"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
10-03-2019, 06:37 PM (This post was last modified: 10-03-2019, 06:37 PM by kildare.)
'You have an aunt in Taiga,’ Elaina had told him.
Discovering Elaina in magnificent, mountainous Hyaline had been shock enough. But to know he had an aunt in Beqanna as well? He had known they were out there, somewhere. It hadn’t been a secret when his golden cousin had taken off for Windskeep and then Lilli followed soon after, wanting a fresh start in places unknown. Nobody had blamed them – how could they? Kildare’s father had intended to take his own family and leave. Elaina and Lilliana had been entitled to do the same. Just as he had been.
But the knowledge of her in Beqanna is unsettling. Kildare has been here a full year now and this place has been a salvation of sorts. He’s been allowed to breathe and stretch and grow in a way that he doesn’t think he would have otherwise been allowed too. Kildare, youngest son of Malachi and Kalina, the little boy who had been born with as much Legacy blood as he had been of that dark god Abaddon, has felt his blood settling here. He has felt himself settling here, in all parts of Beqanna and more recently Loess. But the knowledge that his aunt is in Taiga brings about that promise he made and Kildare, for as much as values his freedom and the distance he has put between himself and his bloodline, he had still made a promise. And that, well that, there was no going back on that. His mind is troubled with the possible consequences of this action – if he does go? If he does not go? There are several possibilities and the young stallion knows he owes that promise to at least a visit to see how his aunt fares in the northern woods. Perhaps he might even journey on to Nerine afterwards. Kildare is no lover of the summer heat. It always seems to find him and bleach out his dark coat, overheats when the sun reaches its highest zenith. The young stallion sticks to where the tree cover is heaviest and longs for a breeze. He catches whispers of it but it is weak in the deepest part of the forest. The salt air that he has come to enjoy is far away now, leaving Kildare immersed in the scent of pine and the dog days of summer. Where is the clarity of his mountain breezes? He wants the bite and bark of the cooler air to wake him from the doldrums of these days. He’d take anything at this point for a distraction, anything from the cursed insects that he swats at with his tail and occasionally turning his head to bare his teeth at. Bugs, trees, humidity. Kildare is ready to forsake this place to the pesky creatures that buzz around until a stirring through the trees causes him to pause. She blends in, almost. Her bay form melts into the trunks of the trees and it is only her ambling through these woods, much like himself, that attracts his attention. Kildare stops and listens as the hoofbeats tread quietly on the loamy ground. Deciding to not let the mare slip from his line of vision, he calls after her. ”What’s a girl like you doing in a forest like this?”
She chooses the forest because it is one of the few places she can still be invisible. The crisp, sea-salt breeze that whipped through Nerine was a refreshing change to the incredibly still air of the forest, and she found that she actually liked the roar of the waves as they rose to crash against the rocky coast, but it still didn’t feel like home. Nowhere did, because she thinks she’s one of those lost souls who is not meant to have a home. And, it was harder to hide in Nerine – too many wide open spaces, and even though it wasn’t an overly crowded kingdom, it was still too many eyes on her at any given moment.
The shadows of the forest offered a familiar security, and while some might find the closeness of the trees and the heaviness of the darkness to be nearly suffocating, to her it was a breath of relief.
Here, she was safe from their critical stares (because her insecurity likes to tell her that they can see her invisible defect, that they all know she is damaged and a waste of time), and relieved of the loudness of civilization. The tension she carried in her muscles seemed to dissolve the further she disappeared into the depths of it, and she had almost let her guard entirely down when she heard footsteps.
Her steps slow, incredibly mindful of every footfall – her breathing stills, and she suddenly wishes she could truly become invisible. She has been doing far more socializing than she ever cared to do as of late, and she can feel her heart warring against her ribs at the thought of going through this again. With a downcast gaze she does not even glance in the direction that he walks, thinking that they might slip past each other.
But then his voice calls out to her, and a nervous chill chases across her skin.
She stops, and she turns towards him. He is young, and handsome – which makes it all the worse. Her jaw is already clenching with the effort it takes to bite back the poison that lays waiting on her tongue, her dark brown eyes narrowing as she manages to repeat tautly, “A girl like me?” Her mind can fill in the blanks of what that could possibly mean; a girl like her – a girl with fire under her skin, a girl too bitter to ever be anything likable, a girl that should be trapped even further than the stomach of this forest can allow. “What does that even mean?” Her words singe with heat in response to what she has chosen to perceive as an insult, and even her eyes seem to smolder as they glower at him from behind a veil of tangled black forelock.
— burn until our lives become the embers —
@[kildare]
she's still pretty bad at making friends, I'm sorry lmao
What Kildare is doing at any point in time is anybody's guess.
What he is doing when he calls out to Brinly, he isn't entirely sure himself. He could let her pass through the woods, weave through the trees and be another shadow in this forest. Sometimes it's easiest to be a shadow - to slip through unseen and unheard. There is more to see and hear that way, after all. He almost lets her go.
But he doesn't.
Perhaps it is the heat, the flies, just the annoyance of summer itself, but he does not let her slip by unnoticed. If he is to suffer in these damned woods, it would seem that he aims to suffer in company.
He calls out to her and Kildare waits in expectant silence (it never occurs to him that she might not reply). He waits and a grin spreads across his dark mouth like wildfire, daring her and all these lurking shadows to come out. When she turns, his green eyes aren't without appreciation. For all that she is the color of these woods, she is fine-boned and even better, fire-eyed. The spark in them taunts him and he strides easily forward with a carriage that suggests he is used to owning the ground beneath him.
The grin widens, "What would you like it to mean?"
She is tense beneath his green eyes. He can see the way she clenches her jaw, spits her words out as if it might keep him further away from her. He might not feel the full abuse of her venom but he isn't immune to the sting. Gently the laughing eyes give way to forbearance, the wildness in his face tames as he looks at her.
"Easy," he tries again. "I just meant-" and then he cuts himself off. What did he mean? Ruefully, he offers her a tentative smile. "Let's try this again." He lifts his head to attempt to get a better reading of her own smoldering gaze, "Hi. My name is Kildare. What do they call a girl like yourself?"
@[Brinly] i'm not entirely sure what this is but here ya go
She can see a spark in his eyes that slowly fades the longer he looks at her, and it feels like burning, heavy stone right in the center of her stomach. It’s no different than with everyone else, she realizes. Everyone greets her with a friendly face and laughing eyes, but one scorching remark from her, one look into her hard, smoldering eyes and she can almost see them recoil.
They are not afraid of her; they just don’t understand why they are being reprimanded for doing nothing. They don’t understand what they could have done to a stranger that was so offensive that they deserved to be snapped at.
And the answer was usually nothing.
He steps closer to her, and she doesn’t know why today she doesn’t have it in her to keep fighting. She doesn’t know why something inside of her feels like it has finally crumbled into ash and dust, and all she can manage to do is step backwards and reinstate the space between them. There is not sharp demand to not come closer. No frantic plea to not try and touch her.
Just a quiet, muted brokenness hiding somewhere in the furthest depths of her dark brown eyes.
“Brinly,” she offers quietly through the dying embers that she has swallowed away. She wants to apologize, but the words are burnt away in her throat before she can form them and so she simply angles her auburn face away from him. She takes a few steadying breaths, before returning her gaze back to his, her brown eyes seeming to flicker in the darkness. “Why are you so far into the forest?”
