"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
08-08-2021, 07:47 PM (This post was last modified: 08-08-2021, 07:47 PM by rapt.)
rapt
rapt.
I need you to be a monster which is to say, I am trying not to love you
He’s nearly drowned, nearly burned alive, nearly been swallowed whole, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at him. He’s almost bitter about that fact. The only things that suggest the events had been anything other than a dream were the lattice of scars on his foreleg, the scattered constellation on his crest.
Whatever deity or demon had drawn him to that place had spat him back out, and now Rapt finds himself wandering again. He is tired, still, but restless – he wants something, feels it like an itch under his skin.
He doesn’t fear trouble as he walks in the late-afternoon shadows of the forest. Rapt loves monsters, has for quite some time, and he does not fear their harm.
(There is a part of him that craves it, even – had he not been at his happiest when he kneeled before that ram-horned monster, when he had belonged to him?)
Besides, his healing is back – he tested it – so what is there to fear?
Rapt enjoys the solidity of the earth beneath his hooves. Nothing like the shifting sands of the beach. He moves at an easy walk, on a trail whose end is unknown, and he looks ahead, at whatever may come to, or for, him.
which is to say, I am still dreaming of kissing your claws
08-08-2021, 08:16 PM (This post was last modified: 08-08-2021, 08:18 PM by Aela.)
Aela always feels it.
That itch underneath her golden skin. A sense of restlessness that never seems to settle. Even when she has achieved what she set out to do, Aela's mind is always pushing her to do more.
She doesn't notice the scars along his legs (not at first). But they aren't so different from her own. While there are none on her forelegs, a deep wound scars one of her hinds ones. It bothers Aela. She had managed to hide what Gale had done by wading into the healing waters of Tephra. There will most likely be another journey but finding Skandar can be tricky; he can be whatever he wants and sometimes what he wants to be is not at Aela's immediate whim.
But the desire for more is singing to Aela like a siren song; she can hear it humming and emanating from someone else and luring her.
Following it - the barest traces of it that still linger on this trail - it fuels Aela to keep moving forward. She - like Rapt - is scarred and still tired. But there will be plenty of time to rest in the winter; there will be time later to be idle.
It takes some time to find him, but she does. Aela, when determined, always succeeds. There is nothing about him that suggests he might be powerful, like Carnage. There is nothing about him that makes her think of Eight or Straia or Beyza. But still, there is something and the gilded mare decides to investigate.
When she finds the champagne, Aela doesn't know that their scars are tied; that they have fought the same monsters and tried to appease the same goddess.
There is only the sense that he is searching for something and it makes her curious.
Feeling the flames sparking beneath her hooves, the palomino steps forward: "What are you looking for?"
I need you to be a monster which is to say, I am trying not to love you
He is not used to drawing anyone’s eye. He is handsome enough, but beauty is a near-worthless currency in a land so populated with fantastical creatures. Mere beauty is not enough – they are expected to control elements, or shift into mythical creatures, or stop time. What can Rapt do? He can heal the wound that those more powerful than he lay across his flesh. And that is plenty, for him. He does not crave power, does not crave magic. He is content to have the power that he does, to have a body capable of coming back from near-death.
(Was it powerful, to lead that crab into the pyre? Was it powerful, to choke the lion to death on your own flesh? Can it be powerful if there was no choice other than death?)
He notices her soon enough. She’s gold, like him, but with so much more. Beautiful, like him, but with so much more.
(Scarred, like him – but this, he doesn’t notice. He doesn’t look for weakness on others.)
He thinks she will pass him by. He is easy to pass by. But she stops, flames beneath her hooves, and asks a question that has echoed in his own mind. What are you looking for?
He pauses and thinks of the answer. Or, something to say for an answer. Because the truth is he doesn’t know, or he knows but doesn’t let himself admit it, or maybe he’s not looking for anything at all, he’s just moving for the sake of moving, or moving because when he’s moving he’s less likely to see the lion twisting before him.
Maybe it’s all of that; or none of it.
“Distractions,” is what he says, the explanation he settles on, “lately, my mind hasn’t been the most pleasant place to be.”
This is true. The memories are too fresh and his mind is too eager to replay them, to resurrect the sea monster and the giant crab and the lion. The feeling of seawater in his mouth.
“And you?” he asks, “what are you looking for?”
which is to say, I am still dreaming of kissing your claws
Aela has poised this question before to other strangers. Sometimes she is given a name, catches the glimpse of a beloved face across their memories. Sometimes it is a place, a moment in time that they are chasing that the Empath knows they will never again capture. But sometimes, they surprise Aela and give her an answer that she might have given.
The champagne stallion isn't so different; he isn't searching for something. Not in the way that Aela does. He doesn't seem to be seeking power or infamy. He merely wants peace, escape from his troubled mind. But it's his troubles that interest her, because though his memories are slightly different than her own, the palomino can see the beach and the blood. There is Carnicus, and there is the prowling lion meeting another violent end. There is the sea, and Aela shifts her weight from one hip to the other, remembering the uncomfortable feeling of sinking with the full weight of her emotions to its murky depths.
Her slender head tilts inquisitively when the strange stallion mentions that his mind isn't the most pleasant to be, and Aela feels the start of a smile. "I'm sure there are far worse places to be in Beqanna." There was the fog and dampness of Taiga. The scalding heat of the Tephran volcano and the sweltering humidity that never seemed to fade, regardless of the season. Trivial things, perhaps, when pitted against monsters but at least in those moments, Aela had been filled with the sense of being alive.
She has never been able to stand the feeling of lingering, of being idle.
Not when there was still so much of this world that had yet to learn her name, to see what she could do.
"Greatness," she muses truthfully to the taller horse with a wry smile. "But that seems harder to find than Taigan trails." It would come, Aela knew that. She just had to be patient. She just had to keep focusing on that kind of immortality she was searching for: not a body that lived forever, but a name.
"Perhaps we might assist each other," the striped mare continues. The crackling flames beneath her hooves start to turn to embers and then Aela finally smothers them, leaving nothing but charred earth behind her. "I can distract you, and you can tell me about the monsters inside your mind."
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
I need you to be a monster which is to say, I am trying not to love you
I’m sure there are far worse places to be in Beqanna, she says, and he has to wonder. He has not explored much of Beqanna, has drifted in its nomad lands, all terribly uneventful until the happenings on that foreign beach.
(Was that place part of Beqanna? He supposes it might be. He doesn’t know its borders, has committed little of its geography to memory. If that is the case, then she is most certainly correct.)
“There’s always a worse place,” he says, and thinks of the battlefield. How ill-suited he has been for such a place! He still doesn’t understand why he was chosen – he was taken, was put to these stupid, awful tasks, for no purpose he could find. And no reward for it, either, save for the glimpse of stars on his coat, a thing he would gladly tear from his skin if it meant undoing the experience.
She answers the question with a much better answer than he - greatness, she says. She has a purpose about her, which he, an often purpose-less man, much admires. He gives her a smile of his own.
“Do you know how you’ll find it?” he asks, curious, “greatness, I mean. It seems to come in so many different ways.”
(Had greatness been what Pollock was looking for? Had he felt greatness creep under his skin, when he made creatures so lowly as Rapt kneel before him? Rapt wonders what greatness feels like, but the more he thinks about it, the more the concept becomes abstract, slippery, like minnows in a river.)
“Maybe I can even help you find greatness,” he says, and laughs, “though I might not know it even if it was staring me in the face.”
Maybe it is.
“I’m Rapt, by the way.”
which is to say, I am still dreaming of kissing your claws
08-25-2021, 07:47 PM (This post was last modified: 08-25-2021, 07:48 PM by Aela.)
"I would hope so," Aela says with a laugh. Beqanna can't be the only world; her mind has often imagined what must be out in the Beyond. She's caught glimpses of it in the minds of others, but their memories never hold anything interesting enough to make Aela want to leave the land of her birth.
She finds his interesting enough, though, and so Aela stays out of curiosity.
Her smile turns wry, because though Aela has plans for greatness, how she gets there still eludes her. Heartfire - her grandmother - had told her once that it was not something quickly found. So Aela does her best in the present and keeps searching for, patient enough with the belief that she would know it the moment that greatness came. The slender palomino would just keep doing her best to strive for better, to reach for a level of power that would catch even the notice of gods.
"Perhaps I'll start a war," Aela continues with a light tone, like the idea doesn't bother her much. It's been done before, she knows her history well enough to remember leaders that go back to the era of the Dogmatists and the Uprising. It was one way to immortalize a name, but there were other ways as well. And perhaps her greatness would come in a way that hasn't been conceived yet. "Topple a kingdom, find a way to defy the laws of Magic."
Aela turns her head to glance at the champagne, and her blue eyes glitter speculatively at the stallion. "Oh, I think you know more than you give yourself credit for." She continues on, thinking the name he'd given was a fitting one as she studied him. "Aela." The Empath offers, and then asks, "What do you know of greatness, Rapt?"
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
I need you to be a monster which is to say, I am trying not to love you
His mouth twists into a bit of a grimace at the mention of a war. He knows Beqanna has waged its own wars, kingdoms fighting for something (he wasn’t quite sure what – he’s never had a mind for politics, it all seems strange to him. Perhaps it was all just for greatness, the original purpose gone, or at the very least, laid at the wayside). The only war he knows is the war that Pollux had ridden him into. That had been an ugly thing. He had not known that blood had such a stench. Had not known how awful the cries of the dying could be.
“I don’t have much of a taste for wars,” he says, “but I will cheer you on from the sidelines.”
She gives him her name, then – Aela – and then asks a question. He wonders how honest an answer to give, and what is meant by greatness, anyway. Certainly he had found Pollock great, had found Bruise great, those terrible monsters to whom he had prostrated himself before. And those strange beings – gods? – he had so recently encountered, with their enchanted bridles and gigantic beasts. Was that greatness, then?
Perhaps he’s overthinking.
“I’ve known great and terrible men, whose powers were quite…overwhelming,” he says. He calls them men out of politeness. They are monsters, but they are the kind of monsters he loves. The kind he knows how to deal with.
“More recently, I met…some rather strange characters, with strange magic. Perhaps there was a goddess. I’m not entirely sure. I suppose they were great, objectively, but I didn’t much care for them,” he says. He doesn’t fail to note that all his examples are cases in which he was adjacent to greatness, and not great himself. Rapt is not great, and unlike Aela, does not expect an abundance of greatness in his future.
“What about you, Aela?”
which is to say, I am still dreaming of kissing your claws
The wars that she has learned of have always been about mortal means, like the mortals who have fought them. For petulant things, things like betrayals and heartbreak. For simple things, like the expanding of borders or the weakening of another kingdom. The borders and boundaries that others draw around themselves are perceived as nothing to Aela; only limitations that she would break and reassemble, if she could.
But that is not in her power (yet) and so she amuses herself by breaking the things she could: hearts, men, morals.
The champagne stranger says that he doesn't have a taste for war, and for know himself well enough to admit that, Aela decides not to break him. A gift for not wasting her time in thinking that he might be somebody else to start a war for her favor. So she smiles instead, and tilts her head prettily at him, listening as he speaks about the men and monsters that he has known. His mention of terrible softens her face - just momentarily - as she remembers the small son that she keeps tucked away in the Pampas, and how she once told him that terrible didn't necessarily mean the evil that his birth mother imposed on him.
Her blue eyes gleam as he speaks of those terrible and powerful men, a curiosity rising at the possibility of learning more. What could they do? What had they done? Had they met untimely demises as her father had?
She can't help herself. As Rapt speaks of their overwhelming abilities, Aela drifts towards the easiest of hers. Just enough to bring more emotion behind the word, filling the air around them with every overwhelming feeling that the Empath can imagine: from anxious fear to drowning despair. A single golden ear flicks towards him, the only visible sign that she has changed the atmosphere around them.
If she touched him, she knows he would feel it. Aela's gifts had always worked easiest that way, but summoning a storm of swirling emotions around, she doesn't want easy. She wants to test herself - as she always does - and to push herself to the very edges of her ability. She wants to press those emotions into him, to see if the emotions that he had felt in that other place could be resurrected.
"I think it's a feeling," she tells him with a wry smile and then lifts her blazed head, wondering if he felt them rioting against his golden skin.
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
