"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
They reach the invisible barrier between Taiga and Nerine in silence, and in the silence, Beryl has lost herself in thought. She thinks on the burning question that still lingers between them of why she claimed to be from Nerine in the field when both mares knew it wasn't true - and yet, it wasn't quite a lie, either. It was... misleading, at worst. And she thinks on how the trek from the field to Nerine may actually be the most time she has spent on travel in... Well, in ever. There is a novelty to their journey that has kept her occupied, searching the shadows between each mountain and each redwood - and oh, the shadows in Taiga are thick and old and she is eager to hears the stories they will tell her.
Another day, she promises them when they reach for her, I will come. At least one set of yellow eyes seemed to look through her without care for her promise and she took note of them, her head tilting to the left, her brow creasing, but she does not speak her concerns to Eurwen. She hurries after the rose and gold and white mare, only casting a single glance back. The strange yellow eyes that pierced through her were already gone, blinked away into the kingswood.
Another day, she tells herself.
Bit by bit the canopy of the redwood realm breaks to pieces, the trees smaller, thinner, then suddenly they fall away completely and leave the pair exposed beneath bright sun and rolling winds. The smell of the north is almost familiar and she feels a familiar nervousness roll over in her belly, and she feels like leaping coltishly as she did so, so long ago in the Meadow before the Shadows kidnapped her away from her patchwork dam. The years have removed the detailed edges from her mother's face and a sudden sadness drapes over her shoulders like a cloak when it strikes her that not once in the year and a half that she'd roamed the common lands did she ever peer around a tree trunk and wonder to if the tobiano mare might have been there. She never once looked into the Meadow for that singular pattern, and regret spreads bitterly on her tongue.
She was so caught up in what Leilan had said, in what she had done, that she had wasted her opportunity and for a moment she is dumbstruck, stopping abruptly, her nose pressing to the other mare's shoulder as if to ground herself as the world bucks beneath her hooves.
"Oh, I am such a fool, Eurwen."
The words are full of bitterness and spill out before she means them to, before she can catch them and bite them back, and mahogany-brown eyes flick up find their match in the Nerinian's face.
"I've come all the way back here and I never even looked for her." She searches Eurwen's face for understanding that she knows she won't find, searches harder than she searched the forest shadows or the meadow's lush valley. She thinks of all the places she never bothered to go, the foot of the Mountain or the banks of the broad river. A year and a half. Never mind that her mother could be anywhere, she might be nowhere. She could be in Pangea. A shiver ripples over Beryl's golden skin.
the secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
Beryl’s claim is but a small worry in Eurwen’s list of late; more than ever does she wish her mother was here to talk to, but according to her brother she had lost her mind or had been replaced, somehow. It’d been a maddening train of thoughts that led her to the Mountain, but she had not found what she was looking for there; or at least not that time. Perhaps they’d sensed her desperation in trying to go back to the old days, and thought it wasn’t good enough a reason. The old days weren’t coming back, she understood now - but could she be blamed for trying to keep at least a connection?
Perhaps a next time, with that insight. For now, she must continue on the path of renewal, the things that Lilli had set in motion. Maybe Beryl wanted a part of it and maybe she didn’t, but here they were, each lost in their own thoughts, until the smells of home wafted towards them and stirred a realization in the younger mare. Wen had been about to say something along the lines of welcome home, though a little jokingly of course, but the utter drama emanating from the galaxy-marked girl when she claimed to be a fool had stopped her.
Her deep dark pools of eyes - part of the reason she knew her father hardly visited her - search the palomino’s face as much as the younger mare searches her own, and a small, weary smile creeps up on Eurwen’s face. ”No-one’s keeping you from going back, Beryl.” She’d be free to go search for whomever she was searching for, if that was her goal. But it hadn’t been the goal for the last few weeks at the very least, considering the claim she never even did. ”But I think you know time and the world wait for no-one, and forward is the only motion we are allowed.”
Honestly, she only learned this on her way back, but it is true. She doesn’t know who Beryl is talking about, but Eurwen has her own regrets - ironically very similar ones, in now knowing that her mother was around somewhere, but also not - she hadn’t had the guts yet to go seek her out herself, see what Aodhán had told her about. Roz is a name now ingrained in her mind, marked as something potentially dangerous, but also something she can’t completely let go of.
To that account, Eurwen lets her gaze move from Beryl to Nerine, the wide expanse welcoming her home once more. ”Why Nerine?” she asks the mare sideways. There must be a reason, she figures, that she’s never seen her and yet there is a strange familiarity in her ways; the way she cocks her head or grinned back then in the Field; the way she looks north as if it has the answers but also knowing it will never give them up easily; the way she deflates when crossing the border of Nerine. Yes, she’s home here, even if she has wandered the world first - but how come she never heard of her?
Beryl's grey lips become a firm frown as she considers the time lost. An entire lifetime stretches ahead of her, Eurwen says, an entire lifetime to find whoever it is that Beryl forgot, but it isn't her ability to look for her mother in the future that troubles her. Instead, she wonders what it says about her, is she the sort to simply forget everything? To leave everybody behind? A quick mental tally paints a damning picture, her mother, Leilan, the Isle, friends she has not sought out because she was busy moping in the shadows of the forest. Stormy eyes cast themselves away from Eurwen, skimming the northwestern horizon where the Isle awaits and her heart still quails at the thought of it, not ready to see the damage wrought. Not yet. But there is no other way except forward, and she nods, sighs, shakes her head, her white mane settling on either side of her long neck.
"My mother, ah, I don't even know if I could find her. I haven't seen her since I was very, very, young. How do you find someone you barely remember? When you don't even know their name?" She asks, but does not expect an answer. The only answer is to search endlessly. The shadows might help, but with the thin memory she retains of her mother's patchwork coat, they would probably just deposit her in front of whichever black-and-white mare they found first, in a successive line of surprised piebald mares, into eternity. Beryl is not certain she has an eternity, but the ridiculousness of the thought lightens her mood. A hint of a smile lifts the corners of her lips and she turns back to Eurwen.
"You'd have a hard time keeping me here if I wanted to leave, anyway," the slight upturn of her lips softens the cryptic remark into something of a joke, though it's true enough. The fast beating of her heart settles as Eurwen asks her the question she has been preparing for since they met at the pond in the Field, "I..."
Perhaps she did not prepare as well as she though, her tongue stumbles over the words.
"I lived here, as a child. Not here. Not Nerine-Nerine. Icicle Isle. But I left after we fought the black dragon who burned it. I just..." Her head shakes again, harder, "I'm just not ready to see it again, to see how it's changed, but I'd like to have a home again."
The memory of black sulfur smoke fills her nostrils and she chokes back the growl that wants to grate against her throat, pulls back against the way her hooves want to flex and claw furrows into the earth. She remembers the strong smell of his bloodied wing, the small victory of her lion-shape finding purchase there. A snort blows the daydream away.
the secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
There is a moment of stubbornness and defiance in Beryl's eyes, but it passes when she explains about her mother - and of not knowing her. Eurwen's face instantly reflects the situation - more than ever does she miss her own dam, the way she was, used to be; how to search for someone you don't even remember?
Was that it, then? Had something warped her mind?
The spotted mare is drawn back to the palomino when she claims they'd have a hard time keeping Beryl here against her will. Though Eurwen doesn't know anything at all about the younger mare, she honestly doesn't doubt that - she detects the mare's fighting spirit for what it is, and wonders if the only way to keep her would be to turn her into stone, or encase her in it; somehow she thinks that's likely. But Beryl isn't the kind of threat that the dragon-horse once posed, and she can't think of a situation where she would even try.
Her question then, the one she finally asks, finally gets answered. Eurwen had half hoped Beryl might come up with the story halfway, but perhaps it's best they talk about it now, in the presence of the mentioned grey cliffs and sea wind. Ah, Icicle Isle. Her gaze is drawn to the still invisible island north-east of Nerine, almost wistfully so, but the pink-dotted mare quickly pulls herself back to the present day, her talk with Beryl here. "I haven't returned either. I don't know why. Perhaps I know what I'm looking for isn't there any more." She shakes her head. No mother, no sister, no brothers. Her family has floated apart, as if a seam had ripped and the wind just blew the pieces further apart until they weren't attached at all any more. No, she only has her own girls here.
And a father who's running from his own nightmares, no doubt. Not that she'd known as a child, or even noticed when she had just returned, but she'd started to see that over the course of the last years.
"I was born on the Isle, with my twin sister. When we were strong enough to face the Plague, at the end of the summer, we travelled to Nerine and never went back. Mom did, when she had both our brothers, and dad naturally stayed. He belongs up there," she nods vaguely north. "Not sure if it's the ice or the solitude." she shakes her head, turning back to the gold-and-galaxy mare. "Nerine has been my home since. I only left to appease the fairies once or twice. There is no other home for me, even if I'm not a princess or an heir any more." It seems so simple to her - Nerine had fit her like a glove, so why change a winning team? Of course, she'd had her rough days here too - but none that a change of land would have fixed.
@[Beryl] (I think she forgot the age/information gap but she can ask, lol)
Maybe what she's looking for is not there, anymore, either. Maybe the sense of guilt and betrayal that she has been holding so tightly to her chest has been a misunderstanding. Her father's domain had never been her own, and her survival in the frozen tundra of the Isle had been in spite of that fact, not proof that she belonged there. Beryl absently plays with the shadows at her feet, they swirl and come together into small shapes, yellow-eyed birds and rodents and reptiles in miniature, to hunt and swallow small stones in the soil so that the bits of rock rain down from a little patch of floating darkness with a sound like falling water as Eurwen relates her story. The young palomino does not know much about the Plague, it's an event whose effects dug great swaths into the foundation of modern Beqanna, and yet it has little meaning to newer generations unaffected by the horror of it. She knows that such a thing existed but not the way it twisted their lives, not the way it shaped the kingdoms as they are now. Life with Leilan had had different lessons.
When the spotted mare stops, Beryl does, too. The shadow creatures run together like water, wind up her leg and twist themselves into her mane, threading the white of it with darkness and those unblinking yellow eyes.
"Both. Nobody that doesn't want both of those things will stay very long. Even the Burning only drove a handful out of the snowdrifts, though I hear it's a little busier since my father took it over." Then she pauses, her head tilting thoughtfully to the side as Eurwen claims to no longer be a princess or an heir, and Beryl wonders if perhaps she knows the other mare's father after all, but it makes her heart skip a beat. She had referred so casually to his de-throning. "The only other horse we ran into out there was Jesper, he's not your father, is he? He tried to show me how to shift back into a horse once, but it didn't take."
It had taken the painted mare's dreamworld to do that.
The memory of it makes her belly ache, the memory of regurgitating the darkness from her own body, the strange physics of that place of metaphor that had allowed her to do it, allowed her to flip herself inside-out until she was a horse again. It had unblocked her from switching between the shapes, made her something stronger, better, than what she had been before. It had triggered the slow trudge to acceptance of that predatory nature humming in the corners of her mind. Her tail lashes her flanks, suddenly anxious again between the presumed insult to Eurwen and the memory of that strange day by the fae mountain, and the darkness around her grows thicker, as though a cloud has settled above her - and only her. She shadows in her mane hiss in her ears, mistaking the threat, but Eurwen will not likely notice their voices.
the secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
The spotted mare doesn’t know much of Beryl, that is clear, but she is very much surprised when she claims to have a father on the Isle who took over leadership. Between her own father and Jesper, there is little likeness to see - only in mannerism, she remembers. But then Jesper’s leadership had been over more than a few years ago; Beryl would not have existed.
She tries to discern then, if there’s anyone else she could refer to, her deep brown eyes scanning the young mare - but no-one comes to mind. ”Your father?” she asks confused, but her head has already put together what her heart has not, and she makes a face. ”I for sure thought he wouldn’t do that anymore.” she sighs, then gives Beryl a weary smile. If she’s disappointed in her father, that doesn’t mean Beryl is at fault. ”I meant Nerine, but I guess the Isle could use a princess or two as well. I’m glad to meet you, sister.”
She waits a while, her daydreaming eyes wandering the moors to the north. It’s a shame she can’t meet Beryl’s mother, she thinks - see the mare who managed to distract him. She must have been pretty, with a galaxy marking and a golden coat like Beryl’s, she imagines. And all of a sudden, Eurwen doesn’t even wonder where the shadows come from, what with her grandmother manipulating both dark and light.
Which, actually, could be useful. She tilts her head at the mare, noticing how her emotions seem to alter their shape. A dark cloud settles upon her, the metaphor making more sense on Beryl than anyone else. ”Beryl? Can you transport yourself with those?”
Darkness curls around her as her anxiety deepens, the shadows growing so thick that they nearly become objects themselves, with body and substance, and even the bright light of Nerine does not cut through them Her bright coat darkens beneath them - the shadows cast shadows. Eurwen's words are incomprehensible at first, but the word 'sister' falls on her ears like the first glimpse of sun in the morning, brightening the blue dusk of dawn. Like dawn, she fades back to gold suddenly, anxiety wiped away by shock, and she lifts her head high atop a long neck, curled ear tips kissing together while dark eyes search the spotted mare's.
"Sister? I--" Her words cut off abruptly, stopped up by ringing clarity. Not the child of her missing mother, but of Leilan. His true daughter, one of his blood, and Beryl bites at the inside of her cheek, intrigued, excited, guilty. She had never even considered the family he might have out in the world. The distant loss of her dam feels suddenly smaller. Sister. But there is a strange note of reproval in Eurwen's voice before she says the word and the young palomino is quick to grasp at it, as she often does, holding strong to that negative emotion.
"No," there is a soft sadness to the smile that treads lightly across her face, "No, not quite" Not quite sisters, she wonders if that will make it better or worse for Eurwen. Beryl is desperate for connection, but the rose-gold woman doesn't seem as eager, not at first, and so she pulls back, "He found me, on the Isle, half-drowned and mostly frozen through."
It's not a day she often chooses to remember, though one that certainly she remembers more often than she would like, and one that has left an indelible mark on the bright and happy child she had always been before. The risk of losing herself to the fear and pain of that day is strong and Beryl curls her neck, her nose pressing against the dancing colors of the galaxy that drips down her shoulder, staining the yellow with blue and red and purple. The sun-warmed skin there grounds her. "I was very young, and I was dying, and he saved me."
A deep breath. She is not frozen. She is not drowning. The sunlight is bright and clear, and the young mare looks up again. Eurwen has changed the subject without her noticing.
"You... you want me to move the rocks?" Her brow crinkles, confused, brown eyes turning to the pebbles piled not far away, and then back to the spotted mare. Back to her sister, "Yes, I could."
the secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
There is a moment in which she is disappointed, though not with Beryl. But her apparent sister notices anyway, or perhaps it was obvious from Wen’s tone. Whatever the case, the younger mare starts explaining, and Eurwen blinks her deep brown pools of darkness, shame settling in her mind although outwardly she decides it’s best not to emotionally distract Beryl any further. ”I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed - it’s just that I have more half-siblings than I care to have, from before my parents decided to be together, and I thought it’d meant... well, you know.” She takes a deep breath, a smile turning back to her face, rather relieved. ”I’m glad you found each other. If you want to, I’ll tell you more about the family sometime.” Not today though - it was one thing to discover your adoptive father had other children, and another to meet them all and the other extended family that this intel brought.
Instead, Eurwen focuses on Beryl’s abilities - once as a distraction, and once more for the fact that if she can do what Eurwen expects her to, then she’ll need her help. She outs a laugh when the palomino asks about the rocks. ”Not the rocks, I can do that myself. Living things, horses. Like yourself and me, or, if you could find her, maybe one of our missing kingdom members?” Eurwen asks her adoptive sister, a hopeful gleam in her eye. ”I don’t know if you ever met her, but Lilliana is missing. She was captive in Pangea, and she should have returned by now. She’s a bright chestnut, blue eyes, and a golden star marking on her chest that can’t be missed.” she adds the description for clarification, thinking it’s unlikely they met before, if Beryl indeed had wandered everywhere but home for the past year. But she’s desperate enough to ask - every little chance that Lilli has been seen or found, would help.
Beryl ponders the name, but she shakes her head, aside from the golden flame on her shoulder, there is not much in the description to identify the chestnut mare from anyone else in a crowd, there are many blue-eyed mares, many chestnuts, and she runs through her brief list of acquaintances but finds nobody quite matches to the description, even under a different name.
"No," she says at last, softly, "No, I don't know her, but if I found her, I could bring her home." She has not taken anyone else through the shadows, but if she can send a rock, she could surely send a horse, even easier if she is side-by-side with them. Remembering the haphazard way she had passed through the shadow realm that first time makes her balk at the idea of sending anyone else alone - how would you explain to them, and could they get lost there? Could they panic and bolt and end up somewhere else? What would the shadows do with a stranger who couldn't speak to them? Perhaps nothing, but there might be others in the darkness, hiding behind those familiar yellow eyes. Just because she's never met them doesn't mean they aren't there.
"Eurwen, have you considered that maybe she doesn't want to come back? I'll look for her, if that's what you want, and bring her home if that's what she wants, but I won't make her." Surely Leilan's daughters have no right to force someone "home" when they have both run away from it, themselves. Her head lifts and turns towards the southeast, towards the distant shore of Silver Cove - hidden from sight by distance and the northern fog - and beyond it to the red, salty, canyons of Pangea. Why did it have to be there? The thought of those black, gleaming, harriers hunting amongst the crags makes her skin crawl, but she's already agreed, and at least she wouldn't have to swim.
The secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
Eurwen
The moment she tells Beryl of her troubles, it seems like she takes it up as a task, a quest - there is not a moment’s hesitation for the palomino to take up the spotted mare’s request, and suddenly she does see her father’s hand in her upbringing. There are of course different ways to her - a different appearance, of course, if there was no blood relation. But she smiles inside nonetheless, thinking not everything that her mother once taught her, and him as well she believes, has gone forgotten.
She loses herself for a short moment in her musings, while her newly found sister ponders over the people she knows. The star marking - or sun marking - on Lilli’s chest will have to be enough, Wen thinks, because honestly Beryl is right that there are many chestnuts.
She jerks up with Beryl’s question. ”If she doesn’t want to come home, she would have told me. If you find her and she tells you she doesn’t, though, just let her know that I’m worried and I miss her.” She swallows hard with the idea, but no, she refuses to believe that Lilli’s disappearance was on purpose - without a trace, without so much as a goodbye. Her friend wouldn’t do that if she didn’t have a very, very good reason. Something must have happened, and she cannot shake the ominous feeling before she gets reassurance. ”Can you drop me on the Isle before you go? You don’t have to if you don’t want to but it would make it easier for me to find him.” She doesn’t have to say who - they both know that for a Nerinian to go to the Isle there is usually but one reason. An audience with her dragon father is long overdue. There’s thing she needs to discuss with him - things she needs to ask, just as she just asked Beryl.
She’ll go out of her way to have her friend safe, and that may mean sending out a dragon, as well.
