memories that would last him lifetimes and mark him far longer. And so, he does not venture. Instead he remains, becoming more and more a piece of these woods, of the trembling darkness that lurks within, with each passing day. He had tried once to be different, to be normal. And he had failed in perhaps the most spectacular of ways.

He does not wish to admit to fear, but it is what he feels. It is what fills him, what keeps him locked inside these woods, inside his own mind. So when a soft voice echoes through the trees, redolent with joy and brightness, his first instinct is to hide. To draw into himself, to pull his shadows close about him and wait for the foreigner to pass. But as she draws nearer, there is a quality about her he finds difficult to resist. Something that pulls him (like the siren had pulled him, so very similar, and almost it sends him retreating the darkest depths of those woods). But somehow, somewhere, he finds one small corner of his heart brave enough to venture forth. Not too far, but close enough to see, close enough for wary brown eyes to find the source of such loveliness.

The trees shelter him, cloak him in their comforting darkness, but he peeks out. Peers from behind those trees, body cloaked in shadow, his head only visible to better see. It takes him a few tries, a few guttural attempts, but finally he manages a faint whisper, low and a bit gravelly from restraint. “Hello?” He did not mean it to be a question, but that is how it comes out anyway. As though he is not quite certain if he wishes to be offering any such greeting.

Ether

Please excuse me while I word vomit all over you :|

[Radiant]

She has never been afraid of anything.

Her life has been full of light and love, brimming with laughter and learning.  Her family has been a shield against the horrors she’s only heard of, terrors that she had met only secondhand in the stories of her father.  Radiant has faced no worse than that same family dissolving before her.  Even that, however, is not terrible, not fatal.  Time has simply pulled them apart so that they can play the roles they are meant to.  She is still tethered to their love, still feels it puppeteering her feet and protecting her heart.  She has been far luckier than most.

The mistress that is Beqanna is not always a kind lady, after all.  The years since the Reckoning – since her birth, even – have been plagued by turmoil and strife.  Newborn lands still wet behind the ears have been dragged to early graves under the ceaseless, churning sea.  New tribes and kingdoms have disbanded as the earth and politics collapsed underneath them.  There is a giant looming over all of them, watching, a mountain so great it eclipses the sun.  From it, tales of mystery and magic roll thick like a mist into the places below.  

Radiant is spared all of it but the stories, and she’s never been afraid of those.

So she does not startle at the cracks and clatters of the new forest she walks.  She’s never known monsters real or imagined, so every snapping twig draws her in rather than away.  Besides, the red girl has always wanted to see everything she can, to learn about all the creatures that call their world home.  Be it fox or bear or wolf (or more likely, a harmless squirrel or harried hare) she is eager to meet it head on.  What she does not expect to find (at least not this deep in the autumnal woods) is another horse.

Or at least, she thinks it is a horse peering from the deep shadows.  His brown eyes are the only parts that stick out, like beetles scurrying on coal.  It’s perhaps the oddest sight she’s ever seen, as if the shade of the trees is wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak.  Intrigue and discovery (and a small hope of seeing the boy who saved the butterfly) are the reasons she set off on her own in the first place, leaving Tephra firmly behind her.  This disappearing (reappearing?) colt fits the bill.  


“Yes?  I mean, hello, yes.”  Her amber eyes are luminous and warm and wide as she assesses the other.  She was taught to be polite and worry about herself (the latter, she struggled with).  But she has to say, his situation concerns her.  The roan woman cranes her head this way and that, looking over every part of him she can see.  “Um, are you ok?  The shadows seem to be swallowing you.  The only reason I ask is that I’ve never heard of that happening.  To anyone.  Ever.  And believe me, I’ve heard some strange stories.  If you knew my dad…”