"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
He had hoped that he would open his eyes to the dawn streaking across the sky and the light would chase away the darkness of that vivid nightmare, that the image of his mother dissolving into insects and the chorus of his family’s voices assaulting him would fade away with night.
He had hoped he would blink the sleep from his eyes and he would be in the forests of Taiga and that maybe in the coming days he would forget following his family desperately into the gaping mouth of that wretched beast – that just like all dreams, even awful ones, it would eventually fade away.
Instead, he was returned, and he was changed.
In some twisted way he had gotten his wish. The boy that had once been so plain, and so starkly different from the rest of his family was now born of the very shadows he had wished that he could control. Awakening from that nightmare he had shed his blue roan coat in favor of the cool, impersonal shadows, not so completely different from his father.
He is not made of the same shadows as his family, though.
He is something entirely different, and he is so different in so many ways that he cannot yet comprehend it.
He just knows that he is hungry, hungry for something that nothing tangible can sate. His chest and his gut feel empty, and he doesn’t what it will take to fill either of them.
Except there’s a part of him – something so small in the back of his mind, something buried in the far corners of his soul – that knows exactly what he needs, and it terrifies him. He craves things that he should not, he longs for things that aren’t real.
He doesn’t go back to Taiga, though he desperately wants to. He wants to make sure his family is okay, he wants to make sure that maybe it wasn’t all entirely real. But he is also afraid; afraid that maybe some of it was. That maybe they are alive but they hate him, or maybe they are dead and he is entirely alone.
And so he isolates himself, but not completely.
He should have gone further into the forest, he knows. Instead he lingers where the light still strains through the trees, where it sometimes cuts right through the shadows that he is made of. And from the dark he watches them, red eyes peering at them, and somewhere lost in the shifting shadows of his face, there is a sorrow that he is afraid he will never shed.
Though she was born in the meadow, she finds she likes the forest best.
Because she can spring through the undergrowth and the birds sing there and sometimes she catches sight of the herd of deer that calls the forest home. And, though it pains her when they flee from her, they cannot fault them for their nature. Even with the soft, velvet antlers that have erupted from her head and the way each of her hooves split in two and she is more their size than she is the size of a horse. Still, she frightens them and she can never keep up when they hurl themselves through the forest. Because she is so much like them but she will never be one of them.
But she loves them all the same.
It delights her just to know that they are there.
It is because of this that she spends most of her time here. There is some small part of her that hopes against hope that one day they will see that she is like them. More like them sometimes than she is like the horses, she thinks.
She is growing steadily bigger. More mature. Still only a yearling but so much older now than she has ever been before. She doesn’t know where her mother and father have gone, but she thinks it’s okay. Because she’s old enough to be on her own and she’ll probably find them again someday. She has no reason to, but she believes that all things turn out as they should in the end.
The limbs are still coltish, but they are strong. They carry her easy through the forest. Skittering and dancing and leaping. Grinning all the while.
Until she comes upon a figure. And the sight of him arrests all of the laughter bubbling in her throat. Because he is made of shadow, darkness forced into the shape of a horse, and the eyes are an electric red. There is a flurry of discomfort at the very center of her but it does not deter her. Because she does not yet know how to be afraid.
So she grins sweetly as she ventures closer, her head tilted funnily. “Are you all right?” she asks, the voice just as velvet as her antlers. “You look so sad,” she observes with a frown, drifting closer still, “did you lose someone?”
careful, child, light the fuse and get away 'cause happiness throws a shower of sparks
She’s small; even smaller than his little sisters had been at her age, and somewhere inside the cloak of shadow his heart twinges. He could see that she had been laughing. That she was all light and smiles, until her sweet eyes landed on him. He wonders if that is the reaction he will forever evoke; that he will simply drain the lightness and the joy from those that meet him.
It shouldn’t matter, he reasons. It’s not like he had anyone to lose.
It doesn’t matter that from here on out he will never find someone to keep.
“Do I look sad?” His voice feels different, like wisps of shadows breathing from his tongue, and this is the first time he has spoken since he returned from that wretched place. He wonders if it will always be like this, or if someday he will get used to the smoke-like rasp of it. He doesn’t step towards her, but instead just watches her from a distance, ignoring the gnawing hunger in his gut. She doesn’t have what he needs, and he finds himself hoping that an innocent soul like hers never does. “I don’t think I’m sad. I don’t think I’m anything at all.”
The shadows of his lips pull into something similar to a smile, and though there is no warmth to the movement, he feels like maybe his smile had never had it to begin with. “My name is Torryn. What’s yours?”
It’s okay, she thinks, because even if he’s sad she can be happy enough for both of them.
Even if he’s sad, she’ll find some way to make him smile.
And it is more than youth that allows her to believe this. It is some insufferable naivety, too. And, while she will grow out of her youth, she will likely never grow out of this.
She nods solemnly in response to his question. But she recognizes his tone as the kind of tone adults use to appease children, which makes her deer’s heart spasm and clench. Because she is small, certainly, but she doesn’t feel like a child. Still, she smiles. And he smiles, too, or tries to. It’s hard to tell when he’s all made of shadow and smoke and those red, red eyes.
She tilts her funny little head at a funny little angle, narrows her eyes studiously. Maybe if she gets close enough she can bump him, just to see if he’s solid, because he looks like he might dissolve and she thinks that would make her sad, too.
He shares his name and she brightens considerably, positively beaming when she echoes his name back to him. “Torryn!” she says, perhaps too loud, too enthusiastic, too unhinged. Stamps her little cloven feet and lets loose a shrill laugh. “My name is Dear!”
She turns in one tight circle before coming to rest again, a bit nearer to him now. She reaches for him, but stops just short of touching him. “You have to be something,” she says, as if she is any authority on the subject, “don’t you?”
DEAR
CAREFUL, CHILD, LIGHT THE FUSE AND GET AWAY
BECAUSE HAPPINESS THROWS A SHOWER OF SPARKS
There was a time where the way she so exuberantly repeats his name would have made him laugh. She reminds him so much of his sisters, or even Astana. He does not understand why, especially now, that bright things seem to be drawn to him, and the situation has him torn. Selfishly, he enjoys this sliver of light, since his world has become so completely dark. But he is afraid, too, that his darkness might swallow her whole. He is afraid that this newly birthed monster will want to twist her happiness into sorrow, the same as was done to him. He is afraid that if he keeps her long enough she will become marred and broken, because he is so sure that he is destined to destroy everything, now.
“Dear,” he repeats in that shadow-murmur way of his, and he decides to not leave, not yet. “It suits you,” because she looks so much like the deer he used to see in the forest of Taiga, though not nearly as timid and flighty. He almost wishes she were; thinks that someday someone will take advantage of her sweet heart and her trusting nature, and he only hopes that it’s not him. Can only hope that he does morph entirely into something he no longer recognizes.
“I don’t know,” he says, and then continues grimly. “I think I am better off being nothing at all, for now.” Because there is something far worse than sadness threatening to consume him. He feels it in the pit of his gut, something just as dark yet far more tangible than the shadows he has become. Being empty seemed better than being full of something he could not control.
He sees her reach for him, and somewhere beneath the layers of shadow his heart clenches in anticipation. Afraid that she will pull back when she finds he is hardly solid, that he is some alien thing that likely should not exist. But she stops short, and he finds that that doesn’t make him feel any better. “I don’t feel like much of anything physically, either,” he tells her, swinging his head in a vague gesture at all the swirling tendrils of dark that he is made of.
