"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
For a time, there is only madness. A sea of memories and possibilities woven in tangled threads around him. He does not reach for them, though he remembers doing so once. He cannot remember why, not when they come to him so easily, unwelcome and unforgiving.
So he drifts until, eventually, reality intercedes.
He stumbles, blinking glassy blue eyes to clear the haze. It doesn’t clear, not quite (never quite), but for now, lucidity remains. Vague memories tickle the edges of his consciousness, but he leaves them where they lurk, skittering in darker corners. His legs ache and more than just the bone of his armor protrudes along his ribcage and hips. How long has he been walking? He doesn’t remember. Ages, he thinks. Or perhaps it was only days?
He coughs, the faint memory of saltwater burning his throat as the scent of brine fills his senses. But there is no water choking him anymore.
The echo of hollow, gnawing hunger pulls at him. Though he no longer feels the pain, he remembers that he had once. He frowns, glazed eyes growing distant. He should eat, he knows that much. So he does, though it is an action of rote mechanics. Tug, chew, swallow, repeat. It does not sit well in his seething belly, but he does it anyway, until the discomfort prevents him.
He’s forgetting something, he knows it. But then, he is forgetting a great many things. This however, is more important. As though he has left a piece of himself somewhere. Perhaps sleep would help him recall. His weary limbs are about to give out on him anyway.
He has no more than collapsed gracelessly to the ground before his consciousness begins to fade. A shadow falls over him, great wings beating as the harpy eagle lands on a branch above.
Ah yes, he thinks, the thought slipping away just as quickly as it had come, now I remember.
06-03-2024, 12:53 AM (This post was last modified: 06-07-2024, 03:43 PM by Iliana.)
I L I A N A
In the wake of the lull that has settled over Beqanna, she has learned to make peace with the quiet.
It had bothered her at first. She was used to turmoil, be it political or some other kind of upheaval, and to her this peace felt…eerie. No fighting over crowns, no kingdoms pitting against each other over fabricated wrong-doings. The lack of disturbance made the tranquility almost feel like a trap, and she half-expected that the next round of earthquakes or storms would destroy the realm altogether.
But recently she has allowed herself to fall victim to the false sense of security, choosing to enjoy it for however long it should last. Should the monster that slumbered in Beqanna’s heart decide to stir once more she would welcome the chaos with sword and shield in hand but for now she was content to simply exist.
Today found her in the riverlands, the tall grass brushing against her knees in some places. Summer had already begun to chase off the coolness of spring, and the sunlight warmed her back as she walked, her rose-gold markings glinting beneath it. The heat was not stifling yet, and she was more than tempted to take on her panther form and find somewhere to sunbathe and laze the day away, but a skeletal figure slumped beneath a tree drew her eye. Unable to deny her curiosity, she approaches, her steps slow and still strangely feline in their movement, even though it didn’t appear as though this target would be getting away.
A closer inspection tells her he is skeletal in more ways than one — thin, yes, but also plaited in bone-armor, and truly looking as if he had seen better days. But the subtle inhale and exhale at his flanks tells her that he is not dead, and as she is debating what to do the harpy eagle lands on a branch above their heads. “The vultures are going to start circling next,” she says to him, peering down at the sleeping (unconscious?) stranger with an inquisitive tilt of her head, all the while keeping a cautious eye on what she assumes is his eagle companion.
It’s impossible to know how long he slept this time. Dreams and reality collide, fusing together until he cannot decipher one from the other. The past and future crash at the seams of his unconscious, though he cannot tell which is which. So when he wakes, it feels far less like waking and far more breaking against sharpened stone after an endless fall through an impossible abyss.
The only warning of his impending wakefulness is a single shriek from the eagle, a sound of caution for the mare who had the misfortune of stumbling upon his slumbering form. His entire body jerks violently as his lungs seize inside his chest. For a moment, one that may as well have been an eternity, all he knows is panic. Death hangs over him, gleaming scythe arching for his exposed neck. He does not recognize them for glinting, rose-gold dapples on smoke-dark flesh as he lashes out, wide and wild blue eyes unseeing beneath the pale mask of bone.
A heartbeat later his vision is filled with feathered wings as pain bites across his nose and cheek. The sharp talons draw blood, but with it comes clarity, giving him something tangible to cling to. Allowing him to focus on the one thing he knows to be real inside the raging chaos he had lost himself to.
When his murky sight finally clears, the faintly blurred outline of the woman who had been standing over him coalesces. “Shit,” he mutters, his breath ragged as it rattles through his lungs, the faint hint of copper at the back of his throat causing him to wonder how long his diaphragm had frozen for that time. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t sneak up on someone when they’re sleeping?”
He doesn’t bother trying to rise. Even if he weren’t still trying to catch his breath, he’s not certain he would have the strength for it anyway. Besides, he’s far too busy pretending he can’t hear Rune demanding he apologize to the stranger. He’d never been one to apologize on his best day, and this is far from his best. Fortunately he is the only one who can hear the large bird’s endless dialogue. He had long ago learned to tune it out, though whether it had helped delay his fall from the edge of sanity or pushed him towards it was anyone’s guess.
When his breathing has finally settled to a small degree, he allows himself to fully take in the mare who had startled him awake. Once, he might have offered her a witty greeting from lips tilted in a devilish grin. Now, though his lips twitch as though he might smile, he instead coughs before saying dryly, “The only vulture circling is Rune. He’s a bit jealous.”
It never once occurs to him that he might be responding to a memory considering how entirely unaware he had been when she’d uttered those words.
“You sleep like a corpse,” she tells him, disguising any type of concern she might feel behind her typical dry humor. She had always been far more empathetic than she wished to be; her father had mastered the art of not caring (or at least maintaining that he does not care) but Iliana had taken more so after her mother in this aspect. She simply didn’t know how to not care — not even when it’s a stranger lying in a heap on the ground that she could have easily walked away from and he would have been none the wiser.
She remains where she stood, even though she is tempted to step closer, to inspect whatever wounds he might have. There is more to him than his physical state, she thinks; there is something else that he is fighting, something else that has worn away at his mind and energy. She does not know if it is concern or curiosity that makes her want to learn more, but whichever it is, it keeps her here.
Her rose-gold eyes lift to the bird that he calls Rune, and her lips quirk into a small smile. “Rune has no reason to be jealous. I was just making sure you weren’t dead.” She wants to ask him what happened, and a younger, less tactful version of herself would have done just that. But her younger self was far less jaded and closed off; her younger self would have demanded he stayed here while she fetched her mother to heal him, would have maybe insisted he stay with them in Hyaline until it was proven he was strong enough.
But Hyaline is gone; though small pieces of it live on in the Dale, all she can see when she looks at that place is how different it is from the land in which she had been born. And she has not seen her mother in weeks, perhaps months, but that is not so strange; Ryatah was prone to disappearing, following whatever reckless whim she felt like, and reappearing with new scars and ghosts in her eyes as if nothing had happened.
“I’m Iliana,” she offers him, thinking an introduction would be a good place to start since she was doing this — whatever this is — on her own.
