"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
10-24-2020, 04:51 PM (This post was last modified: 10-24-2020, 07:53 PM by Starsonder.
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The Island of Ischia shimmers in the distance, distorted by heat and humidity to seem like it's almost floating. Starsonder lay in the Tephran sand watching it, drifting in and out of day-dreams and imagining what it would be like to live of a floating island full of flying horses. Palm branches dance above her, the fall breeze just enough to keep her from sweating as her mind spreads it's wings and navigates through the clouds and stars. But she remembers, as the crash of an unusually large wave reminds her of where she is, that she had heard the island was actually inhabited by water-loving horses. With a sigh, she decides that being able to swim among the coral and brightly colored fish really is no less enchanting.
She yawns. Her small white teeth sit like pearls in her pink gums, and she licks her lips as she stands. Today was the day. No more day-dreaming, she may as well go find out was the Ischia was like for herself.
The tide is low and the crossing easy, even for a yearling. With her blush colored mane plastered to her thin neck and her speckled skin showing through her damp, white coat, she halts on the beach. Her apricot eyes are curious as they glance around, waiting to see if anyone had spotted her, as she resists the urge to follow the parrot-calls into the jungle.
Sometimes he comes to back to his island birthplace, spends hours and even days lounging in the eternal warmth and sunshine. It is a place of peace, quiet, and solemnity. But eventually, the memories of his childhood start to return at the familiar sensations of dried salt on his skin and the squawk of parrots. Then, with dreams of blood-red water and thrashing hooves haunting him, Quell leaves Ischia behind him for the next few months.
Today, he stands at the rim of the caldera where his father swims. He is trapped there, the black colt knows. Trapped and unable to emerge without aid. He hopes that someone is making sure that Ivar does not have aid, but that is the responsibility of those who’d trapped him there and not of Quell. There is a glint of gold in the clear water below, and the colt steps away, shaking his dragon wings uncomfortably as he moves farther away.
Those wings disappear by the time he stands on the sandy shore, and the rest of his body changes as well, adapting at the touch of the water into something more aquatic. The leopard seal that Quell has become dives beneath the crystalline tropical water, his speckled shape sleek and quick in the water. He might have splashed about for a few more hours, but he is distracted by the sight of someone crossing on the sandbars that connects Ischia to the mainland during the low tide.
She looks young to be crossing alone, maybe Herrin’s age or even younger. Quell, at the grandfatherly age of three (in a season or two), is perturbed by this. Where is the parent, or the responsible older sibling? What if she falls into the ceynote? Quell, who’d hoped to fly back to Sylva before nightfall, sighs in resignation and swims toward the shallows. He clambers back to the Ischian shore as a horse again. At least, as much a horse as a winged and partially-scaled young colt can be. The gold and white markings that stripe his legs and wings glitter with saltwater that runs down his furred sides and then his scaled underbelly as he shakes himself dry.
”What’re you doing here?” he asks, not nearly as polite as a real Ischian would have been. Yet despite the gruffness in his voice, his dark gaze does not focus on the filly herself, but rather on the absent responsible party who has allowed her to run wild. “Do you know where you’re going? Who told you to come here?”
10-26-2020, 03:55 PM (This post was last modified: 10-26-2020, 03:55 PM by Starsonder.)
The jungle seems alive with life, and the filly's gaze traces the tree-line, drawn to every little movement. But when the sounds of a distinctly equine set of steps cause her to turn her head, it's back towards the waves. Not so far away, a winged colt is shaking the water from his body, and a startled snort escapes her as her honey eyes widen. She hadn't noticed him while she was crossing, and surely if he was swimming so close she should have seen his head at least... unless...
"Are you one of the water-horses?" she asks in an awe-struck tone. But as their questions seem to collide mid-air, she laughs and pauses to hear what he has to say. His tone is gruff, but this doesn't put her off. No, he seemed to be the age of her older half-siblings, and from her experience, that was just how teenagers liked to talk. But what he says does make her wonder.
"Should I not be here?" Her question is sincere, but her tone is doubtful. She thought a year was plenty old enough for crossing sandbars without supervision. Mother had spoken of visiting Ischia before, so she didn't see why it would be any different for her to do so, but she hadn't considered that maybe the rules had changed until now. A flicker of confusion crosses her face as she wonders if maybe she did make a mistake. It's followed by a brief moment of dread, as something about Beachmasters comes to mind, and she wonders if she went to the wrong island.
Quell, who has been rapidly scanning of the distant Tephran shore in hopes of spotting another horse coming behind, immediately ends the search and returns his brown-eyed attention directly to the apricot filly. The colt expects to find distrust or fear on her face, but instead there is awe. Awe, and then wonder and doubt, flicking across her face and voice almost too rapidly for Quell to read. The sensation is overall unsettling, and he stamps one scale surrounded hoof firmly on the damp sand in an effort to ground himself.
Now his frown is turned on the girl, who has the wits to sound concerned. Good, Quell thinks. She’s new here, it seems, even uncertain that she’s come to the right place. The black pegasus is very glad that he’d chosen to follow her, because the filly with hair like corals might be just the kind to get lured into a trap.
“Yeah this is Ischia,” he says, and his frown softens into narrowed eyes and a curious twist to his white mouth. “But you gotta be careful in these parts. Don’t go swimming in the water on the island with anybody you don’t know, okay. There’s some…water-horses that aren’t so friendly.” Kelpies, he thinks, the carnivorous counterpart to the breathtakingly lovely nereids that rule these tropic shores. He lets the canines of his teeth shift to those of his pinniped body, pointed and over-large in his equine mouth, and he shows them when he runs a nervous tongue across them.
“This place is real nice otherwise though.” Quell adds with a shrug of his winged shoulders. “It’s real pretty. Nice food. Good swimming.” Swimming he’s just warned her away from, he realizes, and falls suddenly quiet. His golden-tipped ears flick uncertainly, and he takes a sidestep toward the sea.
Starsonder's relief is expressed with a sharp exhale through her teeth. Her narrow shoulders relax as the contrasting flurry of her emotions begins to settle, and she searches his face, trying to decide what kind of frown he is wearing.
But his frown changes into something a little more forgiving before she can decide. She is happy to forget it, listening carefully to the advice of her world-wise elder. The scolding note is almost endearing - as if it was important to him that she remain out of harm's way. Again, he reminds her of her older sisters, and she responds to him in much the same way she would have them: with a half-suppressed laugh and teasing tone.
"Not friendly..." she quotes, her lips pressing together briefly to hide a smile, "as in they will be grumpy and bossy?" But the way his tongue bumps along the large sharp teeth she hadn't noticed before catches her eye, and suddenly she is a little more serious. "Or not friendly in the eat you alive kind of way?"
But even with the warning of his newly displayed fangs, her question is mostly rhetorical. It's hard for her to imaging such dangers, at least, not under a brilliant blue sky and next to the turquoise water she had grown up splashing in.
"And anyway, you wouldn't let anything bad happen."
Quell begins to nod when she repeats his words, his sidestepping paused with a single hoof in the air. Nod until she teases, at least, and then he plants his feet more firmly in the ground. He is serious! Why he must always be the thoughtful one eludes Quell, but this girl, like his friends, underestimates risk. Quell, with his inherent caution, is more like his father than he realizes, but he sighs in quickly built exasperation at her too-accurate example.
“Yes! The ‘eating you alive’ kind of way! You wouldn’t even know it, and then you’d be dead!” Impressing upon her the danger seems important, but he is not sure how she will react to mentions of gore.
“Maybe I would! Maybe you’d deserve it for not looking out good enough!” He decides to add for emphasis, realizing as soon as the words leave his mouth that perhaps he has gone too far. Quell looks down quickly, following the line of dark sand out to the sea. He says, very softly and seemingly to the distant waves. “I wouldn’t though, not really. Even if you deserve it.” It’s as close an apology as he is comfortable giving for his outburst. The young colt is not accustomed to conflict (at least not the kind that isn’t a kick or a shove or solvable by one or the other), and it stirs uncomfortably in his belly.
Leave, he thinks, leave or adapt.
Choosing the latter, he looks back at the smaller filly. “I’m Quell. What’s your name?” He takes a moment to look more closely at the newcomer to Ischia. The splashes of white on her sides looks a little like the waves, and the iridescent look of it seems more than a trick of the ocean water that still dampens it. The brightness of her rosey sides is a contrast to the blacks and white and gold that Quell and most of his family and friends sport. She is without wings or scales, and no flowers grow in her mane nor are there flames around her fetlocks.
She is quite different from anyone that Quell knows, the boy thinks. He's not yet sure how he feels about that.
Starsonder was so used to her words holding no real weight with anyone that she hardly ever thought a sentence out before it left her mouth. As the youngest, and on the talkative side, most of what she said was overlooked when she butted into conversations at home. She hadn't meant to get under his skin, and his reaction surprises her - a sharp reminder she is an unknown land. Another attention-grabbing remark to his first statement is at the ready, but the second statement makes her look a little like a colorful cod when the words die in her mouth.
Her pink nose quivers and her eyes grow hot, but she had learned how to keep her baby-tears from falling, and she sets her jaw and refuses to shed them. She points her head back in the direction of Tephra, but it's only a glance. Before she can decide what she should do, he's speaking again, and the little wound he had opened heals as quickly as it appeared.
Her faith that he won't eat her is easily renewed, and she visibly relaxes, her face tilting back up to him happily. "I'm Starsonder," she tells him proudly, but then she remembered the way her mother introduces herself and how she rarely told others her whole name. "But I was thinking about shortening it. Like yours, Quell. Do you like Star or Sonder better? There's already one Star in my family, but I think Sonder sounds funny."
Starsonder, she says, a mouthful of a name with a meaning he does not understand. She’d rather bright, he supposes, like a star.
“You could choose your own name,” Quell suggests, “Like Scar or Dash or something else…cool.” The black colt is uncertain what sort of names a Tephran girl might find interesting or suitable, but he does agree that Sonder is a little heavy and Star perhaps too common with the frequency of the Beqanna God’s frequent presence. He has never questioned his own name, bestowed on him by his mother, though he thinks about it now. He ponders quietly, mouth twisting pensively.
Overhead, the rustling of the leaves in the autumn light catches his attention and Quell raises dark eyes to the canopy. The shaded undersides of the leaves are darker than the morning sky, holding tightly still to the warm autumn night.
Quell holds his dried wings a bit away from his body, allowing the fur and scales of his dark body to dry more quickly. His wings would hold the water against his sides and make him itchy after a few minutes, and he’d long ago learned the importance of drying off as soon as he’s out of the water.
“Where are you from, anyway?” Quell inquires. He’s sure the answer is Tephra given the sandbars she’d crossed. Or perhaps Tephra was just the beach she’d left the mainland from. It is not as though Quell is well-travelled, able to differentiate the scent of one ‘strange place’ from the next. He is only certain she is from neither Ischia nor Sylva. His dark eyes glitter and his expression is curious. “Why’s somebody not with you to, you know, watch out for you so you don’t get eaten?” He tries to phrase it as inoffensively as possible, and glances at her surreptitiously from beneath his black forelock to see if he’s been successful.
"Scar," she repeats, seeming to think it over. "I don't think I've earned that one," she says, her velvet nose wrinkling. Most of the adults she knew had the signs of old wounds somewhere on their bodies, but her skin was smooth and blemishes as it had been when she was born. Dash is a little more appealing, but she decides the matter will take more consideration, and Quell is asking further questions she doesn't want to ignore.
"My mom left for the alliance about a week ago... so I just came over from Tephra." She doesn't add that she was told to stay close to her step-father and siblings. They would surely notice if she didn't come back when the sun began to sink, but otherwise, the days were her own. The other order Warlight had given her was not to leave Tephra, but a year old was plenty old enough to start making her own choices. Or so she thought.
"This is my first time leaving, actually." She had asked nicely to be taken to see the world beyond her home, but there had always been some reason it needed to be done another day. This was better anyway, no one was bothered, and she is enjoying her first brush with independence. "So want to show me around before the tide comes back?
She says that ‘Scar’ is not a moniker she has earned, and Quell nods agreeably. It would not fit him either, he thinks, but perhaps in the future, when he is the victor of an alliance or a warrior king or something else thrilling and dangerous. The draconic horse has a great many plans for the future, it seems, though for now he is simply a leggy colt with dreams. He is thinking of these, a little distracted by his daydreams, when he is reminded that he’d asked Starsonder Longname where she’d come from.
The answer is much more exciting than ‘just Tephra’, and Quell’s dark ears prick up excitedly as she says her mother left for the alliance. That she has been left, presumably alone, is less important, even with his earlier worry.
“The Alliance?!” He repeats. “That is so cool! I’m gonna be in the Alliance someday, you know.” There’s confidence in the way he says this, as though his participation someday will be a given. That he has never had any training, never battled anything but his brothers and friends, is inconsequential. There will be time for that later; the Alliance doesn’t happen every year, after all.
She’s never left Tephra, she says, and Quell is pulled farther away from his consideration of the Alliance and how he might earn the name ‘Scar’.
“I don’t really know this island,” the winged colt says to her request for a tour. “I grew up on one of the smaller islands, but another family lives there now.” He’s seen them, a pair of Beachmasters and their children, but since finding them there has not returned to Kelpie. Perhaps the island even has another name now, he thinks, now that the patriarch of that clan has trapped in the cenote.
“I just know you shouldn’t go near the big water hole, no matter what you see or hear.”
