"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
12-26-2020, 05:59 PM (This post was last modified: 12-31-2020, 09:15 AM by Pteron.)
and since you’re the only one that matters,---------------- ----------------tell me: who do i run to?
Pteron watches the distant storm as it dances across the western horizon. The sunset is nothing but a faint glow above the water; overhead the sky is already midnight black despite the early evening hour. He enjoys watching the weather on nights like these, the beauty of nature dancing across the horizon a soothing sight before he turns in for the night.
Tonight, he suspects that sleep will be hard to find. He worries for Gale, fighting in the Alliance tomorrow. Despite his brother’s healing abilities, Pteron still worries for him, recalling the bloody marking on his sibling’s wing. Apparently, it’s a remnant from the Alliance, and Pteron supposes there is some similarity to the red V that begins at the point of his withers, running down to the base of either wing.
He waits until the sun is gone entirely, and with the cloud cover shielding the moon and stars as well he feels oddly isolated in the darkness.
Pteron sighs, and kick one stockinged foot in the water. His feet are buried nearly to the canon, and the movement disturbs the water that had been flowing against his legs. The water glows, in the air, and when it splashed down, and a ring of light surrounds his leg as it renters the water. The bioluminescent water slowly fades back to darkness, and then Pteron kicks it again, and again, until he is walking along in the shallows with a smile, a trail of glowing water behind him like he’s something supernatural instead of the simply a quickly-healing pegasus.
I should have loved a thunderbird instead at least when spring comes they roar back again
Change is on the air, but Aegean is not quite sure what it means.
Precognition, although a family trait, has never been one that he has been blessed with—and, if he was being truthful, it wasn’t one that he was particularly interested in. He was too content to wrap himself in the present. Too interested in weaving his own stories and sculpting his illusions to think of tomorrow. He woke in the curve of Pteron and watched their children grow. He wandered the islands that were home and yet never his. He discovered new wildlife and watched the waterfalls crash. Listened as Pteron schooled those who would learn the art of war from him and spent hours in his own daydreams.
So when change comes on the air, it barely registers.
And he tucks the strange feeling away as just that—a feeling.
Instead he turns his purple gaze and the full wattage of his attention toward the blue-tipped pegasus who walks from the water now, the sunset swallowed by the night. If it weren’t for the faint glow of the water and the milky light rippling from Aegean, the space around them would be nearly impossible to peer through. As it is, nearly all of the light is swallowed by it and that chill races up his spine again.
Languidly, Aegean paints the space between them bioluminescent, drawing the trail of water behind Pteron and letting it flow before him, up the shore and then around his own dry legs until they feel nearly wet. The path of glowing ocean ripples with life, his gift having expanded over the years until he can draw the details with minimal effort—having long ago found a love of the ocean with Pteron.
“Your thoughts feel heavy,” his voice carries, even though he rarely raises it above a murmur.
A faint tip of antlered head, an invitation to lighten the load by sharing or ignore the weight altogether.
He was never one to press Pteron into one direction or the other.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead (I think I made you up inside my head.)
and since you’re the only one that matters,---------------- ----------------tell me: who do i run to?
The apple that he’d eaten earlier must’ve been bad, Pteron had decided; it sits uncomfortable and heavy in his belly as he draws to a halt. That’s the only thing he’d eaten that wasn’t familiar or recommended, anyway, and Pteron vows in this moment to never eat strange fruit again. Or at least, not strange fruit in the Common Lands. The worry he feels for his younger sibling is compounded by the darkness that has come permanently to their world, and his physiological unease feels rather small against that. He’d thought Gale would have come to visit by now, to talk about the last battle the way they had all the others. Yet days go by (or Pteron thinks they do?) and his brother has never arrived. (Pteron is unaware, of course, that the wings which once made Gale’s visits so easy are gone now)
Ahead of him stands Aegean, light by his ever-glow, and Pteron smiles without thought, delighted simply by his nearness. The other stallion paints the darkness between them with light, illuminating a watery path that Pteron follows without hesitation.
“Everything does,” he answers with a quiet sigh. Pteron presses his forehead against Aegean’s glowing shoulder, warm on this chilly winter’s night. “I am glad to see you,” he says against the familiar white skin, before turning his head to press his own cheek there, sidling so he might lean the length of his body against the other and wrap him close beneath a feathered wing. Glad to see you, he’d said, as if they’d not parted ways only hours before.
“I wonder how long it’ll last,” he muses, brushing against the earlier thoughts of the antlered stallion only by coincidence. Will the sky stay dark forever? Will it grow darker still? Is there a way to change it, perhaps, to force the moon back onto its path? Pteron has no idea, and the weight of his thoughts remains in the creased blue lines of his forehead even as he leans against Aegean.
I should have loved a thunderbird instead at least when spring comes they roar back again
The contradictions of his relationship with Pteron have never escaped Aegean, even though he has never felt any great desire to examine them too closely. The way that he can feel so comfortable with the pegasus and yet feel that sudden thrill at a touch that should be familiar and known. The way that he can hold him so close and love watching him from afar. How his heart pines and longs for him, even as she studies the most well-visited grooves of him, learning the same patterns and finding the same joy in it.
He gladly presses in closer to Pteron’s side, feeling the weight of the wing drape over him. With his same dreamy gaze, he paints further illusions in front of them, pinpricks of light that drop from the sky as if the stars are raining down. They glow and splatter on the ground, illuminating the area around them to reveal only just a touch more darkness. He presses fire into them so that the flames lick the sky and he feels the barest hint of warmth, the illusion playing with his sense of touch ever so slightly. It is not anything real, and he knows it would not fend of any true frostbite, but there is still comfort in the lie.
Smiling, content with his work, he smiles as presses a kiss to Pteron’s muscled neck, his chiseled jaw. “Not forever,” he answers, although the darkness does feel infinite from this moment in time. “Darkness so rarely does.” Another pause, wondering of their children and the children to come. Knowing that there are deeper and crueler things out in the shadows than simply the absence of light.
“You should not carry the weight of it all,” he murmurs as he pushes his forelock back.
“Not even your shoulders are so strong.”
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead (I think I made you up inside my head.)
and since you’re the only one that matters,---------------- ----------------tell me: who do i run to?
Before the darkness, Ischia had seemed a paradise apart from the world, a home without danger. There was only sunshine, warm water, white beaches, and time spent with his loved ones. Concerns he’d once had, those of being a princeling or an heir of a ruler were nothing but distant memories, so far gone they might as well belong to another Pteron entirely. War seemed distant on the mainland, and there was never talk of theft or challenge or of conquering the rest of Beqanna. There was safety, and now with the darkness, that has all been pulled out from under him.
He leans against Aegean with a quiet sigh, breathing in the familiar scent of the other stallion.
Ahead of them, the world transforms with the power of Aegean’s magic. The stars fall from the sky and land along the beach, and fires in every shade lick playfully at them, so realistic he imagines he even feels the heat of them. Pteron hums appreciatively, nodding at the impressive display. He remembers a promise he’d once made, about dancing lights in the sky, and says against Aegean’s warm cheek: “I once told Oriash I would show her the polar lights. Maybe when this all ends we can go on a family vacation.”
At the other’s mention of his shoulders, Pteron replies that “They will be if I keep at it,” but it is with a small smile, the humor returning to his gaze after the earlier illumination. For all Aegean’s own love of dreaming and getting lost in thought, he has always been very good at pulling Pteron out from his own infrequent bouts with moroseness. Adding a playful flex of his shoulder where it rests against the other’s side, Pteron then glances back up at the distant ring of light.
Something dark moves across it, and Pteron at first thinks he’s imagined it. Then it happens again, and he frowns. When it does not happen again, Pteron is turning to ask something of Aegean when he sees it a third time. The pegasus grows quite still.
@[aegean]
-- pteron --
@[The Monsters] please mess with his happiness induction
I should have loved a thunderbird instead at least when spring comes they roar back again
It is a testament to the solidity of their relationship—and perhaps to Aegean’s own ability to ignore so many things in the outside world—that he is able to think of nothing but the presence of Pteron. That he does not feel fear at the darkness or the things that surely crawl along within it. He only feels a strange kind of peace, weighty as it is, and a contentment that he can only find when pressed to the pegasus.
How he lived so many years of his life without the comfort, he will never know.
(He tries so very hard to ignore the years where they had been cleaved apart.)
Instead, Aegean merely smiles, pressing a cheek to the flexing shoulder and then following it with a brush of his lips. “They are strong,” he admits, knowing that between the two of them, Pteron had always been the one gifted with the strength of war. Aegean’s own strengths were different—but he does not disparage them. After all, it was the combination of the pair that had always resulted in the magic he so loved.
He opens his mouth to say something else, a laugh quickly following at his mate’s playfulness, but the shadow in the sky catches his eye too. He frowns, tilting his antlered head back to look at the darkness that seems to press in deeper to them. Something like worry bubbles up his throat for the first time, but when he turns to question Pteron, the words are stolen from him outright, and he can only stare.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead (I think I made you up inside my head.)
