"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
10-25-2022, 01:11 AM (This post was last modified: 12-12-2022, 12:28 AM by Tavani.)
Sunrises here are not any more magical than the world she came from, but neither are they any less - so she still pauses to admire them. Her mane moves of its own accord as it always has, a slight breeze stirring the dark lengths of it as the sun rises. She can see Stratos, the clouds catching the light and making it shimmer on golden edges. She’s vaguely aware that something similar is happening in her pupils right this moment - an anchor tying her to that place she has never been to.
She looks away, focuses on the colours that exist on the ground instead - the brilliant reds and oranges of the leaves, the soft golden brown mingling with green beneath her hooves. A pair of strange, fuzzy-tailed creatures chase each other around a trunk, spiralling upwards and sending a small rain of gold down as they disturb the canopy.
Tavani stretches her wings, and abruptly stops. With them half-stretched, she feels the phantom pains and echoes of memories chasing themselves through the joints there.
There is a distant frown in her eyes, a small short-circuit causing her to forget what would come naturally next. She should fold her wings, move off to find something new but instead she has paused.
The actual memories themselves are too much so she is thinking of something else. She wonders how many of her brethren are similar to her - how many of them chose this new life, or if they were all caught up in the storm and brought against their will. How many of them ran forwards, not knowing whether they would find death or something new but equally entranced by the possibility of both? How many of them are at least a little disappointed with which one they ended up with?
now and then there’s a light in the darkness,
feel around until you find where your heart went --
She doesn’t leave the Pampas often anymore, but it is not out of a sense of duty. She knows the land would fair just fine without her constant presence, and that it was unlikely it faced it any outside threats to begin with.
She stays in the Pampas because every time she leaves she is reminded of how drastically different Beqanna has become.
Water remains flooded across places it had never touched before, with trees seeming to grow from its depths in some kind of twisted Wonderland-esque fashion. There are places where just beneath the surface she can see what had once been worn footpaths, with meadow grasses swaying with the current rather than the breeze. Somewhere beneath it all, so far down that it is as deep as the sea, she knows lies Hyaline.
She hated the change, and in order to avoid seeing it, she chooses to teleport nearly everywhere, and today it is the river that she finds herself landing in. The morning is still young, bathed in that certain kind of golden light that only seemed to happen this time of day, as if the sun itself was still warming up. There is a faint fog that hugs the riverbanks, and save for the stirring of smaller creatures and a few early risers, the entire setting is serene despite the disasters Beqanna has recently endured. Then again, that is the only kind of beauty she is accustomed to—the kind that can be found in the middle of catastrophe, the kind of beauty that only breaks free when everything else falls apart.
Belatedly, she realizes that she has landed herself relatively close to someone else, can feel their presence pressing in on her, and she tilts her head to find an unfamiliar mare. She reminds her a little bit of the Baltian that had come to the Pampas—not in such a way that she thinks they are related, but in the sense that they both carried a certain kind of otherness about them, as if their very blood and bone is not made from the same things Beqannans are made of.
“Good morning,” she says with a barely-there smile, not moving from where she stands but not moving away either. She cannot pinpoint it exactly, but the other mare seems troubled, or perhaps merely lost in thought. She doesn’t want to pry—not really, anyway—but her interest is caught, and perhaps a stranger could be the distraction she is searching for. “Is everything all right?”
She doesn’t hear the other mare approach (not realizing, of course, that there was no approach to be heard) - but the sound of the voice snaps Tavani out of the fog that had been creeping in on her and she turns her head. Gratitude for something else, anything else, to focus on swells up inside of her. The mare could almost be confused for a Stratosian - a fact which fills Tavani with a confusing and gut-churning combination of disappointment and relief - but the eyes are the giveaway. They are a deep black and are not blooming as a perfect mirror to the sky above.
For now, she doesn’t move any closer either - it’s comfortable enough to speak standing as they are, and she hasn’t interacted with many lately so probably best to be on the safe side. Her dawn-pupilled eyes remain focused on the stranger. Unwilling to move closer, but unwilling to look away and feel alone any longer. “I know the polite thing to say is yes - everything’s fine.” She pauses for a moment, considering whether to leave it there, but she’s feeling off-centre. “But the truth is kind of the opposite.” Or very much the opposite, but Tavani’s thoughts are still wrestling with the mere idea of unloading her troubles on this kind stranger - so she will downplay them as much as she can even as they tear into her heart.
She cannot truthfully say she is from Stratos, because she was never welcomed there - only viewed it from a distance. And she is not from Baltia either - not since she didn’t inherit any of the helpful tricks from her mother like being able to breathe underwater.
“I was brought here in the storm… sometimes the memories of the winds sneak up on me.” There, that wasn’t too burdensome of a confession - right? No mention of the feeling of her breath being stolen from her as she was surrounded by violent air, no mention of how she had chosen it willingly. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to fly since.”
now and then there’s a light in the darkness,
feel around until you find where your heart went --
“You don’t have to be polite,” she tells the stranger, her dark eyes appearing more somber than usual in her honesty. “The world is a rather impolite place, and sometimes things simply aren’t fine.” She steals another look at their surroundings, taking in the water that had far overreached its boundaries, at the signs of destruction that the last storm had left behind—trees scarred by broken branches, the drastic change in Beqanna’s horizon as mountains and forests were leveled or submerged.
She is accustomed to things not being fine—her life is a series of disasters and tragedies, but Beqanna, ever-changing though it may be, had alway remained relatively consistent. This the most she had seen it change, shrinking down to an almost inhabitable island, and it would be a lie to say that it did not create a general feeling of unease in her.
She could start over somewhere else entirely new if she had to (she has before, after all—this is not the place of her birth), but in the manner of a spoiled child, she doesn’t want to.
“So you are not from Beqanna, then,” she affirms gently, nodding her head to show that she understands where the mare’s disquiet comes from. Being in a strange place is never easy; she remembers how different Beqanna had been in comparison to where she had come from (she did not think of that humid jungle often, but, there were still nights that it—and a certain pale, red-eyed stallion—came to her in dreams, haunted memories that her mind could not let go of). “It’s….a bit different than it usually looks, but welcome all the same. My name is Ryatah.”
The angelic mare’s words are reassuring - in the way that they make an obvious sort of sense, it just takes hearing someone else say it for Tavani to give herself some grace. A little bit, anyway. Not enough to take this as an opportunity to fully unload the entirety of all that was wrong on this stranger, of course. She’ll keep it with what she’s already said, one confession is enough for so new of an aquaintenceship.
She focuses on leaving the rest of those thoughts alone, in just letting herself exist in this not-okay moment and not trying to make-believe that it is anything but what it is.
All the same, Tavani feels very aware of her own thoughts and instead attempts to focus them on her company. She’s not alone and that is certainly something. She finds a genuine smile to offer in response to the welcome and the introduction. “It’s nice to meet you Ryatah, even under these circumstances. I’m Tavani.”
Tavani had not yet gotten around to meeting others that had lived here, had not thought to wonder about whether the tornado that had brought her here had changed this world in addition to changing so many lives. She looks around them, trying to piece out what might be odd - what might have looked like. And then, with a clear thought that almost makes her laugh, she realizes she can just ask. “What does it normally look like?”
