"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
06-29-2021, 05:52 PM (This post was last modified: 09-19-2021, 03:11 PM by Tiasa.)
There comes a time when avoiding everyone, shying away from all contact, gets very boring and lonely. Tiasa had enjoyed it for a time, had carved out a little place for herself deep in the forest where few would find her and fewer still would survive the meeting. Those were the ones who had tried to touch her, the ones who had wanted a piece.
They got what they deserved but even this game grows tiresome eventually.
She does not feel afraid when she emerges, when she follows the flow of the river to the ocean and lets it sing to her in a way she had avoided in some time. For most of her life she’s scorned the breezy tropical life of her relatives but now she wonders if they’ve had it right all along. Tiasa certainly would fit in with the island scenery with the pink flowers that cluster around her seaglass horns, the bright teal and pink of her eyes as they blink in the early morning light.
The teal and silver mare remains as a kelpie for some time, drifting in the shallow waters. They are warm still, some remnants of summer lingering a little longer here in the water. Her eyes turn from the distant, hazy horizon back to shore as she sun begins to rise. She just stares blankly at the sand and the trees for a time, not truly existing in this moment until she hears the sound of someone nearby.
She shifts then, returning to a horse - wading through the shallow water back to the shore. Feigning disinterest, hoping that whoever else is wandering around the shore this morning will come over and say hello so she is not forced to.
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He watches her openly from the shadows.
He makes no effort to disguise himself, to dull the glow of the freakish yellow eyes, as he tracks her movement through the shallow water.
He is alone there in the underbrush at the edge of the water, no hounds, no great-headed elk. It is only the darkness that watches, unmoving.
He knows without even having to ask, without having to dip his cold fingers into the warmth of her mind to see clearly for himself. Evia had spoken of her children with the kelpie and he had asked her about love as if it were something he was capable of understanding.
The ink-black mouth twists around something dark when he thinks of the daughter tethered to the river. If the two of them crossed paths, would they know they were of the same blood?
And when she emerges from the water and shifts back into an equine, he emerges and moves toward her. Slow, head tilted as he studies her. The same teal as the sisters. The same teal as the mother. Strikingly beautiful, just like the rest of them. So beautiful, in fact, that were he still a weak thing he might not even be able to look at her, just as he had not been able to look at her mother.
“You look just like her,” he says, the voice raspy as if he has had to carve it out of the bottom of his chest, “your mother.”
A haughty version of delight courses through Tiasa when her plan succeeds and she is spared from having to start a conversation. It is better this way, makes more sense too, for her to be the one approached. For her to be sought out, even if only for a handful of words. She does not know how long this venture into the world will last - perhaps she will be reminded of why she prefers her own company and retreat for another dozen years.
Only to come back in again, like a very slow tide. One pulled back and forth by her self-inflicted loneliness instead of the moon.
She does not think him remarkable at a glance, all shadows except for those yellow eyes that stand out garishly from the rest of him.
And she knows so little of the world that she does not expect there to be anything more than what she can see at a glance - because that is how she has always expected others to view her. Not knowing what else may linger beneath the surface.
That delight is tempered somewhat when she is not greeted as she ought to be - with awe and devotion - but instead with a mention of her mother. Tiasa does remember her mother being beautiful, though, and this thought soothes her.
She regards this shadowy being for a moment, tilting her flower-and-seaglass crowned head just slightly to the side before replying boldly in voice that should be smooth as liquid mercury, but instead is raspy like his (though hers is this way from lack of use). “Is that a point in my favour, or against it?”
Tiasa reprimands herself for taking care of a great many things except the tool she actually needs to communicate. Disappearing for another dozen years is already looking like the more attractive option.
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
She is haughty in a way that her mother is not and he thinks she must get this from her father, the kelpie. He grins his shark-tooth smile and tilts his peculiar head, raking the gaze along the plains and angles of her. Down across the shoulder, the soft round of her barrel. Further still until he has seen all he can and shifts his focus back to her face.
It is not lost on him that the voice is hoarse and he cannot imagine that it is from anything other than disuse. Because she is too lovely a thing to sound this way naturally.
He could show her, he thinks. He could show her every memory he has of her mother, but he keeps them locked up somewhere safe instead.
(He has never been a flirtatious thing, Jamie. He has never known how to be. There is nothing about him that is coy, but he had invited the dark mare to come closer just to see how hollow he was. And he feels some inclination to tell this mare who is so much like her mother something similar. He has changed in more ways than he realizes.)
“I think it depends on my mood,” he says finally. Because he has been betrayed once before and does not intend to let it happen a second time. He had shown Evia what he really was, plain beneath the shadows, and when the second collection of daughters had been born he’d shackled the nymphs to the water and left them there.
He does not look away from her then, though he thinks of her sisters for longer than he’d like to. Instead, he draws in a rattling breath and asks, “where have you been hiding?”
Tiasa has always believed she was made to be observed, to be admired. She is not sure if there is any actual admiration in the way those vivid eyes travel across her body, taking in every bit of it, but she appreciates it nonetheless. Her turquoise and pink gaze remains intent on watching the way his eyes move until finally they focus back on her face where they will find a small grin waiting for him.
And though she is curious about how his opinion of her mother might change with his moods, she does not care enough to ask since he does not offer to elaborate.
Or maybe she is interested, but just wants to delay using her voice again for a moment longer. It will get better with use, she’s sure, and her obsession with either perfection or nothing had gotten her into this particularly strange moment in her life where she had lived a dozen years with no experience to show for it.
As for where she had been hiding? “Anywhere and everywhere that I could.” There had been a few favourite haunts over the years, but they all gradually changed. Either she did not get enough attention while lingering there, or she got too much. The rasp in her voice eases a little as she continues, her bright, tropical gaze fixed on him. “It never interested me much, interacting and all that comes with it.” Particularly not when it was required to be a give-and-take and she couldn't just take what she wanted and be done with the whole thing.
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He grins, shadows spilling out of his ink-black mouth, the razored edges of his teeth reflecting no light as he considers her.
And he can feel himself slipping backwards into the thing he used to be. The thing with heaving sides, a death rattle trapped in his throat, sinister in subtler ways. The thing that could not be touched because there was nothing about him that did not seem to be made up, invented by his mother and projected out onto the world without any real substance.
Yes, this is the skin that fits him most comfortably.
This skin with which he had so tenderly kissed Balto’s brow as he’d drawn the life out of him and replaced it with something altogether different.
So he does not smirk when she says that she has been hiding everywhere she could, that she does not enjoy interaction. He tilts his peculiar head and rakes his freakish yellow gaze down the length of her and back up again.
“And yet something drew you out of hiding,” he observes, the voice having gone thin again. Much the same as it always was. Barely there at all.
He shackles his focus to her face again. “What is it that you’re looking for?”
There is a distant part of Tiasa’s mind that tells her that she should be afraid - that this is a predator greater than what she is. From the way shadows spill out of his mouth to the sharp edges of his teeth she can only just make out among the darkness.
It is a part she finds easy to ignore. The movement of his eyes down her body once more seems familiar, seems right. That is the sort of reaction she should inspire - she was a creature made to be admired. So it is difficult to feel afraid when she feels comfortable under a wandering gaze. Even to her, it does not make much sense why she would have hidden away when she so clearly enjoyed being the focus of someone else’s attention.
Even when she has little to say. “And yet.” She repeats with a small shrugging movement.
These shouldn’t be difficult questions, but they are. She frowns in thought, wishing she had something more interesting to offer up than the truth. Or that she had more experience to be clever with her lies. That would come with practice and time. So for now she just gives what she has, as little as it is. “I’m not sure. Something… more.” Fortunately, everything is more than what she has experienced so far. “I just don’t know where to start looking.”
Her head tilts a little to the side as she regards him, the glimmer of a smile returning to her pink and blue eyes. A few of the petals in her mane dislodge with the movement of her neck and they float gently to the ground as she speaks. “Any suggestions?”
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He is not a coy thing.
If he is not susceptible to the wiles of women it is only because he does not know how to recognize them as such.
So if there is any flirtation in her asking, he does not notice.
Instead, he takes her question at face value. He does not smirk or simper, does not turn the voice to something honeyed and warm, something inviting. He drags in another wheezing breath, the air rattling against his ribcage while he considers how to answer.
Where might she find something more?
How can he offer any insight when he has only ever wanted something less?
(But is it really that he wants something less or that the things he wants are so intimately tethered to death that they only feel like less?)
“I could show you,” he tells her. And even this is without flirtation. There is nothing suggestive in the way he says it. No, it is all plain shadows as he takes one step toward her, peculiar head tilted, the freakish yellow eyes never straying from where he has fixed them on her face.
“We could go there together.”
The only place he has ever yearned for, the only place that ever meant much of anything at all to him. The place where he discovered it all.
She had been genuinely asking, rather than simply using flirtation has a distraction. If she had been given a less serious answer, she would have been disappointed. It would have been a path that could have led them somewhere she was not interested in going.
Neither was he, it would seem, and though there is some part of Tiasa’s pride that tells her she should be wounded by his lack of interest, she cannot bring herself to care at the moment. The idea of seeing something new is too tantalizing all on its own, everything else is secondary. Will they have to travel far, she wonders? Judging by his rattling breath, she does not think a significant amount of physical exercise is likely.
So it must be close - her limited imagination does not allow her to consider any other possibility.
Despite this excitement over such a vague offer, she is on-edge about that step he takes to bring them closer.
There may be a mutual disinterest but she feels that proximity like the air has condensed and it is physically brushing up against her.
Wariness is at war with her desperation for something, anything, and in the end - her bright eyes focused intently on him - she nods. “Alright.” And then, a not-so-casual afterthought. “So long as you don’t touch me.”
Maybe that had not even been in the realm of possibility, maybe she was overreacting. Still, best to be upfront about her boundaries, she reasons with herself. It is not personal, these boundaries extend to everyone who breaths and walks and swims. Surely they can travel wherever they need to go without that one thing.
jamie
