"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
He had promised her that he would find the stars, and so he had begun the search. Tiercel couldn’t deny it was challenging, especially when his magic was limited to emotions and healing. Islas was the one who could whisper to the galaxies, who could coax them from their places in the sky to dance across her skin. It is only in his mind where he admits that he has chosen an impossible mission. It is only from within that he connects his frustration with doubt, his disappointment with failure.
Sometimes he thinks he can see the doubt in Islas’s hollow eyes, but he refuses to mention it.
His mission has become even more challenging as Islas has grown heavier, slower, and larger with her pregnancy’s progression. She had said she would come with him to find the stars, and indeed she had followed him to some of the highest places of Beqanna. Tiercel had summited Tephra’s volcano and climbed Hyaline’s range, and even stood at the ridges of Nerine. Yet the stars did not summon themselves, and the shadows continued to crawl around his body.
He has walked nearly to the ends of Beqanna in his earnest attempts at rescuing Islas from the exhaustion that pulls her down and dims her starlit glow.
Time has become a metaphor, and it can only be found in the signs that show they have drawn closer to becoming a family of three. Their world is cold and damp without the sun’s warmth, and days have become relicts of the past. So Tiercel wakes whenever he feels the haunted hands of exhaustion slide away from him (confident they will return before long) and begins his searching again.
He has started searching in the bodies of water scattered throughout Loess. Perhaps if the stars are not hidden above, they are hidden below. Tiercel picks the small lake in the northwestern corner of Loess, and though disappointment and hopelessness cling to the air around him, he splashes confidently into the bitter water. As he dives beneath the surface, Tiercel wonders if the heaviness in his chest will sink him to the bottom of the lake.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
He had promised to find the stars, and she had agreed to go with him.
Even though she had her doubts she refused to let him see that, although she is unsure at how well she is at hiding things. She hardly knows how to handle emotions at all, much less how to conceal them. She did not have doubt in him. No, he was one of the few—perhaps the only—that she had any kind of faith in.
But she knows the stars so well, and she knows if they are hiding no one is going to find them. Not even her.
She recognizes though that this is something Tiercel needs to do. That he needed to feel like he was at least doing something to try and amend the situation, rather than sit idly by. She did not know how to voice to him that she would not have faulted him for not trying, just as she did not know how to convey that he touched some distant, hollow part of her at the gesture.
It was why she wanted to go with him, because she had learned to recognize the way he sometimes grew quiet and pensive, and she wondered if that was when he began to worry he was going to fail. It was then that she would reach over to just lightly brush her nose to his shoulder, silent but understanding. She had decided too that perhaps this was better than simply wasting away—her light had nearly all but faded, and the black that had begun to seep into her skin took up enough of her body that it was no longer something that could be ignored. It enveloped her ears and crawled down the sharp angles of her face, it streaked into the white of her mane and washed across her back.
She didn't know what it meant—she didn't want to think about what it could mean.
Her pregnancy was another difficulty she had not counted on. In her naivety, she had not realized how much harder traveling would be as their child began to outgrow her confinements, but Islas, ever the stoic one, did not complain. She bore the restless shifting and kicks in silence, but secretly she was grateful when they stopped near a body of water that Tiercel was intent on searching. The look she had given him was faintly skeptical, but she did not say anything. She knew he would not rest unless he had searched everywhere.
Lingering on the water's edge she watches the faint ripples he had left behind, though as the minutes tick on, she finds herself growing worried. “Tiercel?” She calls his name quietly to the almost black surface of the water, though she knows it was useless. She could do nothing but wait.
He didn’t think the world could get much darker. As Tiercel opens his eyes beneath the bitter water’s surface, he realizes he was wrong. The lake has taken whatever light can be found and swallowed it, hiding it away in a black hole. The only indication that he has opened his eyes is the sting of the water. He is swimming in the darkness of his mind, in the place between awake and sleeping, in a galaxy with no stars or moons or planets.
He dives down anyway, a clumsy swimmer at best, and kicks his legs until he feels the bottom of the lake. It is smooth rock, washed soft by a river that must have run here decades ago. Tiercel touches it with his nose, and the rock is so cold it feels like something has bitten him. It feels like what he imagines touching a star might feel like (he doesn’t fully understand that the faintly-glowing woman at the edge of the lake is a star, that he has touched her soft skin and it has not bitten him), and his heart sinks even further.
It is madness to think the stars might be hidden at the bottom of a Loessian lake.
With a nose stinging from the chill of the rock, with a heart heavy with disappointment, with lungs burning for air — Tiercel pushes off the bottom of the lake and swims through the pure black. His face breaks the surface first, and he sucks in a quick, deep breath. The lungful of air doesn’t settle the wild array of emotions that seem to pull him back toward the lake’s bottom; he swims to shallower water so he can climb out before the weight of his failure drags him down.
Tiercel moves back to Islas’s swollen side, his pale eyes tracing the places where her ivory is marred with shadows as if someone had poured the darkness of the lake over her head. Regret cuts like a dagger in his chest, and it sits in the air as thick as the shadows. Tiercel cannot bring himself to look into her dark eyes, so he stares at the reddened dirt beneath his feet, watching it grow muddy from the lakewater that drips off him.
“I don’t want to stop looking,” he is stubborn enough to leave his family, to refuse to apologize to Eyas and Gale, to continue searching for stars that may never be found, “but you need to rest. The baby could be here any day.” Tiercel cannot imagine the exhaustion and aching she must feel, especially as she loyally trudges out with him each time he begins searching again. He is amazed by Islas, by her determination to go with him, by her ability to bear the weight of their child without complaint.
“Let’s go find something to eat. How does that sound?” It would be good for both of them to find something; without the sun to provide nutrients the plants have grown weary and wilted, but Tiercel has made another mission out of finding the best meals for Islas.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She is surprised at the relief she feels when he resurfaces, mostly because she is always surprised to feel anything at all. But it floods through her in a way that almost weakens her knees, and she expels an uneasy breath from her white lips. She steps towards the edge of the water to meet him, not surprised that he returns starless and disappointed. The stars feel just as far away as they always have, and she has resigned herself to the idea that soon she will be nothing.
All she can hope for is to make it long enough to birth their child, but of course, she has never voiced her fear of what that might do to her to Tiercel. Her glow has faded to nearly nothing, and she is not sure what it will mean once it is fully extinguished. There is a chance that it simply means the star inside of her has died—that she will become mortal as the grass that has wilted away without sunlight. There is the chance too that when the star dies, she would die with it.
There had been a time when she had thought she would rather die than to never be a star again; that if given the choice she would choose death every time.
But that had been before Tiercel, before their child. She had two things now that made this life worth living, and she wonders at the irony that it is being slowly stripped from her before she had the chance to truly let it be hers. Perhaps it was her divine punishment for wanting to go back to something that was no longer hers.
He stands alongside her, and she notices the way that he refuses to meet her eyes (her own eye contact many had found disconcerting at first, having not realized that staring made them uncomfortable). With a slight duck of her head, she bumps her nose lightly to his, her dark purple eyes strangely soft when she says to him, “I know you don’t want to stop, but a break might not be a bad idea. The stars, wherever they are, will still be there after the baby is born.” She doesn’t want to tell him that she is afraid; fear was not something she was at all accustomed to, and it was perhaps the strangest of emotions to her.
She is afraid, though, of how weak the lack of starlight has made her. She is afraid of not living long enough to be a mother to their child, she is afraid of leaving Tiercel alone in this endless dark.
The fear lives beneath her fatigue though, a nagging prick in the back of her mind, but constantly drowned by other things that are more pressing.
“I think rest and food sound like a splendid idea,” she says with another lingering touch to his cheek, before she begins to move off into the dark, back in the direction that their cave sits.
Her touch momentarily soothes the regret from the lines of his face. Tiercel leans into the soft warmth of her nose, and he grounds himself with the security Islas brings. He doesn’t know what will happen when her white finally succumbs to the black or when her glow finally dims to nothing, but he anchors himself to her presence at this moment. He doesn’t want to think about what will happen when the darkness overcomes her, so he ignores those nagging, vicious thoughts in favor of the simplicity of her touch.
Though his zeal for finding the stars is not completely abandoned, Tiercel is grateful when she agrees to his suggestion. He hopes the break will rejuvenate him, create a space where he can think better about where the stars are hidden, and perhaps the arrival of their child will bring new life to both him and Islas. Tiercel can feel the magic he inherited from Lepis flowing through their child — uncontrolled emotions pulsate in the air around them, feeding into the babe’s two parents, encouraging the tides in Tiercel and filling the emptiness in Islas.
As they head toward the cavern, the dun-and-navy’s mind is brimming. He watches Islas’s figure in front of him — eerie white yielding to shadowy black, her movements swaying and heavy, her belly round and full of the whimsical child that they will soon know — and feels adoration spread through him like wildfire. Tiercel hadn’t realized what it had meant to care for someone (to honestly care, with every inch of his stubborn, emotional, honest body) until he had reunited with Islas and realized she was pregnant. Perhaps this valiant, futile effort to find her beloved stars is just one attempt at Tiercel expressing that affection.
Yet it flows from his soul like a waterfall, an ocean that rises above his head and spills out into the world around him. And oh, if his emotions had light, they would illuminate the whole of Loess.
“Islas,” Tiercel says, and his voice is choked and thick. They walk on a trail that winds upwards along a face of rock, the lake to their left, as they climb out of its basin. His voice echos off the sides of the red stone around them, soft and sincere. “You mean a lot to me.” Is he too scared to say the words? Can he admit that he is beginning to understand what it meant when Wolfbane would pull Lepis to his chest, when she would ask to fly with him, when Tiercel caught them looking into each other’s eyes with a heavy sweetness he couldn’t understand?
He hopes the emotion that dances thickly through the air will convey the words he can’t say, the words that lie stuck in his throat. They are near to the top of the rim now, where the trail will open to solid ground that does not fall away mere feet from their hooves. The lake lies below, shrouded in shadows that seem darker than the rest. Tiercel opens his mouth to speak again, but there is a strange rattling sound in the space between them.
It sounds like bones are clattering into place, drawn together by an unseen hand. Tiercel’s eyes widen, and his chest tightens as pebbles and chunks of rock from the trail pull together to form the shape of a mountain lion. Twin pyres of red flames glow from its face, a pair of eyes that seem like portals to a world of hellfire. Islas. Islas. Islas. The creature seems drawn by Tiercel’s adoration, pulled from one world to the next by the sweet song of a lovesick, stubborn man who hadn’t realized what it meant to care until the moment it is too late.
“Islas, you need to run, now.” And his emotions drain from the world — a rosy-pink light extinguished by the overwhelming dangers that the darkness brings.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She has grown accustomed to the ever changing emotions that ebbed and flowed from the child she carried, to the point that she has begun to wonder what it would be like to be empty again. Would the echo of emotions remain, vibrating off the cage of her ribs and in the chambers of her heart, or would she again be drained, hollowed and cold? Some ancient instinct tells her that she won’t have to wait long to find out (she isn’t sure where that feeling had come from, either; she had never felt much in touch with this equine form she had been trapped inside, but she knows what she feels is not from the stars). The child seemed less active, but the emotions that radiated through her felt stronger, and she knew Tiercel could feel it, too.
Looking over her shoulder when he says her name it is not just the shape of it on his tongue that makes her chest suddenly feel tight, but rather the tone of his voice. It was something she would not have picked up on nearly a year ago, or at least, not something she would have been able to comprehend the full meaning of. But now she recognizes it; the weight of his words, the look on his face that she can just barely make out through the dark. And she smiles because she feels it too, and she is certain that it is real and not just an aftershock of emotion sent by him or their child.
“You mean a lot to me, too,” she has stopped now, waiting for him to come alongside her since the trail has widened here, closer to the top. She does not know how to put into words all of the strange things that he makes her think and feel. She does not know how to explain to him that she does not think she feels things just because of him anymore, but that she has learned to feel things for him. She wants to tell him, though, wants to at least try to decipher all of the emotions that have taken root inside of her chest.
The chance is ripped away at the clatter of rocks and stones, at the sudden heaviness that fills what had once been empty space. Shadow and rock pull together into a shape that is both feline while also something otherworldly, and though instinct and Tiercel both tell her to run, her legs suddenly feel as though they are made of stone. Her dark eyes search for his, but all they find is the eerie glow of the creature’s, and she knows that this thing is not from here, or from the stars, or from any galaxy she has ever known.
“I can’t leave you,” she manages to whisper around the fear that grips in her throat, and she tries, though it is futile, to call for the stars one last time. Just the smallest thread is all she needs, she thinks, just a single sliver of starlight to craft into a weapon, but all she grasps is empty darkness.
Tiercel has been waiting for this moment since the eclipse first began. He has wrapped their home in a thicket of peace to dissuade the predators he has heard in the darkness. He has starved himself from sleep in favor of keeping watch, eyes flickering between Islas’s sleeping form and the heavy shadows around them. He has pinned his ears and armed himself with weapons of emotion when rocks chip from their brothers and sound like monsters in the night.
During all this waiting, fear has been creeping in the back of his mind. Would he be able to protect them if the time came? Could his meager, mortal body and nonviolent emotions be enough to keep his family safe? After all, Tiercel’s body can heal itself, but he would not be able to push death away from Islas or their child. He has been plagued by this potential event since the darkness first descended, and now that it has finally arrived, he finds that the fear gives way to a powerful surge of adrenaline.
Islas’s voice is a whisper among the clattering of the rock-lion’s form, but Tiercel catches it. He clings to it, using those four words as a catalyst to fuel him. For a moment, the creature’s head swings toward her white-black form (and two souls would be much better than one, for whatever purpose it might have), and Tiercel does feel terror grip him then. But he yells a strangled noise that carries no words and charges the beast, feeling his muscles tighten beneath the instinctual force of a dance between fight and flight.
“But I’ll protect you with my life if it comes to it.”
Those words echo in his mind, on his lips, within his heart as he springs.
Tiercel feels everything happen in slow motion, and yet there still isn’t enough time. He is springing toward the rock-creature, ears pinned into that black-white-blue mane and a snarl darkening the sharp edges of his face. The lion’s glowing eyes face him again, and though Tiercel can’t sense emotion within the thing, he feels as if those twin flames will burn him alive.
He catches a flash of Islas’s face — a snapshot of her soft face that makes his heart splinter into a hundred pieces — just before the rock-lion springs to meet him, to shove him off-balance with a force much too powerful for a typical feline. And Tiercel is falling through the air to the left, slipping through space in slow-motion, and he feels his stomach drop.
The lion’s eyes glow brighter suddenly, expanding into balls of fire that seem to ignite the lake below. The pressing darkness bursts with color, and Tiercel realizes the lake is not exactly a lake anymore. It is swirling with colors — so many colors, but the most obvious one is a prominent shade of blood-red— and so brilliantly-bright it hurts his eyes. Though it seems liquified, the lake’s core swirls downward into the earth as a tornado turned upside-down.
It is all he notices — Islas’s ethereal face, the swollen eyes of the lion, a swirling portal of blood — before gravity pinwheels his body, and he blacks out. When Tiercel’s limp body reaches the lake and seems to be sucked into the tornado, the lion crumbles into a dead pile of rocks.
And Tiercel’s unconscious is an endless song of Islas’s voice (“I can’t leave you”) echoing in the realms of a place he might never get away from.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
When the strange beast swings his fire-filled eyes towards her she reflexively emits a brief but blinding flash of light, but in the wake of it the last of her starlight—that dim glow that still struggled to radiate from her—was entirely extinguished. There is no longer a single thing that appears otherworldly about her; her coat is dull, a pitch black that fades into a dim white. Her eyes have lost the look of galaxies, and maybe if it weren’t for the gravity of the situation keeping her here she would have simply dissolved into stardust.
She is nothing, and she feels herself become nothing, and the sensation is not as painful as she had thought it would be.
But her eyes are still on him, and on the thing that has wedged itself between them. Beneath the fear and adrenaline, there is a dull, gathering pain in her sides, one that she tries to ignore despite the panic that is beginning to press against her chest. When Tiercel leaps at the creature she stumbles backward, and the reality of how helpless she is finally settles over her.
She has never been helpless a day in her life.
She has always had starlight and the power of galaxies in her veins, and now she is left on a cliffside with nothing to wield, and too heavy with child to be of any use.
She will regret it all later. In the nights to follow she will replay the moment that he falls over the ledge, she will be haunted by the image of water morphing into something else entirely, something indescribable. She will see nothing but the final image of him disappearing into a world that she cannot (did not) follow, and she will wonder why she did nothing.
She knows she had screamed his name; she knows because it still feels etched into her throat, it echoes in her own ears, ringing off the walls of Loess. But she had not followed because the pain was now so persistent and severe that instinct and panic both took hold of her and she found herself stumbling, staggering, the remainder of the way to their cave.
It would surprise her, later, that she had any maternal instinct at all; that she had known their daughter was coming, and that she could not stay on that cliff ledge, even if it meant leaving behind the only one that had ever made her feel anything at all.
With sweat already flecked on her sides, she is forced to the hard floor, and she does not have the time to notice how empty their cave is without him there. She does not have time to notice that the peace he had spent so much time projecting had entirely faded, that the walls were simply cold walls, or that there was now no one to watch the outside darkness as she struggled to bring their daughter into the world.
It is by sheer will alone that she makes hardly a sound; an intense desperation to not attract any attention to herself, even though the pain was unlike anything she had ever felt before. With blood staining her white hind legs there is finally a sense of relief, and a few moments where she remains with her cheek pressed to the cool ground, sides still heaving.
The emptiness hits her harder than she had expected; not just the physical emptiness, but the emotions that she has been carrying too suddenly carved out of her, and the gaping hole of Tiercel being gone.
It is the feel of something stirring and moving that convinces her to sit up, and when her eyes settle on the small, pale filly, the surge of emotion is nearly overwhelming. It twists inside of her chest, some painful combination of anguish and love, because their daughter is perfect and she doesn’t even know when or if he will ever see her.
She cleans her face, runs her tongue along her neck and down her back, revealing the iridescent navy blue stripe. Every new discovery, every marking or familiar shape that she knows comes from him feels like someone digging a dagger further between her ribs, and she wonders if this is her punishment—for feeling nothing for so long, to now have to feel it all at once.
“Kamaria,” she whispers into the girl’s mane, having now pulled her close to her chest. She doesn’t stand yet but instead holds her in the dark, and wonders if they can stay here, just the two of them until the sun brings Tiercel back. That maybe by staying here the moment will be frozen in time, and she will be able to share it with him, too.
Islas
I know you never specifically order nonsensical word vomit, but sadly that is all I have in stock right now.
