hello from the other side - anyone

[Djinni]

Beneath her feet, the first blades of spring grass are starting to push themselves through the mud. She pauses now and then to take a mouthful of the more plentiful ones, but she is not truly hungry, only bored. The trip form the Meadow to the Chamber is longer than she had expected, though much of her time had been spent staring down at the wide plains of Beqanna from the mountains. It all seems so small from up here, she thinks; everyone down there is so very tiny.

But eventually she turns away and her brown-eyed gaze lingers on the burnt black trunks of leafless pines, the remnants of the forests that her mother had told her about as a child. There are young tree, growing between the ashes of their parents, but it will be decades before the kingdom resembles that of the one in her childhood stories.

Closing her eyes, the grullo mare breathes in the smell of rain and soil, and decides that yes – this does seems like a good place. She can picture her mother, young and brown as a doe, leaping over fallen logs with her sister as their mother (Djinni’s grandmother) looked on. She had never met her grandmother, but Djinni feels close to her here, and unconsciously she shifts her appearance until a reincarnation of the Bloody Shouldered queen stands in the forests of the Chamber.

Djinni is smaller, now – barely more than a pony – and her rich dusky coat has faded to a rosy grey with white tobiano patches. She’s not sure of the pattern and so they are not exactly alike, but she knows the bloodmarked bay shoulders well, and wears them proudly on either side. She smiles, pleased with herself, and takes a few more steps forward (accompanied by the soft clink of her bracelets), crossing over the boarder of the Chamber in the process.

current form: greyed bay tobiano, lightly-built mare, blood marks on both shoulders, 15hh

[Set]

His world has gone stagnant. That’s the trouble, you see, with immortality. You live on and on, one day folding into the other, your body never changing – stuck, as the world changes around you. Family, friends, lovers fade into gray and dusty memories, faces blending together until your past is someone else’s and you are lost among the faces. A deep breath fills his rib cage and his throat shudders with the exhale. Nera, Nazul, Tatter, Frostreaver, Chain … Starlace. Gone, images on the fickle breeze of time. Nostrils pinch tightly closed in a brief display of annoyance, the only sign that he’s noticed the light rain that has begun to fall. He lies curled against the boulder on the shoreline; the rock he always returns to, shadowed by the weeping willow whose branches hang low, just brushing the water’s surface. The dirt is cool beneath him, scarred shoulders twitching with battles gone past as he drifts into sleep. Set awakens with a start at the loud caw, mismatched lids snapping open to reveal deep gold irises, a sinking feeling in his gut. He looks up to find a raven perched atop the somber grey rock, having brought some half-torn squirrel to sup on only to find a piebald stallion resting against his favored dining perch. It hops toward the stallion, head tilted in that curious manner of his kind, squawking it's annoyance. Set watches it for a moment, his expression blank, before smiling vaguely and setting fire to the obnoxious little vermin. White hot it burns, managing to choke out one final, strangled sound before there is nothing but ash left. Unperturbed, Set rises to his feet. The remains of the squirrel still lies atop the boulder, it’s tail and hindquarters the only pieces left intact, viscera a hopeless, tangled mess. Briefly he inspects it before turning away, jaw stretched wide in yawn turned smile as the half-squirrel suddenly leaps to life, scampering off into the woods, intestines hopping and skipping behind the now two-legged creature. Momentary distraction gone, he cannot shake this strange feeling. He wades into the water, welcoming the chill as he lowers his head to drink. Perhaps it was time to do something about his life’s stagnancy. Decades have come and gone since he was the crowned prince of the Chamber, heir to his mother’s throne. The Alliance is but a distance memory of battles hard fought and won. What does he have to show for the years in between? Sensing movement in the distance, he raises his head, water dripping from his chin. One ear twists forward, the other back, sentries switching positions at will as he narrows in on this second source of disturbance. His soul drops, his tattered heart stops. It cannot be. His magic is forgotten in the thrill of the moment as the dead traverses the distance between the two. A chill tickle-taps down his spine, rendering him motionless, speechless. It simply cannot be. How many times had he explored the depths of the underworld, forcing his son to return time and again to search the deepest recesses of the afterlife? All his searching had been for naught, his mother lost to the past forever … Yet here she walks, alive and well, her footsteps echoing the sharp staccato of his thundering heart. It cannot be … “Mother?” he croaks, blinking wildly against the nearly overwhelming emotions. “Mother,” he whispers, unaware of long limbs with a mind of their own, the water that parts before him as he delves deeper, the earth that drops away beneath his feet. Powerful strokes take him across the center of the lake, striped hooves finding the silty mud beneath him once again. Even as he emerges from the depths, he does not take his eyes off of her, fearful that she will disappear before he can reach her. It simply cannot be … and the soft clinking of bracelets, the glint of gold from her ears tells him indeed, it is not.   It is the cruelest joke, this creature who mocks his sorrow. A low, wailing sound fills his ears, the ominous rumble of an avalanche and it is several seconds before he realizes it is him. It is not Starlace who wanders amongst the burnt and blackened pines – a fake, an imposter. Trembling, he takes a step forward, now two. Tears track down his face, running over high cheekbones to fall to the earth below, tears of anger, tears of loss. The ground beneath him begins to tremble in empathy, spreading out across the clearing like a sickness. The stalwart pines lash against one another in a wild display of his angst, the earth falling away in a wide circle to trap her there, with him. “You had not right,” he seethes in a whisper of pain and anger. Despite the chaos his pain has brought to the once-quiet clearing, she will hear him, and he her … skin to bone, steel to rust

[Djinni]

There is a lake in the distance; Djinni can see it reflecting bright sunlight through the burnt branches of the forest. Ducking her head to see better, she notices a bright fire at the edge of the lake, but she is too used to Beqanna (and to stranger places than this one) to think anything of it. She continues forward and each press of her hoof to the ground causes a fresh waft of ash and pine to fill her nostrils. The sunlight that reaches through the bare canopy is warm on her dappled back, and the distant caw of ravens reminds her of the gulls beside the shore.

Djinni likes it here, she decides, even if she’s not seen anything of the residents of the kingdom.

She is too far to see the water’s unnatural parting, so the ground that shakes beneath her feet is her first warning that she is in danger. The grey mare freezes immediately, her nostrils flaring and ears and and eyes searching for whatever is coming. The sound is not coming from the mountains she has just descended, but rather from the stone beneath her feet. She is grateful that she had reacted by becoming statuesque when the earth falls away around her, pinning her into a circle with a black and white stallion that is clearly the source of the magic.

She is frightened, and in her fear shifts unconsciously: first a mirror image of the stallion in front her, then back to the grey bay, and then finally returning to her own grullo skin and shape. Her brown eyes are wide and flashing white, but she bites down on the fear in her throat before it emerges as a scream.

She is afraid, but she is not a child.

He is a border guard, she assumes, irate that she had managed to make it past the edges of the kingdom without being accosted. It never occurs to her that the source of his anger is anything else, let alone that he is reacting to the shape she had been wearing seconds ago. His tone though? That throws her off, causes her to bite back the careless quip about borders being meaningless things.

As she puzzles through his voice (it takes only seconds) her calm returns and she fades back into the smaller greyed tobiano again, her attention clearly elsewhere. The sound of rumbling earth makes it hard to think, but she assumes this stallion will keep himself safe, and she is at least not going to plummet into the earth without some sort of warning. “My mother lived here,” she finally says, knowing that such an excuse means little when kingdoms are as protective of their secrets as they are. “And my grandmother,” she doesn’t pause, but gestures to herself as she speaks, as though demonstrating this shape that she wears does not belong to her but not thinking to apologize, “I only came to see the Chamber.”

[ooc: i have missed posting with you!!!]