"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
Nayl stirs. Her body aches and she's exhausted for some reason. She has been asleep for a while now, but she had been in the Jungle. So why is she in the meadow now?
Her autumn eyes blink slowly as she rises to her feet and shudders off the leaves that have scattered across her. A dream had taken her prisoner and she reflects back on it, confused. It seemed so real and yet so fictitious. Skeptical, Nayl looks to the gnarled oak tree standing above her. A steady stare is held, her mind cranking into gears that it hadn't before. The branch fidgets but she assumes it to be the wind as she releases any magical hold she may have had, doubting herself. It was just a dream, she tells herself, as she turns her head and casts her attention on the world as she knows it. There is no snow, no Grinch or Santa. There are trees as she has always known, and grass and horses.
A slow smile tugs at the corner of her mouth as she inches forward. The crowds don't frighten her. She isn't reclusive like those who stay coddled to the treeline. She embraces the idea of company and conversation. With the wind at her back Nayl drops her head to graze as she mulls over the odd dreams she has had as of late.
Mandan takes the trail through the trees that leads him away from the Falls and back to the meadow; he needs some space, some peace, something to disrupt the thoughts of impending fatherhood that he thinks he isn’t quite ready for. He can’t fail - Scalped, his own mother, saw to that and made sure that his upbringing was rich in instinct and lore, and he knows that he will pass the same things down to his foal(s). Still, his nerves are jangling and raw from the idea of fatherhood, of having found love so fast that his head still spins from the thought of it - which is why he needed to find refuge from the Falls, from his lover’s side as horrible as that may seem, but he too gentled around her, less himself and not at all wild and rambunctious as he ought to have been.
He passes relatively unscathed through the crush of horses; none of them catch his eye, most are engaged in conversation with others or doing whatever it is the horses of Beqanna do since few of them seem to rarely eat or drink, maybe they’re all a little more than magical, having no natural needs of grass or water like he does. The bay greedily snatches at mouthfuls of grass, tearing them up by their juicy spring roots and munching as he moves along, shouldering this horse aside and slipping between those two with no care to what spills from their mouths in the way of threats or admonishments. Mandan doesn’t care, they drown out his own thoughts and that is enough for the moment but he notices that more and more give him a wide berth as he moves through their midst - probably because of the horns on his head - they spiral upward in three sharp twists, black and shiny like onyx more than the keratin and bone that make up his addax horns.
His animal-black eyes land upon her, grazing like him, and he snatches one last mouthful of grass as he moves near her, “Hello.” is all that he manages, thinking it is quite a lame greeting but what the hell, why not?
