Talk some sense to me; Elektrum/any.

[Tarnished]

He doesn’t want to be here, but where to go?

The sea doesn’t seem big enough, he can swim to the bottom and back up again; he can discover all of its secrets, if he so chooses, and learn the name of each fish and creature that calls its depths home. The sky can only carry him so far—space, space means darkness and cold. It’s vast and empty, possibly endless; but there are no voices there, no warmth; not a single happy place to be found. He could sail off to the sun and burn up—that would surely cure his boredom, but he doesn’t want to die; it’s not a natural thing to want to die. He experienced that feeling, once.

Never again.

But then.

Maybe it isn’t boredom.

Maybe he’s lonely.

He has friends, sort of, sure; but they’re only a means to pass the time.

That’s all they have ever been.

There’s women, he can have his fair share of those—but there’s no reward in it, it’s not like coming home and having your whole day made at ‘hello.’ It’s not like curling up under the moon and counting the stars. It’s not soft kisses and tight hugs, or having them memorize and mention your favorite things simply because they love them—simply because it reminds them of you. He understands that now. He knows what made Quark ache and Nocturnal run; he knows why Else chose Caius, he knows what Dominion had with her family.

He knows.

It doesn’t hurt, it just makes him wonder—makes him feel as vast and empty as space.

--

Spring hasn’t quite taken hold yet; no children, no flowers, just bare trees and frost; gray cloudy days and bitter cold nights. He cannot sleep, sleep promises nightmares filled with scalpels and blood and the crunching of bones; so he walks, he leaves his little daughter safe in her den and checks the perimeter like a good soldier. His breath billows up like puffs of smoke, his footsteps are marked by soft crunches—branches rattle, a couple of deer scramble ahead, but besides that there doesn’t seem to be a sound for miles. Tarnished never stops to wonder why; that’s just how it is tonight, that’s just how it’s supposed to be. And he doesn’t mind.

It’s better than screaming.


[It's... bad.]

[sinew]

She remembers things she should not be able to remember: the plains, the thunder of hooves - buffalo and horse, strange upright beasts that laid their hands upon the necks of horses like her, their skins trembling in reaction to the touch, the way lightning crackled across the sky and storms ate up the distance. Sinew wakes; she knows that she has been dreaming again - dreams every day since she slid from the womb. Maybe she is too young to dream like this, of a time before that was not her time but her dam’s, but the dreams are there - in blood, in her marrow, in the very sinew of her that holds her bones and fur together. She knows that the things in her dreams do exist, or did once, just like she knows that she was not really there - an observer from a distant future, displaced outside of time, is this then what her immortality should feel like? Even as a foal barely days’ old, she is comfortable in her skin and does not stumble around like the rest of them do on their long legs. She has slipped her mother’s grasp and strayed off (but Scalped lurks ever near, hot on the trail as any mother ought to be); these explorations thrill her in a way that her callow mind cannot explain, perhaps it is the allure of danger that flavors her tongue, her own bravado false in the puffed out baby-chest and the way her eyes shine, scintillant and strange in their blackberry gloss - she knows, oh she knows! Sinew is far too new to have drunk from the cup of immortality, and it is a heady elixir upon which she is drunk with the knowledge that death is far from her, and she is no more unfeeling towards it then it is to her. She revels in her long legs, her lank thin body that is all ribs and hips, the milk on her breath and the way her lips twitch in smiles that roll out like hills before her, useless disruptions to the flat certain earth of her being. Sinew doesn’t question why the night is absent of the usual noise that should fill it; she accepts it for what it is - unnatural but somehow not, somehow it was more natural for the night to sing with silence then anything else. It is in the night that she meets him, their paths having somehow crossed - maybe meant to be, and maybe not, but it happens, and the tiny overo looks up at the stallion, curious and not in the least bit afraid like she should be. “You,” she mutters, sounding vaguely imperious like a warrior princess though we both know that Sinew will never do battle.

[Tarnished]

His mother didn’t think him capable of living on his own, so she carelessly forced her memories inside his head; it made him cold—but it made him strong and though he grew up far quicker than he should have, he has managed to outlive them all. Even her. Rather than grow old, or sick, immortality has been kind enough to keep him relatively young and fit. Tall with dense bones and thick with muscle, Tarnished is permanently frozen in his prime—as he should be; the would-be soldier, the almost-King, the cult member, the murderer, the rapist.

“You.”

The girl should be afraid, but she isn’t.

Tarnished lowers his golden eyes to the little chestnut-and-white creature, pausing mid-step; she’s brave, he supposes, for one so small. He was brave once, too. It had gotten him into a lot of trouble. Smiling, rather than bend down, the shapeshifter stretches his neck; it twists like a vine and his head slowly spins like a large, eager bud down to her level until they are eye to eye. Black creeps across the gold of his eyes like tiny eclipses, eats up the pupil until it’s no longer distinguishable from the rest; she should be afraid, but she isn’t.

He can gobble her up, make her disappear and her parents would never know.

Doesn’t she understand that?

Probably not.

There’s another breath of smoke and then, with that same smile and that same mouth full of sharp teeth and a forked tongue, he echoes back: “You.” His neck winds back up, then; up and up until his eyes are all clear and he’s back to normal—well, as normal as he can be, at least. He hopes he’s frightened her, chased her back off to her mother where she belongs (he can smell the milk on her breath, look at her and know she’s well cared for), but all too often such isn’t the case. Children are often too brave for their own good.

It makes him worry about his own.

[Elektrum]

 

“Me,” he says, crookedly, because his lips have fallen aslant with a grin not fit for the solemn sounds of this day. And then he steps between their faces, so the skin of his shoulders will meet one’s nose, and the other’s cheek – and then, he takes them.

This time he moves forward.
This time lightning cracks the sky into halves, again and again, and the years are shed away from them like old skin cells.

Because he has been feeling particularly self-loathing today.

He has been winding the clock more than he ought to in the effort to shake her. Her, with her spindly black legs and porcupine mane. Her, with her effortless family, bound together with a stronger glue than his own had been. Maybe it’s that she reminds him of Perse. Maybe it’s that she reminds him of all of the things that choices not his own have made him into, but something brings him back to her.

"Atlantia," he called her.
Atlantia.

So it is no surprise that he was lingering on the edge of the forest searching for distractions with his lips drawn in tight lines like the quiet lines of ECGs. And it is no surprise that he has chosen the nearest two to save him from the burden of everything.

And when they stop the spring that they will land in will be glowing. Here, the sky is lilac like the petals of wild waterleaf, and it melts into a haze of blush where wisps of feather-white clouds strain out all of the colour and pour them like paints into the rippled reflections of a glassy lake that feels more like a mirror.

And he won’t know it, but the girl will never exist in a more beautiful timeline than the one he has forged today. Here, she exists without hurt or betrayal. Here, she exists raised by a family that will never be his – and his crooked grin falls to the dirt even though he doesn’t mean to be bitter.

Because here her bones are poems, and here the marrow in them sounds like melodies, and when she blinks the water from her dark eyelashes they will fall away from her like pearls even though they can’t be. She is grown now, different than the last time, waste deep and drawing ripples in the water that echo out beneath the tips of her glass wings. Behind her, a mountain peak reaches out into the sky and threatens to pull it into everything else – until snow and rock and water and girl are one thing.

And when she sees them with peace in her eyes and a start in her breast, and she says, hastily, “How long have you been watching me?”

Elektrum will forget both of his companions, and think: forever.

elektrum

i am and always will be the optimist

(TLDR; Elektrum takes Sinew and Nish on an adventure to meet a fully grown Atlantia in utopian timeline.)

[sinew]

She thinks she could stop time and stay a foal forever; Sinew chooses not to though, even if the idea holds a great amount of appeal for mischief-making. She is Scalped’s daughter and she is fearless, the budding immortality in her veins does not help this at all. It gives her a sense of strange entitlement and despite the inherent knowledge that harm can still come to her, she is not afraid of any of them - she remembers that there are worse things than their magics and their means. She has dreamt of bellies slit open and steaming, their entrails a warm nest and their livers a lifesaving meal; she has dreamt of throats gaping open like shocked lips, bled not of words but of their life’s source for nothing other than ritual use; and she has dreamt of the horrors forced upon them not by each other but by the straight-up beasts that know how to tame them (Sinew’s mind and memories are older than her mother’s, and there is a strange boar-tusked horse in them that haunts her). The tiny overo should be afraid, but somehow, she isn’t. Sinew stares as his head slithers down to her level and she meets him eye to eye; they go from gold to black, swallowed up by the space in between the stars, cold and dead, and she should be afraid but she isn’t. Her bravery is foolish but admirable, but his forked tongue snaking between his lips and his smoking breath do not scare her - they fascinate her! His ploy to frighten her only makes her laugh, pleased at his response more than anything else and she was about to ask him to do it again, remembering how the shadows crept across the earth towards them, the land going dark like his eyes did and she wants to see that again, but they are not alone any more. Something - no, someone - else crept out of the dark towards them. Her nose or her cheek ends up against his knee; he is a force to be reckoned with, caught between them and she thinks for a moment that she could leave all this - not because of fear, but because it is too strange until the lightning cracks across the back of the sky and blinds her eyes. Time sloughs off of them like old dead skin; they have years to lose and she has only days before they are elsewhere, in a time beyond time that any of them has known or may ever know. The trip is dizzying and she feels like the world cannot stop spinning out of control; she experiences an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach, hollowed out and strangely sick and even here, her legs are as wobbly as they had been the first time she tried to stand only days’ ago. There is a mare in a lake, black and beautiful; a mountain rises behind her into a sky purpled and pink rather than blue, like dusk maybe, but Sinew honestly doesn’t know. Just like she doesn’t know how they have come to be here and her foal-face pulls up into a frown as the threads of time and magic and their manipulation teases at her old-new mind. She cannot help the instinctual snort that leaves her, the apparent distrust of this - she’s not pierced by such beauty as the stallions might be, though she watches her first companion more closely than the odd fellow that has cast them both into this, unwilling stones that skip across the lake of his being, forgotten and she turns to her first companion - the one of smoking breath and gold-gone eyes and asks of him, “Who is she?” when she should be asking who he is and what has he done to us?