"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
Where ice once gathered and clung to the fur of the creature now it melted, and the warmth of Spring set itself upon the world: through all the trees and all the winds. Gleaning with moisture the wetted fur was darker but not so much as to hide the patches of gray and spots of white tangled in the black… and the lengthy legs, dark and spidery, seemed to briefly vanish into shadows of trees and the briars tangled in the floor of the wood. Mutable in form she slithered through the gaps and passed from shrouds into others before brushing the thick coat against the harsh bark and feeling the sensation of scratches deep again the skin. Shivering, but not from the cold, the creature remained for a moment: its compact body shaped and molded with lean muscle and wiry definition beneath the skin. Shrunken at parts, hints of rib bones lingered beneath the flesh and the pointed edges of her hips carried a razor-like appearance that bore into the very mind at their shape.
Paused in place the creature lifted her head and the impossibly turquoise eyes seemed to peer through each corner and shadow… through each flat and clearing, and lazily she stared into the wild and unending primordium. Deep, and deeper yet the canopy grew heavy and the darkness seized the ground and all the air around it. Slow to move the first step was strained, weight shifting and bones cracking as the ancient creature lowered its neck and rolled the very shoulders back when it carried onward. Hips swaying and movements made in such a manner that they seemed robotic and lacking fluidity or grace, instead they seemed harsh and out place: as if the very sense of this was wrong and alien. She inhaled and a discordant sound of whimpering and rough breath accompanied her, the lungs swollen and bloated: water dripping from her lips. With the dark ears swirling the creature heard sounds: heard the fading calls of birds and movements of squirrel; but in the depth of the wood: there was nothing.
In her mind she recalled the hellish and fiendish whispers of another life, the pleas and cries; but Yidra, in all her impossible ways, only displaced the thoughts. Her body, again, pausing; but this time more permanently, and she stood in the shadows of trees and in the darkness of the canopy with drying fur and the scent of the ancient wood bearing itself upon her. Mouldy, loamy, and filled with strange things there was the smell of rotting wood and stagnant water, of dewy wildflowers, and the spicy hint of sage and other herbs tangles in the weeds. Clover and caraway, the faint recollection of things that prompted her head to shake. Black and inky, void of undertones, her lengthy mane and tail shook and snapped: the hair wavy and tattered. For a moment she remembered something, the biting feeling of stone and pressure: of flowers rooted in her own skin…
With lifeless black eyes the ancient thing, Yidhra, remained in this darkness: in this depthless and endless wood, and she slowly breathed, lacking water and choking.
Caves to linger in that trapped the warmth between the rough-rock walls. Plenty of grass beneath the thick-knit trees the snow couldn’t reach. Countless hours alone that allowed him to disappear into the dreamlands.
Dreamlands.
Dreams.
He had to stop himself from going there. Parts of him had begun to go incorporeal as he struggled to maintain more than one foot in this world. But he managed it. Deep breaths and swaying branches overhead helped to center him. Grounded him, until his shape took root here and the incessant tug of dreams became a low roar to match the blood in his veins.
It was easier to breathe now, to concentrate. Though never far from the forefront of his brain was the dark slant of a girl’s eyes. Sometimes full of love. Sometimes full of fear. Or maybe it was loathing. He couldn’t be sure but knew it varied from one extreme to the other.
Abysm shook himself.
Shook the dark eyes and the cobwebby entrapment of the dreams he could so easily touch upon from his mind as if he was shaking water from his skin. Then he froze —
Traces of dream; sometimes confused with and caught up in remembrance; seemed to flirt through the shadows on gauzy wings of dust-note and light. These vague shimmers pulled him forth through bramble and low-hanging branch with no thought paid to a single scratch. His nostrils fluttered on imagines threads of scent until scent alone brought him to her - faraway herbs and horse.
Naturally he stops and stares. It is what he does best. An ear moved to the pace of her slow breathing and lack of other sound in this deep dark part of the woods. Abysm though, was not afraid and merely offered a wordless grunt to gain her attention.
To the eye a sliver of sunlight pierces the canopy, burns and brightens the depths of the forest: illuminates the veins of leaves and the shadows within the bark of the trees. It cascades over her face and darkness fills the sunken in cheeks and maw, forces her eyes to close and when she opens them after pulling back- away… she sees the glimmer of pollen and dust, the specks of earth disturbed by her hooves, The primordium smells of dew and of loamy soil, metallic and strane: she can taste it and for the faintest second there is the sensation of voracious hunger that burns in her belly.
Yet? None of it matters, instead there is a sound of hooves and soft steps… of breathing and of the heart that rattles within a chest not her own. Sharp breath inhaled suddenly, and Yidhra’s throat rattled and moaned: a rasping breath exhaled and her words touched by thick accent, ancient and without origin; but nonetheless, audible.
“Is it often the young wander,” she pauses, her body turning slowly and in such a manner as the the motions were not streamline nor smooth but instead they were jaunty and improbable for the body she possessed. Robotic and clanky, uneasy too, and the sunken in ribs and sharp hips became little more than things in the shadow behind her.
Lurching her spine and rolling back the shoulders Yidhra rose to full height, skeletal and malnurished: her shaggy fur matting and tattered mane and tail draped lazily about her body. With teal eyes she watched Abysm, stared and waited, but unmoving she remained a ways from the boy. Darker and spotted with dirt the impossible creature laughed darkly, chuckled and offered what could’ve been a smile.
“So freely and without a mother to guide them? Or are you weaned and seeking, longing to find a place in the world that has torn you from the teat of your life-giver? Questions, but, do not answer them- they matter as little as the fly nesting within the corpse of the log several paths away. Call me Yidhra if you wish, or if you care to talk and stay.”
So it was she stopped, her shoulders rolling back and hips swaying when she stepped forward- approached and drew near, stopping on the edge of the sunlight breaking through the canopy.
Yidhra
@[abysm] my job killed me I so sorry that was severely delayed
10-27-2018, 04:52 PM (This post was last modified: 10-27-2018, 04:54 PM by abysm.)
He does not stop looking at her.
It is impolite to stare but this might be one of the lesser grievances he’ll level at her in the course of their time together.
Speckled and varnished and blue. Even her pelt is a conundrum of color that dazzles his senses. Each rattling rasping breath that she takes and lets out does the same - enchants him, but it is an old enchantment. The kind that bespeaks of timelessness and magic. It carried on into her voice, trailing ancientness and an accent he’d never be able to place except that it did not originate here.
Of that he was certain as much as he was that she had not originated here but immigrated in. Unlike him... or not so very much. He’d been something else out in the ether and the dark before his mother pulled him into the fetus forming in her womb. Then it had been a different dark that nurtured him, one full of nutrients and formation. Then this - his current existence. But his mind turns back to her even as his eyes still have not left the turn of her body towards him.
“Probably,” he responds in kind. To be honest, he’s never given it much thought but he knows that he is guilty of always wandering. It had become habit - a mainstay of his life. That might have also been because he could wander and walk through dreams too. In dreams, nothing was off limits to him. Only because he could manipulate them to the whims of his will.
He was thinking of how he’d always wandered without consequence until her eyes find him and the real of them holds him there. Abysm overlooks the matted fur and tattered mane, the dirt and malnourishment that she is rife with (and probably worms, she looks the sort, half-dead and all). Her comments leave him taken aback - was she blind also? He’s almost a stallion grown, very nearly so. Full of untested brawn and might that he’d never use, not when he could dream his opponents away with a wave of his nose.
For a moment he feels slighted - insulted. Then the moment passes and he remains decorous in the face of her shortcomings. She mentioned not caring for answers and so he gave her none of them. If she thought him a tottering milk-drunk foal than so be it. He drew on his power to clothe in just that: a foal’s shape and size so that he appeared to be at least weaned off the tit if nothing else.
Let her see him as an unassuming youth as he took a step back when she broached the sunlight at the forest’s darkened edge. “Yidhra...” he tries out the strangeness of her name on his tongue. He’s probably garbling it but does his best before offering up his own short utterance of - “Abysm.” Then - “What brings you here?” and the here is vague, purposefully.
@[Yidhra] my turn to apologize for the delay! and up to you if she sees him as a foal or sees through the dream-glamor to the stallion that he is lol
10-28-2018, 02:49 PM (This post was last modified: 10-28-2018, 02:49 PM by Yidhra.)
Bleary and tired, her eyes have not perhaps adjusted to the light: to the strange beams that break the canopy and illuminate the foliage and fauna. She finds this most evident as the creature turns her head and feels a wateriness in her ears- sees the light darken and burn upon the ground: as it ripples and waves. Like many submerged too long, she also feels her body moving in ways it does not, and she feels her balance utterly lacking as the sensation of up and down… of ebb and flow weaves itself deeper through the fibers of her being.
“Long ago,” she says, voice dripping in the ancient tongues and accents of worlds long gone. The husky breath and smoke still drowned by watery chokes and gasps. “I remember a place like this, or I think I do, but it was deep and dark and filled with life that had been forgotten. Creatures with feathers and scales, sharp teeth: and where my children once played.” the latter is harder to say, to speak. She waivers in a way that is audible, her voice trailing off and the strange beasts body shrinking back a moment as she smells musky spore and ancient wood, rotting.
Attentions flitters here and there, to fireflies and cricket: the cicada burrowing for next year. She looks to Abysm again and sees shaped and form- sees change and a strangeness that she cannot place. Her mind imagined him as a boy, where he was a man and for the seconds passing she sees him again as a child… as a boy, small and strange.
This once-great leviathan shudders as she feels the chill of the breeze on her matted and grotesque fur: on her fragile and almost skeletal figure. She regards him then with a profound and deep sort of stare: with her teal eyes glimmering and the blackened and coagulated blood lingering where it had dripped from the nostrils (more notable on the white side of her face). “Foolish as it may be,” she continues, pained by the pressure of her chest and the weight of her lungs. “I had secretly hoped to find that it was here, the memories- the, dreams. That this was the place they originate from. It seems however it is not, and that instead this is another unfamiliar place: where the magics are unknown to me.”
Simplistic and calm she turns, all creaking bone and stiff muscle. She drifts between seeing what he presents, and what he is: what she mistook him for. Fascinated by the changes the abyssal creature and her spattered coat seem to linger and watch: to wait. “Some are more gifted in it than others, and I must say… how they use it, is a curiosity.”
And there, there in that moment the creature shifts and changes: its colors and form still the same but beneath that skin an eerie and large eye is opening.
Yidhra
@[abysm] I'm really just kind of going on the whole thing of, at this point she's not sure what she sees. Her eyesight probably isn't great yet after wandering around the ocean xD Also I thought he was a baby!
