"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
The heart inside that sable breast beats ever onward in outright refusal of death. No pale claw will silence that drum-like tune for some time yet. Not so there long as there exists a lover to be loved, a romance to be had, and sweaty speechless trysts to tangle with.
Isn’t that why she feels resurrected now? Not a true resurrection from a grave that is more flowerbed and dirt than a corpse’s house, but the kind that tickles the cobwebs in her ears and scratches at the worn velvet of her neck. Time wears on her though: from the smattering of gray on her muzzle to the heavy wind-knots that pull on her mane.
Despite this, she is the same beautiful creature she has always been. Mud is slathered up to her knees and burrs hold court in her tail. She looks like some forgotten queen of the wilderness as she parts the bracken with a push of her plump well-loved breast.
It is the kind of breast that lovers and babes alike have laid their heads against. The kind that still begs for the soft ticklish touch of lips there. Even the slope of her back with its new sag still invites heads to sit there in rest. She has lost count of the lovers that dozed and dreamed on her black back as their babes grew in her belly.
But she has never forgotten the mare - pale as moonlight, fierce as a lion and as gentle as a mouse. Their histories are tangled together in places throughout time. Here, a touch of their lips to the other’s mouth. There, a brush of shoulder against shoulder and somewhere, the cry of birds above their bent heads.
She sighs, as she thinks of it - of her - now, with fondest remembrance. Her step is soft in the grass as her nose seeks answers from the stuffy air. Sickness colors it and her nose wrinkles distastefully in response until she finds the one scent she knows she’ll always follow - her’s.
Boheme raises her head up sharp and lets go of such a whinny it might very well shake the foundations of the heavens above. There is such joy in the braying note as she rubs her face against that milky skin she knows and loves so well.
11-19-2018, 12:08 AM (This post was last modified: 11-19-2018, 12:09 AM by Ryatah.)
“What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end."
There is no one left that has known her since the beginning — her true beginning. Before Beqanna, before the Valley and the Dale. Before Skellig, and her countless other loves and affairs. She feels as though she has lived a hundred lives, and the Dimension had been the first chapter. With Dhumin gone, it was a chapter she considered closed.
It only took the faintest scent of someone so sweet and familiar to send her back.
”Boheme?” She speaks her name on a whisper, mostly to herself. The syllables themselves remind her of humid jungles, of endless days and nights when they could seek comfort in only each other, because they were all that they trusted in that twisted land. It seemed impossible, it has been years since she last saw — literally and figuratively — her beautiful best friend. With lifted head and arched neck she waits, her pale body trembling from fever and cold. She is imagining things; she must be. The illness that has taken over her small frame had to have been confusing her other senses that she so strongly relied on.
But the call brings a brilliant smile to her face, and before she can even take a step forward, there is a warm body pressing sweetly against hers. She responds by leaning into her, draping a muzzle over her neck so that she can pull her into an embrace. ”My beautiful Boheme,” she murmurs into her black skin, letting her lips caress against her satin flesh. ”You shouldn’t be here. Beqanna isn’t safe right now.” The words weaken in her throat, triggering a cough that rises from the bottom of her lungs, flecks of blood staining her white lips. She steps away, forcing the cough to subside so that she may manage to add wearily, ”I don’t want to get you sick.”
But Ryatah has always been a little selfish, and it was so hard to have her so close but to feel so guilty about touching her.
The Dimension; it remains a special time in her life that saw her as both earnest and innocent. That innocence was shed like a snakeskin and left behind. She’d blossomed beneath the parrot-chatter and monkey-talk, becoming pliant and passionate through their guidance and kisses. Never had being a kept woman been so grand in her life, full and lush as the tropical jungle itself but not without her mysteries too.
Plus, there had been the pale mare. More gray then, but paler now. Having gone from raincloud-dark to stark as bone. Her rich plum eyes drank it all in, even the beautiful blank sockets that once held eyes that had seen so much. Boheme could never resist her, perhaps because of the bond they shared that began in the Dimension and outlasted it and others. Couldn’t resist finding her, begging for a taste of that pale skin that had always complimented her much darker pelt - the kind that is saturated and drips night.
Her ears quiver at the question, her mouth an answering smile that’ll go unseen but maybe it’ll be heard in the laughter that lilts from her mouth. She wants to cry out and say ‘yes it is I!’ But the sad sick look of her best friend has her pressing her own self close instead to give the last shreds of warmth and life that she has. It is easy to let herself be pulled into that familiar embrace; the kind she’s missed above all else.
“Oh my friend!” she coos, beneath the caresses and murmurations of her name that land against her ears like prayers. She feels Ryatah pull away at the moment the cough seizes hold of her slight frame, and a frown paints itself prettily on her lips. Boheme sees the blood speck and spatter those pale lips and decides that she doesn’t care. She’d risk it all to just be there and makes up her mind to stay.
“I’ll take my chances,” she affirms with a step closer than another. Her lips touch Ryatah’s as she begins to rub at the infected blood, mixing her own spittle into the pale fur to clean up the signs of sickness from her friend’s beautiful timeless face. “Besides, we’ve seen just as worse in the Dimension.” she adds dryly, remembering countless times that she’d clean battle-wounds or groom the next stallion awaiting her attentions. It was how they passed the time, and she did not mind sickness if it meant more time with Ryatah.
“What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end."
There were so few that she could consider a true friend anymore. Her lovers had a way of coming and going — or perhaps she was the one that came and went, but regardless, she was accustomed to solitude being the one thing she could count on. Boheme was one of the few that she always found her way back to. There was something so entirely pure and unadulterated about a friendship that came with no expectations, no animosity over the length of time that stretched between meetings. They fell back into each other as though they had never spent a day apart.
She isn’t surprised when Boheme doesn’t listen — she wouldn’t have either. She does not shy away at the feel of her lips against hers, and she does not ignore the way it makes her pulse accelerate, a slow smile lifting at the edge of them as the blood is slowly cleansed away. ”You have always been too kind for your own good.”
With her small white form resting against her friend’s, her teeth idly combing through her mane and occasionally brushing her lips along her neck, she sighs — a sound that rattled in her chest and throat, the sickness firmly rooted into her by now. ”Do you ever miss the Dimension?” The words are thoughtful, almost whimsical, as she lays the flat of her bone-white cheek against Boheme’s ebony neck. ”It was a lifetime ago, and yet I still think about it. Not just Amazonhollow, but of Gullshore, too. ” There is something nostalgic in the way that she says it, her mind’s eye still able to recall the coastline she had adored so much. The same coastline she had met Dhumin on, an event that had been the catalyst that sent her entire life spinning beyond her control — not necessarily in a negative way, however. Beqanna’s shores were not the same, and they never had been, no matter how hard she had tried to convince herself otherwise upon first arriving here.
There were nights that she still dreamt of her first home, when she could still hear the cries of the gulls in her sleep, or thought she felt the humidity of the jungle, and half expected to open her eyes — eyes that only existed in her dreams now, and in that place between almost awake and still asleep, before her mind can grasp reality — and see that familiar albino face that she had awoken to for so many years.
Over a hundred years and two lifetimes ago, and her dreams still haven’t changed.
