"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
04-19-2019, 10:36 PM (This post was last modified: 04-19-2019, 10:36 PM by aegean.)
love is my religion. i could die for that.
The dreams come to him in the day now.
He is lost in the magic of his new power. He is enamored with, enraptured with the way that it flows out of him during his waking hours, letting him weave dreams for himself. He brings the moon to the cove, brings the heavens to the earth. He floods his senses with it, losing hours and then days to the magic of his making, to the illusions that smell of peonies and salt and taste of the ocean breeze.
Today is the same. He walks through it, his amethyst eyes glazed and unseeing as it hits him wave by wave. Today is gossamer and lace and the middle of the sea. It is life in its purest form and he glows all the brighter for it, overjoyed with it at the same time that he finds a strange peace within it.
Of course he now has this gift.
It makes complete sense.
It is only when his hooves strike a rock does he split the illusions, letting them ripple and pull back. He blinks against the afternoon sun, swiveling his antlered head around to take stock of where he is and where he had managed to find himself. His velvety lips pull into a dreamy smile when he realizes that his wandering has brought him to the forest, the light falling into pools on the needles and the brush.
When he hears the cracking of a branch, he angles his head toward it. She moves forward and he traces the scales that like her body, the sage green of her eyes, and the spiral of a horn emerging. He doesn’t bother to hide his intrigue, and he steps forward, lips parting into that smile.
“Hello,” his voice is soft and silvery, nearly feminine in its delicacy.
04-21-2019, 08:42 PM (This post was last modified: 04-21-2019, 08:42 PM by Sabbath.)
you've got to move slowly, take and eat my body like it's holy.
She hasn’t spoken to anyone in so long she’s almost forgotten the sound of her own voice. Sabbath tried to carve some semblance of happiness in Pangea with Eight and yet she felt more lost than ever. So she began to wander until all she felt was emptiness. Her mane hangs ink black over her graying face and obscures her view as she weaves in between the trees and over the underbrush around her. Little red dapples are just beginning to reveal themselves along the full curve of her hips and strong, slender shoulders. She’s got her father’s strong eyes and her mother’s delicate jawline, the high cheek bones of a proud family.
And yet no one knows quite where her little spiral horn came from. It shimmers silver-green from her lovely face and occasionally serves to push a low hanging twig from her. Her father had said once that he doesn’t remember anyone else in his family carrying such a thing but he used to kiss just beside it before she fell asleep at night. She misses falling asleep curled to her mother’s side while Adna slept on the other.
A slow sigh shudders from her lungs as a twig snaps beneath the weight of her small hoof. The sound pulls her from her thoughts just enough to notice the pale boy approaching her now. He is all perfect white and crystal eyes that make her suck her breath right back in when they meet the sage green of her own. Beneath the orange shade of the autumn trees, he is glowing white in spite of the shade. Sabbath takes a step back without even realizing it. Aegean. He looks like something out of a fairy tale, some perfect prince come to rescue the damsel from her plight.
But she wants to be her own knight in shining armor.
She wants to pluck herself from this tangled mess of a life that keeps her tethered with night terrors and rabid hunts.
“I’m Sabbath. Are you a ghost?” she asks, blinking to make sure exhaustion isn’t just fooling her into this vision. The ethereal boy remains in place, of course, and she wonders if he’s anything like the magician she met before. Will he be beautiful and cruel like so many others? Marvelous boys with their perfect faces have become something of a warning to her now and so she bristles a little at the thought.
There is something delicate and strong about her all at once; she is all edges and roses and he wants to lose himself in the thorns. “Maybe,” he says with a dreamy smile, the wind picking up the edges of his ivory mane and carrying it onto the air around him. “Would that be a bad thing?” He plucks at his new gift, letting it dance around them. It makes the forest around them fade away, makes the smell of pine on the air begin to fall away until it is his favorite cove from his home, until it is salt on the breeze instead.
He wonders if she has a favorite place.
He wonders if there is a smell that makes childhood rush into her.
“It is pretty,” he says softly, turning the amethyst of his gaze around them, taking in his own illusion, hearing the sound of the waves creeping up the beaches. “It isn’t real.” The illusion waivers slightly, as if in reaction to his admission about it, but he frowns slightly in concentration and it solidifies again.
“But I don’t think that makes it any less beautiful.”
Aegean lifts his crystal hooves to take himself a step closer to her, until the floral and spice of her almost overpowers the ocean brine of his own creation. “It is really nice to meet you, Sabbath,” he says her name like a prayer, like a song, and the edges of his lips turn upward into another smile.
“Are you real?”
The illusion around them falls to the ground like dust spiraling into the sunlight.
He doesn’t know the answer, but he knows that it won’t matter.
Knowing the reality of her won’t make her any less beautiful.
you've got to move slowly, take and eat my body like it's holy.
Maybe, he says, and she wonders if she’s supposed to just accept the possibility that he may be the living dead. Perhaps her notion of what that means is only fueled by her night terrors and the scary stories she used to share with her sisters though. She wonders if a ghost boy is just the kind of friend she needs in her overcast life. But there is little time to dwell on the question as he pushes the smell of earth and pine from them, replaces the trees with cave walls and the smell of salt hanging heavy in the air. The serpent girl tenses and takes a step back from him, startled by the new setting and the change in the air around them.
Her sage eyes watch the dream world shudder and ripple at his words before he steadies it once again. It isn’t real, he assures her, but her muscles continue to tremble as she waits for the forest to come rushing back to her. The cove and the sea are foreign whereas the shade of the trees is a second home, a shelter in even the greatest storm. Meeting a beautiful ghost and being thrust into his dreams of seaside caves is too much for a fearful thing like her.
But she doesn’t confess such weakness. Sabbath forces herself to focus on his amethyst eyes when he addresses her, keeps her chin tilted down just an inch so that her spiral horn remains poised and ready. Life has taught her that the most wonderful things are often facades, gilded monsters all waiting to snap their teeth. After all, her mother had trusted her father’s handsome face and what good had it done her?
His smile draws her in though and she wants to press her lips to his, to nurture that tender-soft center of her heart despite the way it quivers. Is she real? She laughs softly at the question and moves closer to him, tucking herself beneath his chin and letting her rough scales meet his smooth skin. Real enough, she supposes. Just solid enough to savor his warmth for a while.
“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. Sometimes, I just wish I would disappear,” he confesses against his chest. How lovely it might be to exist only as a fleeting memory on the tongues of her family before the wind snatches the last threads of her away. Her rich green eyes close and she sighs softly. If only she were an illusion invented to entertain a gorgeous thing like him.
He feels—for the first time—a twinge of guilt when he sees the way that his illusions, these things that he weaves into the air before her cause fear. His lovely features, usually wiped clean of emotion, fold into themselves, his velvety lips pulling down in the corner as he pulls the illusion into himself quickly. He drops his head slightly, the length of his forelock falling over his jewel-toned eyes. “I’m sorry.”
He has never stopped to consider that others may not look at his gifts the way that he does.
He never considered that what he views with awe, others could view with trepidation.
It leaves a strange feeling in his chest, a twisting of emotion that he struggles to breathe around, but he does his best to push it to the side, lifting his solemn gaze to her beautiful serpentine face. It becomes easier when she closes the distance between them, curving beneath his chin. It sparks something like a protective flare in his chest—a feeling he has never once harbored before—and he reaches down to press the softness of his cheek against her. He holds her like that, letting the silence swell between them.
When she talks again, he cannot stop the tear that touches the corner of his eye, the impossible sadness that her presence strikes in him swelling. “I don’t want you to disappear,” he confesses, whispering into the tangles of her mane. “I just found you. I wouldn’t want to lose you that quickly.” There is an earnest, genuine note in his voice as he gathers her into him again, as he holds her as if scared she’d disappear with as much ease as the illusions that he weaves and then releases into the wind, into the wild.
you've got to move slowly, take and eat my body like it's holy.
Sabbath often speaks or acts without thinking of how it might affect others. Still, she can’t hide the way his illusions startle her and yet she feels guilty when she sees the remorse darken his soft face. He offers up an apology even though she feels like she should be the one telling him that she’s sorry. But the tangles of their negative emotions find themselves easing when she bridges the gap and finds her way to his chest. Even if he were to cast his spell over this place now, she would continue to feel safe right here with his pulse murmuring in her ear.
When he speaks, she finds herself blinking her eyes open and she wonders why someone who has hardly begun to know her would worry himself over her this way. She hardly views herself as anything unique or loveable, especially when compared to the other women who inhabit this world. Sabbath is not beautiful like her mother or strong like her sisters. She isn’t a warrior like her father or an illusionist like Aegean. She is only Sabbath, the girl with the scales and sharp teeth. The girl who lost her way and never made it back.
He holds her tighter and she closes her eyes again as her heart swells at his question. Even if he only cares with a fragment of his heart, it stirs the slumbering kindness deep within her. His voice traces its fingers across her skin and she blooms to life at the feeling of it.
“Maybe I could stay a little longer,” she mumbles against his skin as she breathes a slow sigh. Maybe she could stay forever right here, pressed tight to him while he holds her close. She tries not to think of the shadow of war looming over Loess and Tephra, over her family and friends. There is only peace and the sound of the wind running through the grasses around them here. She can breathe without a weight on her chest or a storm in her mind.
It is easy for Aegean to find himself caught in the otherworldliness of this moment.
It is easy for him to not think about what is to come, the wind of change that will soon make their way through Beqanna. It is easy to just be here in this moment, with her pressed into his delicate chest and his lips on her poll. “We can stay as long as you like,” he whispers into the curls and tangles of her mane, letting the moment seep on his tongue and wondering at the poisonous flower who blossoms before him.
In the corner of his eye, he begins to paint illusions, letting them form and shape to the pressure of her mind. “Here,” he whispers, his mouth pressed into the velvet next to her ear, where the skin grows thin and soft. “You can help control them.” It feels like a river that passes beneath his hands; it feels like he can feel the clay shaping beneath his palm and he presses her own into the swirling mud.
Flowers blossom at their feet between the pine needles and mulch, and he can smell their delicate scent as it wafts up to them. “Maybe you will haunt me forever,” his lyrical voice says under his breath, but his dreamy gaze is now on the world around them, the paintbrush delicately placed in her hand as he weaves and spins, lighting up their vicinity with whatever it is that she imagines, whatever his gift responds to.
“But let’s just dream a little while longer.”
A giant whale emerges silently from the forest floor and arcs through the space around them, the edges of it slightly translucent and constellations trapped in its belly. Stars shoot from the imagined water out of its spout and shower down as galaxies around them as it begins to swim above in quiet harmony.
