"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
11-23-2015, 12:00 AM (This post was last modified: 11-23-2015, 08:49 PM by Anhedonia.)
Snow. It sticks to what she can claim of a mane, soothes the raw skin that opens along the edges of her scars, her flesh an endless field of volcanic ash demarcated with the fault of her sores. The edges of her ears are crinkled, shrunken inwards, filtering the wind past them though it would not have mattered anyway. There was nothing to hear. The wind and her heartbeat, the wind and her heartbeat, the wind and her heartbeat. Her hooves drag regular, straight lines through the snow as she climbs. She is freezing. Eventually the pure, glittering colorness of her surroundings is marred by what she leaves behind, blood dripping over chest from a sore for the snow to drink.
She imagines it in half-section, a drop suspended in water, curling jellyfish-like, tributaries a mockery of her veins.
She doesn't look up until she's reached the top of the mountain. They fascinated her. Quiet. Unreachable. Ancient. 'I'll just take a look,' she said to herself. And yet there she was, frozen and smiling. Beqanna opened up beneath her, kingdoms and herds alive ant-like and milling at her feet. Their daily dramas, the lives she watched play out in front of her every day - miniaturized. And in the center of it all the Meadow - her Meadow.
She looks up from that very Meadow now, gaze locked on the peak of a mountain far off in Beqanna's distance. Wasn't it funny? In her mind she'd been to every corner of Beqanna, explored every desert and hidden waterfall. She knew the taste of the water cupped in the jungle's enormous leaves, had felt the shifting crunch of the tundra's snow under her hooves.
She'd never left the Meadow.
She liked to daydream.
Night was falling, the sun lowering in a final brilliant flare, violet-orange on the mountain's apex before dying in a dark-purple deepening. As soon as it was safely gone, Anhedonia left the safety of the forest surrounding the Meadow, shed her cover, and moved out to find something to eat.
Anhedonia
i've grown familiar with villains that live in my head
they beg me to write them so they'll never die when i'm dead
OOC: So I was basically too excited to post to wait until I finished her bio, but just a little background to explain her situation. Anhe has alopecia so she's mostly bald save for a few patches of coat and mane, both black. She has no tail save for the boney part. She's photosensitive so she mostly only comes out at night, and stalks people from the woods during the day. And last but not least, she has epitheliogenesis imperfecta which covered a good portion of her body and deformed her ears. She's about 5, so the patches are mostly scar tissue, but she does have some recurring sores that will spontaneously bleed.
Night comes crawling, and she crawls with it, gaunt and naked like the deciduous aspens shivering against the chill of new snow. She revels in the night - in the waning half light of dusk where gold, and orange-pink drain into colorlessness. She idles just within the confines of shadowy trees - waiting. Waiting until silver moonlight leaches away all that was left of the day. Then, she comes forth with eyes wide and haunting - with too quiet steps, and pitted ribs.
Ghoul is something other; a glimpse of the afterlife that no one seems to stay in. Yet, she is corporeal in her sea salt skin (enough to fill the lungs with ocean), and the way her breath rises against the cold. There is, at least some warmth to her. She casts a long black shadow across the ruined, trampled blanket of snow. She glances at the spindly figure, legs too long, and body to short, when she sees another peeling from the trees to join to night.
She pauses, because this creature is like none she has ever seen, scarred and bare. If she would have had a mother worth a damn, perhaps she would have been taught not to stare. But, Ghoul is Ghoul; feral, uncouth, detached. There are reasons she chooses the night, reasons she lingers in the Meadow.
Her eyes, wide and gleaming white around the edges, rove the girl from deformed ears, to bare tail bone. Ghoul inadvertently flicks her own tail, as if to make sure it hasn't fallen off. Then gives a satisfied Hmph to feel it still there.
Ghoul moves closer, more intrigued than she should be, and borderline concerned for the girl’s lack of hair against the cold of night.
“Hello.” she says, suddenly solidified into sinew and bone; suddenly real. She walks along with the (mostly) hairless mare, no longer staring. In fact, she isn't looking at her at all, but rather the cold mountain tops in the distance.
12-03-2015, 01:41 PM (This post was last modified: 12-03-2015, 01:41 PM by Anhedonia.)
She is alone, knees tucked up underneath her, hips swaying lightly to keep her upright on the gentle surface of an ocean that was, for once, not her own. Driftwood and seaweed a makeshift raft – hardly a place to call home, hardly a way to survive forever. There is nothing for miles. To her left, to her right, in front of and behind her, is nothing but flat gray skies stretching to meet the edge of the ocean’s horizon. She could swim for weeks and never reach land, and she gets the feeling that she is out there alone, that no ship would cross her path no matter how long she dwelled. The sun hid behind the flat slate of clouds. No birds rode the air. There were no waves. There was no breeze. It was just that quiet lapping against the loosely-bound refuse slowly but surely collapsing under her weight. She reached down, tentative at first, but dipping her delicate fingers under the water when she realized it was warm. Let me have all of you like you have all of me. The raft came apart but it didn’t matter – she was already slipping off it, a pale speck diving under the water that had so frightened her with its depth not long ago. The silence here is loud in contrast to the loneliness above the surface, the light flitting along in the bubbles of air that rose up from her mouth as she sank slowly, slowly, slowly. And here, even floating towards the dark, there is life. Her skin sings with the whispering touch of fish, an octopus wrapping an arm around her thigh as she passes, the rough scratch of some shark gliding by. An entire world where she’d never thought to look. The light disappears. She is sucked backwards, suddenly hurtling towards the sea floor, threatening to hit its sandy bottom and dissolve in to a million pieces to match its grains. But instead the sand is stars and she is floating weightless.
She doesn’t actually know anything of the ocean, beyond what she’s gathered from passing conversation of others. But she knows water, and she can imagine the sort of beasts that were named in a stranger’s conversation. It seemed, to her, an apt analogy for her life – except she was still on her raft, begging for the courage to slip beneath the waves.
Perhaps she dreams of the sea out of some memory from someone else, triggered by the salt-scent of the sea the stranger that appears carries with her. Anhedonia has never seen anything like her and is fascinated, though careful not to stare. Her mother had never been particularly attentive, and her Father had far too many children to pay attention to every single one – especially one like her – but she’d learned manners through observation. If she had noticed the mare staring at her, she wouldn’t have minded.
“Hello,” she answers as if the stranger’s sudden appearance wasn’t something to comment on. Anhedonia follows the other mare’s gaze, looking up at the mountain piercing the navy blue blanket of the sky. “Have you ever been up there?” she asks, wistful, unaware that such a journey would be nearly impossible. Her lungs would collapse before she reached the top, the air too thin to support her.
Anhedonia
i've grown familiar with villains that live in my head
they beg me to write them so they'll never die when i'm dead
Her world is the ocean. She is slowly bobbing along with waterlogged lungs, and a strange weightlessness. The stars above them glisten like fragmented moonbeams caught within unsettled waves. Ghoul floats along beside the mare, snow pluming up from her steps like the sand from the ocean floor. The distant mountain is like the edge of a continent, plummeting down into the depths, too far away for them to reach. There is a longing in her eyes as she gazes upon it, the way a hungry shark yearns for meat after having traveled through every abyss to get here.
Anhedonia speaks, meek, and gentle. Ghoul is lured back to consciousness, like a small morsel into the mouth of the angler fish.
“No.” She says, and there is a sadness as she stops to blink at the mountain peak. She sighs, a mass of warm fog curling up into the cold. “I mean, I don’t remember.” She says, her voice ragged, and melodic at once. “I don’t remember anything, but here.” Her face furrows, and she looks to the snow.
She has seen magic, she has seen shadowy mystics, she has met dark gods. She had birthed a child somewhere in the shadows of the trees, but that had been years ago. Akhlys was gone now, or, at least, gone from her mother.
Night comes crawling, and she crawls with it, gaunt and naked like the deciduous aspens shivering against the chill of new snow. She revels in the night - in the waning half light of dusk where gold, and orange-pink drain into colorlessness. She idles just within the confines of shadowy trees - waiting. Waiting until silver moonlight leaches away all that was left of the day. Then, she comes forth with eyes wide and haunting - with too quiet steps, and pitted ribs.