"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
Tiercel isn’t sure why, but he lingers in Loess. He has spent enough time wandering in the past years; quite frankly, he’s grown bored of mindlessly drifting from one tuft of grass to the next. The does and badgers have been his friends for long enough, but they make poor conversationalists. When he had first made his way into his old home, Tiercel had wondered if the ghosts of his childhood would walk with him. He had carried the weight of their shadows since cleaving himself from his family’s legacy (an ironic concept — to feel heavy when one should feel lighter from severing the ties).
As he bathes in a warm saltwater spring, Tiercel realizes that he has not been plagued by the memories of his youth. He can recall only one experience where he had contemplated those days, but it had been his choice to drift through the memories. Since then — since Oceane had sought out his parentage from within his navy face — he has drifted through Loess like a feather upon a western breeze. It is as if Loess has gathered those tightly-bound memories and hidden them among the red rocks and cacti, rescuing Tiercel from those thoughts that disturbed him for so long.
The sun warms the parts of him that lie above the water’s surface. Dark blue withers linger just above the clear water, where his bi-colored mane follows the ebb and flow of his movements. Tiercel positions himself comfortably, wedged against a few smooth underwater rocks so he can relax his muscles. As his pale eyes slide closed, Tiercel gathers there is no need to craft emotions for the content he feels during the sunny afternoon.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She does not usually think about anyone else. Sometimes she thinks of her mother, or her twin sister – wonders where they had disappeared to, if she should look for them, or if it was simply expected to never see them again as they navigated their separate lives. She does not miss them, even though she thinks she is supposed to. She assumes they do not miss her either since they have never tried to find her.
But rarely does she think of anyone else that has crossed her path, which was an alarming amount for someone that often chose to hole herself away from the eyes of others. Most of them were interesting in the moment, but she did not feel any kind of attachment to them.
They were forgotten almost the moment they were out of sight, and not thought of unless she should happen across them again.
Sometimes, though, usually without warning, she does think of Tiercel.
He is a passing thought, much in the way of her mother and sister, but a thought nonetheless. It was strange, but not in a way that she lingered on it.
He had, in her opinion, one of the most interesting abilities. She still did not understand how he could project emotions onto her – and she was not sure if essentially being a blank canvas to his brush augmented his own power, or if it just seemed that way to her. Regardless, he stood out to her more than anyone, and when she finds him in Loess, there is a moment of genuine surprise that jolts through her. It's sharp and electrifying, but short-lived, and her face is again seemingly carved of marble when she says his name in the quiet, plain tones of her voice, “Tiercel.”
She steps closer, the afternoon sun warm across her back in a way that makes her crave nightfall. It doesn't seem to occur to her that she is interrupting his moment of peace, and though she does not step into the water, she comes to stand right on the edge of it. She looks at him with dark, bruised-purple eyes set against a stark white face, and there is, almost, the smallest thread of what she thinks might be happiness warming inside of her chest. “You’re back,” and her face faintly softens with a tentative smile.
They made an interesting pair at their first encounter… Two souls searching for different things and finding themselves woven together into a loose knot that offered a brief moment of relief. She had watched her family with detachment and he had felt the emptiness that dwells within her. He had fled his family with pleasure and she had felt the vitality that dwells within him. That knot had become unraveled in the years since their first meeting, but it had held on by a thread. The thread was found in her occasional thoughts of him and in his occasional feelings about her.
They are opposites — empty and full, thinking and feeling — and it draws them together.
Their differences pull them closer at an inopportune time in Tiercel’s day. The sound of another’s feet against stone and grass disturbs his inner peace, so he sends a fierce arrow of anger toward the stranger. He is beginning to let the emotion fester in her skin like an infection when her simple voice reaches his ears. Although he hasn’t seen Islas in years the quiet within her tune is familiar to him, a song that calls at the tide of emotions that roll within his body. As Tiercel pulls the anger away from her pale skin, his eyes open to find her face.
She looks older since the last time they met, and he expects he looks older as well. Time has added curves and muscle in a way that dares his eyes to follow their ebb and flow. Tiercel barely resists, only because he catches the way her face softens at the sight of him. While it is a subtle change, it lightens the purple of her eyes and adds femininity to the rocky edges of her face.
The rosy tendrils of happiness float between the pair of them and the emotion pulls the knot tighter. “Islas.” His tenor is smooth and warm, filled with all the emotion her voice lacks. Tiercel is pleased to see the white mare, but he is rather annoyed by their positioning — her standing over him and he turning his head up toward her. He isn’t willing to share that annoyance with Islas just yet, so he keeps it hidden while he climbs out of the saltwater pool.
His pale eyes search her ivory face for a moment as he allows himself to drip-dry for a moment. “You’re in Loess.” Tiercel doesn’t remember ever telling her about his childhood home, but he is grateful she is here nonetheless.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She remembers the first time she had seen anger – the kind that she could almost taste. She had asked Set if it felt like a storm inside of his chest because that was all she had to compare it to. She has seen the way clouds grow black and bruised, has heard the low growl of thunder and felt the way it reverberates within the marrow of her bones. She is familiar with the ways that nature chooses to unleash her fury, but she has never understood the way it tries to manifest itself inside the chest of mortals.
It was the one emotion she couldn’t seem to mimic. She had learned how to fake smiles, had picked up on all the things that they deemed as proper conversation etiquette, but she could not figure out a way to feel anger.
Until it shoots like lightning in her veins, bright and burning. It pierces into her chest where it then spreads outwards in hot streaks beneath her skin, and her dark eyes sharpen at the newfound venom that springs to her tongue.
And then, just like that, it is gone.
Just as quickly as he had injected the toxin into her veins he pulls it back out, and the hollow space that makes up all of her insides somehow seems to feel even larger.
She is left with an unfamiliar ache in her chest, a longing for something that she still did not quite grasp, something that wasn't entirely hers to begin with.
The happiness blooms next, an amber warmth in comparison to the molten red of anger; like the sunshine from above has seeped into her skin and spread through her bones. It brings with it a new depth to her eyes, as though they finally can come into focus and she holds him within her gaze. The emotion takes root inside of her, and she almost begins to wonder if she had missed him, or if it is just what his artist's brush is telling her to feel.
She doesn't know what to do with it either way and so she can only take a step back as he rises, watching the way the water glistens and runs off the muscular shape of his body. She thinks he is what would be considered handsome, but she comes from a place where all the stars are beautiful just because they are stars, and she sees everyone here in the same way. No, there is something else about him, that mysterious give and take of emotion; the holder of the things that keeps her so divided from this world. He is something beyond his physical shape, just as she is so much more than the equine shell this place has confined her to.
“I am,” she says as she casts a sweeping glance at their surroundings, still trying to decide what had led her to stop here, before looking back to him with a softness that is so out of place for her. “I don’t know for how long, though.” She pauses, still clinging to the threads of emotion he had given before, wringing the last of it until her voice is sincere rather than hollow, “And you? Are you staying, or just passing through?”
The line between wrong and right can quickly become blurred with such an influential ability. Does he create the emotions out of thin air and pour them into the body of another or does he simply coax their feelings from their hiding places and stoke their fires? He imagines himself pouring the hot lead of guilt into their veins. He imagines himself pulling surprise from their belly and allowing it to soak into every inch of them until they are quivering.
Tiercel has wondered many times if there is a line between creating and magnifying — and if there is such a thing, whether he will notice it as his skills develop. His stubbornness and bitterness have never given him a chance to ask his mother, not even when they were on speaking terms. But as he tenderly coaxes the happiness to ignite within Islas, he can tell that this emotion is different. It is the tiniest flame of its own, a small burning ember that may quickly disappear into ash if he does not give it oxygen and nutrients.
So Tiercel feeds the ember what it craves and watches as she softens like an innocent fawn before him. Despite the gnawing emptiness he knows she feels, there is something genuine about her that is neither manufactured nor illuminated. Islas is unapologetically authentic in her own starry way. He cannot begin to comprehend exactly what she is, but he also cannot deny that there is something different about her.
She is ethereal, otherworldly, astounding.
She is reliable, and yet he finds himself surprised by her.
As his cerulean eyes look first into her gaze and then across the lines of her pale face, Tiercel begins to understand that he might never figure her out, no matter the amount of time he might peer into her abyss.
“I haven’t decided yet.” Reluctantly, he peels his gaze away from her and scans Loess’s hills and valleys. “This is what I was running from when we first met.” Tiercel allows her to feel all he had felt that night — the overwhelming guilt that Gale had died while he had struggled among the thorns, the fiery anger toward the family that felt distant and ill-fitting, the aching sadness upon leaving the favorite nooks and crannies he had grown up among, the surreal excitement at the possibilities in front of him, the lingering rapture she had left him with in the hours and days and weeks past their goodbye — and each emotion might sweep over her like the rhythmic tides of the oceans or the slow rotation of the stars upon the skies.
He paints his life into her darkness so she is full of color. Once he has finished, there is a steady ache of emotions (the emotions that he feels when he thinks of her, in fact) but they are too numerous to put to words.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She finds herself staring at his eyes, which is not by itself a strange thing for her to do. She has always been overly observant, in a way that she has learned others did not much care for. They found it invasive when really she was just studying them, trying to sort out the way that they worked. They felt such an array of things that she could not even begin to fathom, and while a younger version of herself had once been set on learning to mimic them in a way that would allow her to blend, that was no longer her goal.
An earth-bound star was never going to blend, no matter how hard she tried, no matter how much emotion Tiercel could create for her, or how many times she echoed a hollow smile to a stranger.
The way that she stares at his eyes now, though, is something entirely different from before; admiring, almost, rather than studious. The happiness from earlier still lingers, and maybe that is why she notices that his eyes are the same color as the waters off the coast of Tephra, or the sky in the meadow on a sparkling summer day.
She wonders if it means anything that he was born with eyes vibrant enough to broadcast his emotion – the way they can go bright with happiness and then cloud with displeasure.
She wonders what it says about her, to be born with eyes so dark they are unreadable, a mirror-image of the almost incomprehensible emptiness that makes up the inside of her.
She doesn’t respond to what he says, because the sudden torrent of emotions begins to hit her. The guilt that feels like a stone but tastes like tears on her tongue, the storm of anger that lights her veins on fire, and then the sadness that could almost be the hollowness she feels all the time, if only it had something to cling to.
They all eventually give way to a strange kind of thrill, one that shivers down her spine, but the emotion that she is left with is the one that makes her look at him as though she is seeing him for the first time.
It hits her like a rush of heat, it blossoms alive and bright inside of her chest, before twisting itself into a knot that aches just behind her breastbone.
“How can you stand to feel all of that?” The question is quiet, confused, and almost sympathetic. It didn’t seem possible for any living creature to be able to withstand that kind of whiplash of emotion, and she cannot decide if she is lucky because that will never be her, or something to be pitied – because that will never be her.
Except for now, because the ache is still there, spreading from her chest to her bones, and she finds herself closing the gap that had existed between them. Her stark white lips touch his shoulder, and she is surprised, as she always is, at how warm and so completely alive he feels. She is sure she can feel his pulse jumping just beneath his skin, and when her own heartbeat quickens in response she shifts closer. “What is this one called?” She asks him, referring to the lingering feeling he had left her with; the dull throb in her chest, the feeling of something – someone – missing. It reminds her of the way her trapped star seemed to pulsate and flutter when she looked at the stars in the sky, like it knew up there lay the answers to all of her problems, but with no way to get there.
He was similar to those stars, then, because he has always been her answer here on earth – her key to feeling, her only hope at some semblence of normalcy – but just like the stars, she didn’t know how to reach him.
Tiercel cannot remember the last time he shared the entirety of the weight of his emotions with another. He is certain he had smothered his siblings under his excitement or frustration in those years where he could not control his projections. Ever since those days, he has kept his emotions locked away unless he wants to share them with another. Tiercel has kept their heaviness upon his own heart, allowing them to crash against the walls of his body and feeling his skin prickle with heat when they encourage him to set them free.
He is a pressurized vessel.
She is willing — he thinks — to be his release.
The persistent waves of his emotions settle. Tiercel feels weariness settle within him, but it is a peaceful sensation that mingles with the relief Islas has brought him. He spends each day full to the brim with feelings and there is a brief, sweet moment of emptiness after he pours into her. Tiercel catches a glimpse at the shadows she feels; the way he is hollow and absent is foreign and yet he welcomes the sensation.
Her question surprises him and it brings a rare smile to his dark navy lips. His heart has always submitted to the restless tides of his emotions and he cannot imagine a world without such a fact. He supposes he has been hardened by those threatening waves; his spirit has become both an iron prison and a humble slave to the endless onslaught of thought, feeling, and reaction. Tiercel had learned to control and submit early on, when letting his projections run rampant or ignoring the wild flames within led to consequences he would rather not mention again. From his first breath, he has lived with all she had felt, and more. So his reply is rather simple, despite the twisted road that lies behind it. “I don’t know anything different.”
Her pale mouth reignites him, but Tiercel finds himself softening into her touch. She is a light — bright and mysterious — and he is the moth drawn to her. His fatigued heart quickens within his ribs as hers does, and the ancient dance of souls drawing together brings his muscular side closer to her slender one. There are times when emptiness is not recognized until it has been filled. Her warmth makes him realize he has felt emptiness before, although he didn’t notice it until just now. Like his projections might weave to make her darkness feel even darker, the soft ivory of her body makes his loneliness feel even lonelier.
He wonders how long he has felt like this without realizing it (the riptide of bitter isolation, a soft blue flame burning beneath its wilder cousins of rage and guilt). When Tiercel’s pale eyes find her endlessly dark ones, they seem even brighter than they had before — enlightenment seeming to color them a shade lighter than their typical cerulean. Again her question surprises him, and he tucks his nose into the pale strands whispering across her neck to gather his thoughts. Rather than slowing his heart, like he thought it might, Islas’s smooth skin and sweet smell only further speeds it up.
“It doesn’t have a name,” Tiercel says. His voice is barely above a whisper, but it is low and soft in comparison to his normal tenor. The heat of the sun burns against his back, but his insides are igniting with an entirely different heat. “I suppose it’s how I’ve felt about you since we first met.” He feels no shame in admitting there has been a steady ache in his chest, or in acknowledging the fact that he feels as if she is the answer to unspoken prayers. Tiercel pulls his face away from her neck to peer into the abyss of her eyes, expecting her familiar observant yet emotionless stare and anticipating no less than an honest answer.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She has never felt anything for anyone else before, and it is alien and strange but also exhilarating.
Would she have ever felt this without his help? She is certain the answer would be no, but with this new ache spreading in her chest and to the center of her bones it brings with it a peculiar kind of hope – this idea that maybe he could have stirred something in the dark even without pouring emotions into her. It’s a foolish thought, she knows, and under normal circumstances she would never be prone to such romantic ideas. But it's impossible to ignore it now, with the way her skin hums like electricity when he touches her.
She wants to believe that he is bringing to light all of the things she would have felt if she had not been hindered by the star that seemed so intent on keeping her from feeling anything.
Alongside the emotions that he lends her there is one of her own that blossoms, faint and almost imperceptible; resentment towards her star, toward the thing that kept her divided from this world, from him.
Because in the back of her mind she is already thinking of what will happen when he leaves, how she will be left with her darkness and her emptiness, and she wonders what it would be like to miss someone.
And so she drinks up everything he offers her, she feels it all and she lets herself linger over each and every emotion, like maybe she can memorize it enough to still feel it after he has left. When he presses his nose into her neck it sends a shiver down her spine and ignites a heat in her chest, one that spreads the full length of her and makes her wish that he was closer. The sun across her back is warm, but it is nothing compared to the way she is glowing on the inside, catching fire like tinder when he whispers against her skin.
“How?” She whispers, the word soft and confused as she wrestles with the overwhelming tide of emotions that keep pulling her under – the emotions that she gladly sucks into her lungs and drowns herself on. “There's nothing about me worth feeling anything for.” There is a pain to the words that tastes strange on her tongue, bitter like ocean water, and a feeling of guilt that tightens around her ribcage. He shouldn’t feel anything at all for her, least of all not this torrent of things that are still raging inside of her veins.
But with this newfound state of feeling she is also selfish, and while she knows she could sever the tie between them – could step away and disappear, where his emotions cannot touch her – she doesn’t. She coils her body against his, trails her lips along the edge of his jaw, and tells him, “Don’t let me forget how this feels. Please,” the sureness of her voice fades into a whispered plea, her chest pushed against his and her teeth running against the slope of his shoulder, “I want to miss you once you’re gone.”
Tiercel has also thought about what will happen when she leaves. Her simplicity is a balm to the chapped edges that sting from the force of his grief and insecurity. He pours into her — splashing her darkness with the hundreds of colors that dwell in him — and yet she pours into him — a soothing presence for his aches — and they become a mutualistic relationship. Like the birds and the beasts, they are two different species that are drawn closer together because of their gifts. They are unique in their own ways but their differences create a bubble where the world becomes easier, if only for the few hours they have together.
And as Islas winds closer to him, he settles deeper into their embrace. He hopes the way her touch feels against him will banish the thoughts of their imminent separation. The feverish way she clings to his magic is like a gentle tug at Tiercel’s heart, pulling him closer to her in a way he could never describe. As she drinks in that endless torrent of emotion, he notices the smallest spark from within her own chest. He doesn’t magnify it or touch it, merely observing the way her resentment quietly, softly glows against the immense darkness.
He hadn’t expected her to understand why or how he has come to feel this way about her (it is confusing enough to untangle the complexities of the emotions that bring them closer together). If Tiercel is honest with himself, even he doesn’t understand it. His ability to wield emotions and the ways he submits to their control do not grant him the knowledge (at least at this point in his life) of their mysterious ways. He is merely their vessel, a tool to carry their power far and infect even the most simple of beings.
So — as confused and mystified as she is — Tiercel does not answer her question. His nerves shiver in response to her touch, sending a twitch across the muscles that lie beneath her teeth. A trail of fire burns against his shoulder in the wake of her mouth and he is so lost in her that he almost misses her pleading. “Islas.” The steady ache between them has developed into something more, something fierce and unpredictable and consuming. Tiercel feels out of control; whether he wants to or not, he isn’t entirely sure he could pull his projections away from her now.
His dark lips trace the curve of her neck, and he pauses when his mouth reaches the bend of her back. “Stay with me, Islas.” And while the sun shines down on them, they burn together so brilliantly even the midnight stars might be able to see them.
