"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
02-26-2019, 09:04 PM (This post was last modified: 03-04-2019, 01:28 PM by Rae.)
my soul is in the sky
Home. She was home. In a way, anyway, though it depends on how you define home. Home, if it is the place where you are born, would be the beach for her, a place that is home only to corpses and carrion birds. Home, if it’s the place where you were raised, would be the Jungle, but that home is long gone and Rae does not mourn for its loss. Home, if it’s the place you choose, well, she doesn’t have one of those. Home, for Rae, is not a place, not really. Not unless the sky can be a place. Home is everywhere for her, wherever the wind takes her. Rae was born of lighting and the sky, and she knew no other way to live but at its beck and call.
Where Rae was made of the sky, touched by its uncontrollable nature and the blue of a perfect, clear day, her twin had been made of the earth. Though he carried their parent’s electric in his veins, he’d been made like the mountain, unmovable, unshakeable. He’d followed her briefly, but then he’d found a home and stayed. Rae, though she loved her brother, could not stay. They parted easily, knowing he would be there and that she would find him when the wind brought her there again, as it would in its own time. She’d never called one place home, and still, she wasn’t sure she ever would. The idea of settling unnerved her, but there was something beautiful in being back in the place where she began. The land hummed in her veins and the wind sung in her ears a chorus of home, even as the sky beckoned her back into its loving embrace.
Nothing was as she left it. Death and disease hung in the air. The lands she knew as a child were gone, replaced by strange landscapes filled with strange faces she did not know. It had not been so many years, but change happened quickly, swiftly. Time, for that matter, moved differently in different lands, and so what was only five years for her may have been far longer here. In fact, it certainly was, though she has little idea how much time has truly passed since she left Beqanna as a babe, just old enough to be left on her own. Foolish girl she’d been then, and foolish girl she was now, depending on who you asked. Most found her nature to be foolish, to come and go and simply not care about creating roots. Roots belonged to her brother though, not her. They were two halves of a whole. He was the tree, the thing that stayed and flourished and grew. She was the wind that blew through the leaves and took them on their way.
She swoops into the meadow, more bird than horse in her movements, one of the few places unchanged since her departure. Even she is changed since her birth, the wild magic of the world splashing blue into her hair, a color that did not run in the family. The rest of her looked so like her mother though; if it weren’t for the wings and the touch of sky blue, she might be mistaken for Rhy. Rae was not her mother though and never would be, not that she could know what her mother had been like. She’d been half of the cause of her mother’s death, though she felt no guilt having been unable to control her power in the womb. Still, she would grieve the loss of a mare she’d wanted to know, would have been privileged to know. Perhaps, if her parents hadn’t been dead upon her entry into this world, Rae might have understood the concept of roots, but without them the sky became the only home she cared about. The sky that gave her its power and called to her, always.
Today though, she finds the earth, walking land that is familiar and not all at once, wondering what her old home – new home? – might have in store for her. How long would she stay in one place before the sky called her up and away again, before the wind changed her course?
Annapurna’s roots are strange things.
She’s of an old bloodline, for one, with her siblings dead centuries before she was born, though Beqanna runs amok with half-siblings. She would have been royalty if she was born when her full sisters were, and it would have been quite the different life.
(Now the kingdom is long dead, and her mother haunts the afterlife like a strange queen, and her father swallows galaxies and spits them back as children.)
Blood aside, the land she knew – the land she called home – was a strange thing unto itself, a cold and lonely mountaintop. Except she didn’t know cold, didn’t feel it. She didn’t know loneliness, either, having been raised in such stark isolation that she wasn’t aware it was an option.
It is why this land feels entirely too hot and too loud, sometimes, the throngs of horses and the beating sun. She tries to keep the cold and snow with her – it obeys her, somewhat – but her power is still weak, atrophied from disease (what use had she in generating cold atop a mountain, with snow already swirling around her?). There’s a chill that radiates from her, still, as if she’s just walked in from a snowscape.
She is thinking of snow when she first spies the other mare, bright colors standing out, catching the eye.
(Color still shocks her, sometimes – she knew white and gray, mostly, and the blazing blue of the sky.)
She pauses when she comes closer, examining her, and then she manages a smile. It is somewhat stiff, because she is still learning, but it’s there, and honest enough.
“Hello,” she says, then, “your color is very striking.”
Light touching the gold of her, refracting. A brilliance like sunlight on snow – yet not.
“I’m Annapurna,” she adds, as if a name would somehow add sense to her words.
The day was cool, the chill of winter settling over Beqanna, the sky gray but not dreary – no, never dreary, not to her. It doesn’t take long for a mare to find her, all white, a stark contrast to Rae’s sky-dipped edges. There’s a deeper chill that follows the mare, and though Rae knows nothing of Kora, perhaps if she did, she would note the similarities between this mare and the aunt she has never known. An aunt that she does not know exists. Kora, the only one of her family that belongs not to the sky, but the winter cold, to the mountains and the Tundra and Isle. Winter clings to Kora as it does with this mare now, but Rae cannot make the connection with one half missing.
Draconis had done her best, telling the orphaned, infant twins at least of their mother, of the legends that Rhy left behind and the little she had known of Kratos. Though what would a mare of the Amazons have really known of a stallion she’d never seen, other than the lightning storms that the pair had created together? They were perfectly matched in that, but that was all Rae knew of her father. Draconis had painted her mother in near perfection, but Rae was no fool, and no one was a shining as her mother’s legacy. Rae has simply never be gifted the truth of her roots because, to her knowledge, there were none that could give her the stories as they were. Perhaps Draconis had some faults to share, but she’d never had the heart to impart those faults to two gangly little foals.
Rae doesn’t know that there are ways to find the stories though. Kora roams Beqanna once again, and Leander too. Neither of them exist in Rae’s world though – a world that has never consisted of family or friends. In this, her and Annpurna are alike. What is loneliness? The concept has never crossed Rae’s mind, for she has the birds as companions and the sky as her home and needed no more. She could find Kry easily and visit as she wished, and in that, she did not lose her other half, though she never needed him either.
The mare is quiet for a moment, pausing to examine Rae and she itches under the stillness of that gaze. Though Rae too has spent little time with others, she is never still as the winter is still in a snowfall, hushed and quiet. Rae was born as a storm and knows no other way. A smile creases the white mare’s features, this too stiff and unused, and Rae returns the gesture with a smile and a nod, attempting not to seem impatient. She is not, in fact, in any rush at all. The plan is to stay, at least for a while, to find out what it might be like to keep her feet on the ground (figuratively speaking, at least).
“Thank you,” she says, unable to come up with a suitable comment in return other than you are very white, which didn’t seem worth uttering. “Rae,” she offers instead, as if this makes up for her general lack of polite conversation. She too is learning, uncertain, not quite young enough to get away with it but clearly some part of her is simply wild. Her mane stirs, caught in a wind, though there is no discernable breeze. “I was born here, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been back. It’s different.” She tries, not sure what to say to this mare that she doesn’t know, but offering something, anything.
She knew no one else like her, but then, she knew few others at all. She’d been alone, for the most part, though her father had visited, albeit infrequently. He was odd, and his visits had felt perfunctory. He told her stories of her mother, of long dead siblings, and when she opened her mouth to reply her voice was always raspy, a strange and unused thing.
He had quit visiting months or years ago, and she hadn’t noticed for the longest time.
He’d been magic, her father. Or, was magic, she supposed. There was no singular ability about him, the powers changed and warped as suited him.
Since coming here, she’d heard his name on their lips, spoken with trepidation or hate or awe. He had a reputation, it seemed.
(She’s heard only slivers of stories, and has not sought out more than that. Many of the silvers are entirely unpleasant, and she does not want to know more. She is not particularly fond of her father, but she does not want his memory completely soured, either.)
She nods as the mare gives her name, short and sweet (unlike hers, more of a tangle on the tongue).
“Rae,” she repeats, to practice. Someday her words may sound effortless, but now, it is still a labored affair. She doesn’t practice enough. She doesn’t care to, really.
“Different how?” she questions, idly curious. Then, to explain herself –
“My parents are from here. I’m not. I’m trying to figure it out.” It - the land, talking, names. How to deal with heat. How to smile without seeming a madwoman.
She’ll get there, or she won’t. There’s always the mountaintop.
Rae has heard no whispers of her mother or her father, but then again, had she truly expected to? Perhaps she hoped that their memories would be burned in someone’s memory, that someone could offer her the truth of them that she was never granted. Perhaps never knowing the truth is a mercy though. Would she prefer to find that her mother was a killer, a monster, rather than the shining warrior Rae believed her to be?
Though in truth, she didn’t believe Draconis had lied to her, and she imagined the stories she knew and the truth were not horribly different. Rae simply longed for the details, longed to know of her grandparents and her family and her cousins. Did they exist? Did her mother have siblings? She knew none of this, and likely, never would.
“My parents were from here too, and I am not. I can understand that,” she says, finding common ground in this. “Everything has changed. New lands. New faces. Even magic here has shifted. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it doesn’t feel like the place I was born.” Even the sky feels different to her here than she recalls, though perhaps her memory is simply imperfect and warped. It wouldn’t surprise her, the memory of a child often something rather imperfect.
“I’m trying to figure it out too,” she offers, the only olive branch she really knows how to extend. They are alike in this, at least. “I have never truly lived anywhere but in the clouds.” She still wasn’t sure she was capable of anything else.
RAE
my soul is in the sky
@[annapurna] Wow I missed this reply - sorry girl!
