"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
like a bird caught in a curtain, this temporary entanglement may lead to an open sky
Alkena continues to float along the breeze—carried forth by some unseen presence that feels entirely too real and too tangible to ignore. It is a wonder to her that others do not let themselves be buoyed by that same presence. Do not feel the same urge to drift along the wind and see where it may take them. What a shame, she thinks, smiling at nothing, feeling herself wind along the currents of air and float on.
It is cool today, but when in this form, such things rarely bother her. She can only feel the edges of it on her conscious, as if viewing something from her peripheral. After all, she cannot be made uncomfortable by the thing from which she is made. She cannot be uncomfortable with her own cellular makeup.
So today she is the winter wind and she wakes up more fully. She unfurls into it fully, howling into existence as she makes her way into the forest and around the branches that crackle into life. Alkena laughs at the way the trees sway beneath them, her and the wind, and the sound is loud, even if she remains invisible. It cracks through the air and she is gleeful with it, with this tangible mark of her.
It is only when she sees the alien boy that she stops at all. She bounces lightly, invisible in the air, and peers down at him, trying to deduce exactly what he is and why he is so different from what she knows.
Curious, she floats further down until she is but a foot away from him, studying him unabashedly knowing that he might be able to sense her but knowing that he cannot see her. She blows out, sending a rush of wind across his face and she manages to suppress a giggle, curious what he might do.
i'm torn from the truth that holds my soul i'm down in the grave where I belong --
The forest remains the place he most commonly inhabits.
He has ventured to the meadow once and found it to be too open. He did not like how easy it was for them to stare, how he stood out so starkly with his black armor among the green grasses and soft flowers. Everything about him was already so harsh—the unyielding ridges that line his spine, the knife-tipped tail, and the armor that plates his face. At least in the forest he was overshadowed by the towering trees and the darkness that they cast; he was able to be insignificant and invisible.
It wasn’t what he wanted to be, but maybe it was best, for now.
It’s quiet in this part of the forest, away from where others tended to wander and congregate. He had stepped off the worn paths and was making his own, ignoring the way branches and bramble scraped along the hardened armor. But as the trees grew closer together it became too complicated, his great wings growing cumbersome and hindering his movements. He turns to head back the way he had come when there is a strange gust of wind and the sudden ringing of laughter, and he frowns behind his armor as he tries to figure out where it had come from. The limbs had not rattled, as if the wind had come from within the forest itself instead of following a path from the sky, and he could not find a source for the laugh.
There is the feeling of cold too close to his face, and then the strange sensation that someone is watching. “What are you?” he asks, the words still feeling thick on his inexperienced tongue. He thinks he was supposed to ask who are you, but he is not sure if the wind can be a who.
like a bird caught in a curtain, this temporary entanglement may lead to an open sky
She has managed to see so much of this world in her young life. Had managed to travel far and away. Been able to study those who make up this world—the young and the old, the kind and the cruel. She had watched as they had lived their lives and gone about their days, and she found that she was infinitely thrilled to learn something new about them every new encounter. Perhaps they did not always know her—in fact, they rarely did—but it did not overly bother her. It was enough to know them in turn.
He, however, is different from so many she had seen.
She can barely stop the curiosity that bubbles up in her chest and the millions of questions that she wants to ask him. She can barely pause the way that she wants to run down his armored spine and know what it feels like to touch the strange skin. But she does. She holds back and only watches him from where she bobs in the air, tilting the wind of her to the side in consideration, amusement threading through the air.
“It is not kind to ask me ‘what’ I am,” she chides in her silver bell voice, a laugh weaving through every word. “I am the wind and the air and everything around you.” A grandiose lie perhaps, and more than a little generous with the truth, but the young sylph sees no reason to be so honest with him. “What are you?” she breathes and this is not such a retort as a genuine question, it never occurring to the girl that she had just returned the very questions that she had deemed rude in the first place.
i'm torn from the truth that holds my soul i'm down in the grave where I belong --
Though he was not much of a conversationalist, he has always been observant.
For the longest time that was all he could do, was watch them. Their language was strange to his ears and he couldn’t figure out how to make his tongue say the right words that they would understand, and so all he did was watch. His predator side made it easy — he could follow them unnoticed, and knew just how to step to avoid making sounds. And in all of his watching he learned that Beqanna was brimming with magic, and that it showed itself in countless ways. The voice that he is hearing now must be another example of that magic, though it was nothing like he had experienced before and for some reason it is unsettling, perhaps because it had never occurred to him to look for the things that are invisible.
“I was not being unkind,” and though the words are clumsy there is a sort of indignation to his tone, his ears falling back although they don’t quite pin. She laughs when she says it, which feels confusing as he tries to decipher if she—is the wind a she?—is actually angry or not. He can feel a flicker of irritation come to life in the pit of his stomach because he still cannot see whatever he is speaking to, and switching to the infrared range had not helped him.
It made him feel exposed, and he was not used to being the prey.
The feeling fades though when he is caught off guard by her question, confusion shadowing his face. “I’m a….” he trails off in uncertainty, his mind struggling to recall the thing he had heard others murmur when he walked by. What they called themselves in his mother’s tongue had no translation, but there was a word in particular that was said over and over by those around him as they stared. “Xenomorph. Or part one. My name is Fret.”
like a bird caught in a curtain, this temporary entanglement may lead to an open sky
If she picks up on the indignation, she ignores it completely, sweeping it away with the ease of someone who has never once thought themselves in the wrong. She has never had any reason to think she is anything but right, anything but purely perfect, and she doesn’t let the faint irritation on his face color her viewpoint in the slightest. Instead she tilts her invisible head and consider him, trying to study the strange angles and curves of him as he struggles to find a word to explain what he is to her.
“That’s not a real word,” she trills with a laugh, floating to the other side of him and sending a breeze once again to blow over his alien back. “At least not one that I have ever heard,” she muses, pursing her youthful lips in thoughts for a second, “and I have heard all of the real ones so that should say something.” Another easy laugh as she blows a kiss, the wind coming out in a ripple from it.
But she tires of being unseen, tires of speaking to him in riddles, and so she does something she rarely does. She becomes the other version of her. The air around her ripples and she comes into view, although it is though she stops near the end—her body still maintaining that faint translucence. Drifting down, her feet come into contact with the ground and she shudders a little, shaking with the effort.
“Oof,” she exclaims, wobbling as she takes a step forward. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.” She glances back up again, a brilliant smile growing on her dainty face.
“My name is Alkena,” she offers, shaking her silvery mane. “And you are…?”
