"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
omewhere, a wolf lifts her head to bay at the moon before hunting.
She has not thought of Terrastella in some time. Back there, in her birthland, that is is where the thoughts of her Po are tenfold. That is where her mother, bless her soul, tortured her father and her father has tortured her mother. Neither of them meant to do it to the other, but she could see it in them, and she knows, even now, they’re tearing each other apart. There are memories from there, still though, that she might not have remembered were they were not printed into her bones like scars. She can feel them aching there.
Elliana turns into the darkness and she can hear it breaking, can see the cracks of it deepening as her blue eyes slice through it. And for one terrifying moment, she thinks this darkness will be eternal. It will not. It will not. It will not. She breathes and opens those glacier cut eyes once more.
The darkness of the forest, beneath the church-steeple pines, now, is not like true darkness to her. In each shadow, and each shadow pressed upon a shadow, she can see a hundred colors laid down upon each other. She can see the faded rust of pine-needles, the violet darkened where a field mouse hurries past, the blue of a bruise where the light almost dapples the edges of a shadow tree. Madness lives in the moonlit forest tonight, gathering like twilight darks in the tangles of their shadows over the loam. Elliana can feel it in the wind against her cheek, a kiss of ghost petal, a memory of her mother’s touch before she went off to sob at the grave of a son who was no longer drowning in water, but in soil. Beneath her hooves, beneath their shadows tangling, she thinks she can feel the ebb and flow of all the life that once lived here, buried beneath a sea of soil, ash, and compost.
And suddenly, she is no longer in the trees. Elli is thinking of the sea, as she stands in the autumn forest and listens to the hush, hush, hush of leaves all around her. In it she can hear the echo of the ocean. When the scent of maple trees reaches her, she is almost surprised it is not that of ocean brine. That alone makes her peer into the space between all those trees.
Somewhere, a wolf lifts her head to bay at the moon, the body of a fallen deer at its feet.
Despoina has done her best to put the thoughts of the quest behind her.
These thoughts do not serve her. They do not make her stronger, or bring her comfort, or change her at all. They are just new nightmares to chase her through the night. They are new thoughts to twist her stomach and make her head ache. The images of the tigers chasing her. The image of her mother refusing to come near her and standing there bloodied after having fought them off. It is just confusion that she feels. Just a painful ache that she is once again left to deal with—once more having to accept her own failures.
She does not come home changed as Torryn had.
She barely has a gift to offer her children.
But the sight of the other mare brings it back with a flood, and she thinks perhaps that she is dreaming. She had been there, hadn’t she? Despoina cocks her head to the side, the light catching the iridescent blue of her coat, and she considers slipping away—trying to find some reprieve from having to relive any moment of that haunted night. But she doesn’t. Instead, she remains rooted, her impossibly black eyes studying the mare with little shame, her face cut from stone, the emotions long ago bled from it.
When moments have passed, Despoina finds herself walking forward, emotions caught in her throat.
“How have you been?” she asks before she can stop herself.
“In the after,” she clarifies, not realizing she has not clarified anything at all.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
nside, deep beneath the veneer of quartz and granite, there is a world so full of voices that it is deafening. The sound of it follows her like the sound of thunder follows light. It echoes so fiercely behind her eyes that she can feel her own pulse stuttering and stumbling like a fledgling trying to learn the rhythm of it. In each rotten root, and each seed full bit of fox jaws, she can taste every dream of that deafening world. She can taste them like she had the pollen in the spring of her birth land.
The flavors of it, and the melody of it, break her heart.
Days have slipped by her as if the mountains have swallowed up the tick, tick, ticking of time that shifted around her. It takes her a moment to truly know her, or remember her. Elli has tried to believe that the entire night was a dream, that it never happened and the snowflake that catches on her eyelash was simply just a dream caught in a catch and one she carries with her now. But the recognition of this girl when it comes in full is too sharp, too strong, for her to continue believing as such. Maybe someone else would not have seen it, whatever there is behind this girl’s eyes, what might be behind her own eyes the night her mane became garnished in snowflakes. Elliana notices it though. She notices it like she notices each constellation in the sky. It is that part of her that wants to draw lines between all the pieces of Despoina that cause her to frown, to become unsure.
She isn’t sure how to respond to such a question, she tries to pretend one more time that she does not recognize her, but Elliana is not so cruel, at least not in this way, not right now. When she breaks the heavy, full of sorrow, silence her voice is whisper thin as she swallows up a hundred little lies. I've been well enough. Elliana wonders if the other mare can taste the taint of lasting fear in her words, the way it rots the crisp night air around them.
She grows quiet. There is not a better answer she can give. She doesn’t ask how she is, doesn’t return the question because she thinks it is probably much the same. Words finally come to her and she catches them like fireflies between the drifting moon-dust of her thoughts as she drifts a blue eyed gaze upwards. If you could draw anything in the stars, what would it be? She asks, a game she and her brother used to play as a children. And then, she told herself she wouldn’t speak anymore of that night, but Elliana is the worst liar to herself. I’m sorry, for whatever those monsters showed you, became for you—it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.
