"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
The sea still frightens her.
She was the ragged avenger, full of guts and grime and piss and vinegar, but the churning of the waves still sends her legs to shake.
Zosma watches it now, her twilight eyes pulled into its movement, her gaze drawn further towards the horizon with each retreating wave. The sunset is bold here. Far bolder than the milky fading of the light at home. Here, the sky is awash in all the colors of a draining fire: reds, oranges, pinks. The spilling ink of night begins to blot out the reaching flames, but the spectacle is glorious even in its death. It distracts her from the sea-spray on her legs and the salt gathering on her lips, its taste as bitter as thoughts of a life that had meant so much to her. Of a life she has now firmly placed behind her.
Her knees buckle at the thought of starting over, because everything she’d had, she’d built herself. Everything she made, she constructed on the sturdy slope of her back. Everything she desired, she poured oceans of her blood and sweat into its acquisition.
She is more than her faults, more than her victories; the past is still difficult to forget.
But here, she can start over. Here, she can weave new faces into the expansive tapestry of all she’s known. She can smudge the remainder of his face from the creeping corners of her brain on the good days. She can pull the smiles and the laughter and the touches of her women to the forefront of her mind on the bad days. Here is different. She, however, stubbornly remains the same.
Zosma cannot turn her back on the sea until it is invisible in the night. When it is as black as the rest of the world around the mare, she makes a quick retreat away from it. The smell of other horses grows stronger the further into the land she moves. The earth grows stronger, too, as reliable dirt replaces the easy give of sand beneath her feet. She smiles at this, the gentle way she is already beginning to accept this new place. For better or for worse. And when she finally stops, the moon is waning in the heavens. The sky lets itself wake to birdsong and a gathering wind stirring the trees. The pale white mare watches the rest of the world follow suit under the shelter of a sturdy oak tree. Its bark is like her skin, flayed and broken. Both are whole, healed, living, though.
She licks her dusky lips and tastes the last vestige of salt.
z o s m a
ooc: side-note, she is also looking for a kingdom home (only Gates, Falls, Chamber, or Valley doh)
He does not fear the sea so much as he despises it.
For the sea took his parents – or, to be far, they gave themselves to it, a gift swallowed greedily by the beating waves, while he and Adeline lay, newborn and tangled, on its dark shores.
From then on, the taste of sea-salt on his tongue always makes his stomach turn, fills him with an indescribable sense of dread.
He almost smells the sea, now, an echo of it on a wafting breeze. He tenses, paper-thin skin drawing tight, but then the scent is gone and he wonders if it was there at all. He’s paranoid, but rightly so – a man who returns from death has every right to paranoia. Even more, he’s a man made fragile, blown glass and paper skin, a beacon for predators.
(And hadn’t the predators found him, in the end? Hadn’t the wolves – the wolf – taken her meal?)
Adaline is gone, now – he doesn’t know where and he tries not to think of her lest his heart decay between his ribs. He doesn’t think of her. He doesn’t think of wolves, either, of snarling jaws and the sound of bones breaking.
The way they’d both said his name.
He doesn’t think of these things because this is a new life, he is reborn – albeit reborn into the same frail body he’d first pioneered – made whole again by forces he cannot comprehend.
He no longer smells the sea.
But he does see a woman, pale-colored, standing alone.
She does not seem like a predator, though lord knows he’s been wrong before. But the loneliness that wells within him is a strong force, and one he bows to – bows to by walking closer to her, a small smile on his face.
“Hello,” he says, and that’s all, that’s all.
One little girl used to love the feel of a cool liquid licking at her skin, beckoning her forwards deeper and deeper until she was trapped. One little girl would dare her conscience, to guide her to the salted waters and allow her to bow her head for a drink. One little girl would play in a small puddle perhaps the size of one adult hoof. Unfortunately that girl is gone, the urge to visit the waters that had once hailed her name in an ever so tempting manner had vanished. That little voice in her head had restricted her to the simple life of a warrior but how could she complain? Stealing equine from other kingdoms was all fun and games, how could she resist?
She finds herself alone, lost in a social place known as the meadow. She aimlessly wanders about, ebony glossed build shifting in and out of focus form the views of equine. Almost avoiding all bodies within the premises, that is until she finds a pair.
Unable to hear their conversation, she supposes that they had not begun in conversation. A pale faced mare, confronted by a glass stallion. The two were quite interesting yet, this wasn't her first she had seen a glass equine before when she was just a filly but the image was vaguely pressed within hr mind as she strode into the silent conversation. Charcoal lobes fold forwards, in a neutral yet friendly tone. A gentle smile curls up upon her velvet lips, "Hello, I'm Kena." She pauses gathering her thoughts before continuing, "Wonderful day isn't it? What brings you two to the meadow?" She is quick to speak, navy eyes search their facial features. Hopefully she didn't speak too much, truthfully she had no idea where she was going with this.
I Will Answer Injustice With Justice
Kena is a Gates Pony, she might bring up her Kingdom if Zosma would like.
This place is stuffed with bodies despite the early hour. It is so unlike home, so unlike the wide, reaching plains sparsely populated by the wilder ones that it gives her pause. Zosma watches them through the sheer curtain of her forelock before venturing closer. This is what she has come for, civilization (and a civilized people, most of all). This is the difference between the brutes of the borderlands and the soft press of unperturbed strangers. This is Beqanna, the fabled land whose existence she’d been promised. It is different – of course it would be – but she doesn’t know how to approach it at first.
Out of the corner of one cornflower-blue eye, she sees a man with a tawny hide stretched over a bone-thin frame. She thinks it is him, at first, and she grits her teeth. “Remember the copse,” he’d asked. “Remember, Cecilia, how I made you a woman?” She can hear him now, though she knows he isn’t here. He can’t be here, or there, or anywhere. But her moment of hesitation blurs into minutes as she stands watching this tawny man that can’t be. She feels her resolve falling away like the sand that had slipped under her feet. Because of course he had found a way – he always had in the end; her future was not her own.
But then the stranger crests the fall-crisped hill and she sees that he is just that – a stranger.
Her held breath hisses out between her teeth.
The glass man comes then, in the space between fear and realized folly. She’s even smiling a little herself, shaking her head lightly against the contrast of her dark thoughts. The stallion’s skin catches sunlight like the surface of a lake, and she turns into the sudden brightness. “Hello yourself.” It is too easy because he is too fragile. Even she can see how quickly he would shatter beneath her veteran-hooves. It makes her confident when she possibly shouldn’t be. It takes away some of the newness, some of the strangeness of this foreign land.
Still, she’s never seen anything like him.
Zosma moves in with predator intent. She is a land-shark in deep waters easily navigated. It is her natural, instinctual stance (because he’d asked her to remember the copse – she couldn’t forget the way the leaves had fallen alongside her innocence). But she realizes herself almost immediately and relaxes her approach. “They told me this place was different, but I hadn’t imagined you.” His paper-thin skin barely covers the red-white mass beneath, all of his muscles bared to the open sky. She is no stranger to what lies beneath a hide, but she’s never seen anyone able to breathe and live in such a state.
Her statement is true, but it is also rude. “Forgive me. The road to this land has been rocky and long.” Isn’t that the truth of it as well? “Zosma,” she says, close enough to see the twitch of each individual muscle he moves. But just as she’s about to dive deeper into the waters of conversation, they are joined by another. This one is sleek and black and too pretty to have come from the wildlands; there is no wayward scrub-grass in her hair or burrs poking at her sides. She smells like the meadows, though, and Zosma wonders where the girl hails from.
“Days like these are to be cherished when the world is not so generous with its wonders.” The pale mare smiles conspiratorially, though there is more truth to it that aches to her very soul. They won’t know, though, and she almost prefers it that way. Besides, she rather enjoys being cryptic. “Zosma,” she says again for the girl’s benefit. “Tell me, what wonders I can expect from this place?” She directs the question to Kena, but turns to the glass stallion after the words have left her lips. “I’ve already seen one miracle for myself. Seems like good odds so far.”
He is used to the weight of their eyes.
Some of it is curiosity, those interested in the inlay of veins and arteries made visible by the translucence of his skin. Some of it is hunger, a predator’s desire to see him broken. His whole body is a beacon, a thing begging to be broken, and he is acutely aware of this.
He longs to be strong, to be steel, to be a king. But he is too fragile for that, he would be usurped in a moment. Prey is not meant to be powerful, and he is prey.
Still, he forges a tenuous existence like this. He is always aware.
(And he doesn’t say their names or imagine their faces – the girl who loved him enough to bring him back, and the girl who loved him, but not enough to keep from killing him.)
For a moment something tenses in the woman and he is ready to flee, but then she realizes herself and he sees her relax. He steadies himself.
“I’m Contagion,” he tells her as another mare comes forth, gives her name – Kena – and he nods to her.
She asks about the wonders of Beqanna but truth is, Contagion has seen more disasters than wonders. But he is an odd tale.
So, he does his best.
“Colors,” he says, “horses like the rainbow.”
He remembers sky blue markings tracing up her impossibly strong body. Before she turned to a wolf and gobbled him whole.
“And magic,” he says, “there’s so much magic. Some fly, some bend water, or light, or fire. Some shift into--”
He almost says wolves.
“all sorts of animals. And there’s a place where the dead walk again. Though not everybody can go there. It’s not the nicest place.”
Indeed, he’d hated being dead. Or hated the way he’d died. He isn’t sure which.
He could continue, but he doesn’t. He can’t stop thinking of wolves.
Instead, he turns his attention to her.
“Where are you from?”
