 what is dead may never die;
The first thing she feels is cold.
She's never been cold before. In fact, she's never really been anything before – at least, not uncomfortably so. She's simply been, existing in spite of all normal conventions, defying all expectations of what should be felt, what should be thought.
But here, in this place, the cold soaks into her bones and she shivers. It is an unfamiliar reflex.
Opening her eyes, she looks around. This place is both familiar and distant, like something she's seen in a dream, like a set viewed in a movie but never actually experienced. How had she come to be here? Where was her family? They were all she'd known – and she knows, somehow, that here in this place they are either missing or scattered.
Even now, the memory of them is fading. As though it had all been a dream, the memories start to float away into the scattered, snowy, familiar-unfamiliar landscape. She grits her teeth.
She remembers only two things with absolute certainty: the names of her mother and her father, and the land that both of them would call home, assuming either of them were alive in Beqanna. Carnage, she knows, is her father. Librette, she knows, is her mother. The Valley, she knows, is the place that they would both be found. And yet, somehow, she feels in her bones that neither of them are to be found there at all.
She rises slowly, suddenly aware that she's been lying down. Snow falls from her, having obviously settled around her like a blanket while she had been...what? Asleep? Unconscious? Dreaming? The ground is cold beneath her, and everything nearby seems withered and grey. It matches her perfectly: she too is grey, although she is not withered. How old is she? She wonders idly, but has no good answer. She doesn't look old, but she is distrustful of her own appearance. She is distrustful of everything but those three facts: mother, father, home.
Finally on her feet, she finds herself steadier than she'd hoped and expected. Where she had come from there hadn't been much in the way of walking. It had been a different world, an entirely different way of being. And thus far, she prefers that to this. Out there, it hadn't been cold. Not like this, anyway.
But that is then, and this is here, now. And if she's here, she will continue to be here, at least until she is yanked away. And if she's going to be here, she's just going to have to get used to it.
She grits her teeth, and gains a fourth certainty: her name. Aletheia. She is Aletheia, and always has been.
And, perhaps, always will be.
but rises again
Aletheia harder and stronger
 He knows more of this world than she, though not by very much. Walking to him is normal, though he’s not all that good at it yet. His legs are too long, spindly and wobbly beneath him in the snow. There’s no snow in the Jungle to contend with, though he’s growing used to the underbrush. He is not used to the cold (it is always, always warm in the Jungle), but he doubts that his life will keep him in his warm home. He better get used to the cold at some point.
He knows that his mother is Myrina. She is very much alive and very much doesn’t care what he does. As is evidenced by the fact there’s a very young boy wandering around the meadow, though he doesn’t seem particularly disturbed to be so young and so alone. It’s as if it doesn’t matter, or really, doesn’t even cross his mind.
He knows his father is Covet, and that his father once called the Valley home (perhaps he’d go there one day, perhaps he’d make that home, perhaps not). He knows that his father is also dead.
He knows his own name is Rhonan, and he’s gold and white. So very bright and pretty and ridiculous. His bother, Tytos, is brown and black. Suitable colors. Plain, simple colors. He wants that. But no, he is gold and white with an orange ring around his otherwise muddy brown eyes. He is bright and vivid and terribly annoyed by this turn of events in his life. Thus far, it is the worst tragedy to befall him.
What a charmed life, apparently. Not really, but he just doesn’t notice the other flaws. His dead father means nothing to him. He never met the stallion and never will. His careless mother doesn’t bother him. He assumes all mothers are like this, and that being a young child in the meadow is simply normal. He knows no different, and so these things are not bad. But he knows his bother is suitably colored and he feels like a pretty pretty princess.
He’s wandering around without any plans whatsoever (what else is a boy to do?), when he spots the girl. A gray little thing, apparently only a year or so older than he. She’s part white, either snow or just coloring, he can’t tell from here. But she looks about as plan-less as he is, and so he makes his way over. No one has taught him manners, and he doesn’t know it’s polite to announce his presence or any such nonsense, but the crunching of the snow beneath his ungainly legs is probably enough to do the trick anyway. “Hi,” he says, and then nothing more, because he doesn’t even know what he plans to do next. Nothing, probably. Hopefully she’s more useful.
rhonan.
@[Evie] I don't even know what this is. Sorry, but not sorry, because I love your characters.
what is dead may never die;
No one has taught the boy manners, but thankfully, no one has taught the girl manners either – or at least, not any kind of conventional manners. In some ways she's just as newborn as him; the world she has known is either fading, faded, or was simply a dream. She isn't sure which, but she isn't bothered by her uncertainty either.
She watches him approach, her icy eyes watching him with perfect neutrality. She is not interested, not curious, at least not in a normal equine capacity. To her, he is just another creature, just another thing that will wash over her like the tide, leaving her with inevitable shells, pockmarks and remnants of everything that is this new world of hers.
The crunching of the snow beneath his hooves is impossibly loud to her ears. She can hear him in her bones, and she wonders if everything is this sharp, this raw here. She can only remember sounds that were muffled, noises muted against some kind of impossible vastness. She is not sure which she prefers.
hi, and she tilts her head, regarding him with curiosity. He's so tiny, she thinks, but then realizes she has little concept of her own age. "Hi." she repeats, her voice a strange combination of lyrical and flat. She is like the voice that reads an audiobook, so perfectly bland and yet somehow enthralling.
Her eyes flick over his small body, noting every detail: the way he holds himself as though almost shy, the way his bright colors distinguish him against the snow around, the way his legs and his head seem ever so slightly too large for his body. Gangly and ungainly, she decides. Had she ever been like that? Her face is smooth as she turns her head the other way and sighs.
"Are you cold?" She could have asked a million things, and maybe she would have if she'd known about (or, for that matter, cared about) social graces. But she is either deliberately or accidentally ignorant, plunging forward by simply asking what's on her mind.
As if to answer her own question, she shakes snow from her back with the graceful nonchalance of a bird shifting its feathers.
but rises again
Aletheia harder and stronger
He would be surprised, if he could read minds (he cannot not, he is as normal as pretty pretty princesses come), to know she thought him shy. He wasn’t shy. At least, he didn’t think so. He had no qualms about walking around or up to strangers or anything such thing. He was simply awkward and uncertain of what he was actually supposed to do. His older sister seemed to always know just what to do, but she was busy running about trying to make herself a Queen. He couldn’t be bothered to follow her, because clearly, he was not going to be the Jungle Queen one day.
His mother didn’t seem to know what to do either. She mostly didn’t do anything. If he’d ever met his father, the similarities might have been obvious. Covet, who knew when to show up but had all the social graces of the monkey’s in the Jungle. Which, to be fair to Rhonan, were about his only friends. Clearly he wasn’t going to grow up in to some dapper young gentleman.
His Arabian heritage might help in the looks department somewhat. And growing up and not having legs too long and thin for his body, ears too big for his head, and a normal rather than baby fuzz coat would all help as well. But his father had been anything but handsome, and there’s enough Mustang in his lines that he’ll never really be lithe and pretty. Not that he wants to be. Rhonan doesn’t care, really. He has no concept of what he looks like, other than gold and white and fucking bright. He’d rather be colored like mud, and look like it too.
The girl replies with her own hi. And then they are silent for a moment, her head cocked as she studies him like he’s some science experiment gone wrong. Hell, maybe he is. Time will tell on that one, it seems. He doesn’t mind; he just stands there looking back at her with those strange muddy brown eyes with the orange ring, like a pumpkin stuck in a mud puddle.
Eventually, she breaks the silence. “Yea. It’s freezing here.” Clearly he’s not real worried about being macho either. No babe, it’s not cold. Here, let me keep you warm. Which would just be hilarious, because he’s too small to keep anyone warm. He’s more like a teddy bear right now, with his fuzzy gold coat and too-large eyeballs. Everything is too damn large. “It’s warm where I live,” he adds, like this explains everything, rather than the snow on the ground and her coat.
rhonan.
what is dead may never die;
They make quite a pair, the two of them. Clearly it takes someone with some schooling in social graces and etiquette to make a conversation really work. And equally clearly, they are both sorely lacking in that department.
Perhaps it is the fault of their parents. It's hard to blame Aletheia's mother – Librette did not even know that the girl existed, had never known herself to be pregnant with her, and had certainly never seen her. And Carnage? Perhaps Aletheia had met him, but if she had, she didn't know it. But every second her memories fly further back into the past, fading into ever more dim shadows. So perhaps it is the fault of Aletheia's parents for being absent, for having her in the way they had her (which, really, means it's all Carnage's fault, as Librette had not a single ounce of input in the matter.)
If she'd known that he had the advantage of at least one parent, where she had none, she wouldn't have cared. Already she is sure that her lack of parents is no disadvantage. They had created her (and yes, created is the apt term in her case), and that was enough.
Standing there in the snow, she has her own kind of beauty, the kind of absent, waifish beauty that so many of the stick-thin models seem to carry. Her heritage is muddied with many breeds, but her graceful, elegant frame has survived all of that cross-breeding to leave her, well, her. She's also got the advantage of being more grown than he, which means more grown into the length of her legs and the proportions of her body. She is a pretty thing already, and once she is entirely finished growing, she'll be even more lovely. Perhaps one day she'll care, but today, she doesn't even know what lovely is.
He confirms that it is cold here, and she ponders that for a moment. Had she ever felt cold before? What did it mean, really, to be cold? Was it dangerous? It certainly wasn't uncomfortable. In fact, what did it feel like to be not cold? She couldn't remember. There was simply nothingness, and then there was cold.
He keeps speaking, and he talks of a home that he has, where there is warmth. She knows her home is in the Valley, although she does not know anything but the way to get there. She wonders, briefly, if the Valley is warm. She will find out, she suspects.
She remembers, then, that he's spoken, and that it's usually polite to talk back when you're being talked to. And so, she fixes him with her stare of ice once more. "Why?" she skips right past (or knows nothing of) the more common, logical questions. She could've asked where that is. She could've asked how he'd come to be here, instead of there, wherever there is. But she doesn't. She asks such an oblique, open ended question that it could mean almost anything. Perhaps she's curious to see how he interprets it. Perhaps she thinks she's been perfectly clear. Perhaps she's getting used to this whole talking thing, and just isn't sure how to do it quite yet.
"I don't know if it's warm where I live." she says, and it's difficult to tell whether she's talking to herself or talking to him.
but rises again
Aletheia harder and stronger
Bahahahaha.
He’s not even sure he can blame his parents either. Is it Covet’s fault for being dead? Honestly, would Covet have even cared that the boy was alive. The black stallion had a hoard of children running around. Rhonan was just another face in the crowd (even if his particular face was fucking gold). Is it even Myrina’s fault? He didn’t exactly hang around her much, and even if she yelled at him, he’d still wander off. It probably didn’t matter what his mother did. He’d still be Rhonan. He still wouldn’t care enough to understand the finer graces of this conversation thing. Why would anyone not say what came into his or her head?
If he ever became a diplomat, he’d have to learn the answer to that question. Hopefully, for the sake of whatever kingdom he joins (should he decide to join one, he’s too young to care), he never becomes a diplomat. Maybe he’d learn how to fight. Maybe he’d suck at that too and just pimp himself out like his dad did. That’s not a half bad life, right?
He’s never really thought about warm and cold in the way she does. Things are hot or they are cold. In the one, he sweats. In the other, he shivers. So far in his short life he hasn’t experience warm or cool, that lovely in between in which neither sweating nor shivering occurs. Maybe one day he will. Really, odds dictate that he definitely will, but he doesn’t know odds yet. He just knows what he’s experienced, and the tiny bit of the world his mother has bothered to tell him about. Mostly, he’ll just have to figure it all out as he goes.
“Sun,” he says in answer to her question, again as if this alone is enough of an answer. “There’s a lot of sun, though we can’t really see it because of the trees. But I guess the trees trap the heat? Dude, honestly, I have no damn clue. Cause it’s hot.” He doesn’t think that this answer is rude. Just honest. He thinks it’s because there’s a lot of sun and there’s not much of a breeze because there are so many freaking trees. But he’s a colt. Really, it could because his ass was on fire and he probably wouldn’t even know.
He’s a little more normal to her next statement. He does know the different kingdoms here. That much he’s picked up, some from Myrina, some from random conversations he’s wandered past. It’s amazing how little attention adults pay to children, as if they don’t have ears to hear with at all. At least in the case of Rhonan, they are lucky enough to be overheard by ears that just don’t care. “Where do you live?”
rhonan.
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