"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
The first several steps in this new life were the hardest, the shakiest. Risa moved off the beach and did not let herself look back at the gateway. The scent of death lessened as she left but it did not disappear entirely, for which she was grateful. The world was dark and decaying, utterly unlike the one she only had vague memories of from when she was a girl.
And she was glad for it.
It made her transition easier, though she soon realized she was not sure where to go. Neither of her parents had been in the afterlife when she left it but she had no idea where they might have gone. As the bay mare walked without a destination she tried to remember the scraps of information she had been given from the various souls she had interacted with. Beqanna had changed, though she only remembered bits and pieces of it before anyway. The Gates no longer existed, which might have been the only thing left familiar to her.
She was adrift.
And it was both frightening and exhilarating.
Her blue eyes were so deep they matched the shadows of the world around her as she moved. It was a halting, unsure journey that brought her here - to the meadow. Eventually, she stopped, standing near one of the trees as if she was sheltering from a bright sun. But she was just fascinated by the solid presence of the bark as she leaned against it - as it scraped against her skin and reminded her what pain was.
After a few moments there, she needed to inhale a deep, gasping breath. Breathing was an instinct she had only half-remembered and every now and then, she forgot it was now required in order for her to function.
As her breaths came in more regular intervals, timed with a slow mantra in her head in and out, in and out to find the rhythm, she turned her attention away from the tree, away from its solid presence and into the vague nothingness that was the meadow around her.
She never wanders far, she knows better.
But she has an electric pulse and the dark things know better than to touch her.
To sink their claws into her would surely hurt them more than it would hurt her. When she touches the purple father, it is the sweetest circuit and she lays her head against the swell of his ribcage and revels in the electric currents that surge through them. The star-strewn father touched her only once and then could never touch her again.
The dark things are like the star-father. They are not electric, not like she is.
This is why she does not fear them as she trips across the meadow, skimming her dark mouth through the dead grass, wondering what it must have tasted like once. What it might have been like to fill her belly with it. How wonderful it must have been.
She leaves a static charge in her wake as she moves, wondering.
And when she turns to make her way back to the purple father she finds that she has wandered farther than she meant to.
“Dad?” she calls into the darkness, squinting. But he is nowhere and every acre of dead grass looks the same. But she does not fear the dark things because they are not electric, not like she is.
She takes a series of tentative steps back in the direction she came, catching a glimpse of a shape sheltered beneath a tree. A dark shape but not a dark thing and she ventures closer. It is not her father, that much is clear the closer she gets. “Excuse me, have you seen a purple stallion nearby?” she calls. “I lost one of my dads.”
@[Risa] i'll come back with html eventually lmao
@[The Monsters] please mess with her intangibility!
Risa is lost in the rhythm of her breathing, lost in the emptiness of her thoughts and (seemingly) the world around her. She could wander anywhere in this darkness and never know where she is, she thinks. But she supposes that might be true even if the sun was blazing overhead. Surely, the world has changed a little since she has last been to it.
Although it startles her into awareness of her surroundings, it takes Risa a moment to realize she’s being addressed by the voice. She turns to see a young filly and even in the darkness, Risa can make out the stars that adorn the girl. They are so strange to her, this mare that had grown up in a very different Beqanna - when odd colours were more or less non-existant. She certainly could not remember having ever met any, her entire family was shades of grey or brown. And the girl is looking for her purple father?
Risa finds that she cannot even imagine what a purple horse would look like so surely if she had seen him, he would have stood out. “No I’m sorry, I haven’t.” Her voice is thin and ghostly still though her body is solid. Maybe there are some things you just don’t get back.
Whatever she might have sounded like in her last life has been lost to time.
04-10-2021, 06:16 PM (This post was last modified: 04-10-2021, 06:17 PM by sigrid.)
The child doesn’t know much about ghosts, certainly not enough to know that the mare has the voice of one. No, all she knows is that the voice sounds like smoke while the rest of her seems solid and she feels one sharp stab of uncertainty as she takes a short, uncertain step closer to get a better look at the bay mare. Suddenly she’s not so thoroughly convinced that she’s not a dark thing after all.
“That’s okay,” she says, though there’s an edge of wariness in her tone as she studies the mare through the crushing darkness. “I’m sure he’s not far.” She adds this like a warning, just in case the mare is thinking about trying anything funny.
She is on the verge of saying something further when a series of extraordinary things happen:
A soft light materializes just above her, suspended in the air just to the right of her head, a star that murmurs quietly to her. It tells her that the mare is not a dark thing at all, though the child has no reason to trust this soft light any more than she has any reason to trust the mare.
And then the most extraordinary thing of all --
A great light breaks over Beqanna, spreading outward from the eclipse as the darkness that had blotted out the sun dissolves. The child squints instinctively, having been born into darkness, the light burning her sensitive eyes.
“What’s happening?” she yelps, eyes tightly shut, the bay mare suddenly her only ally.
Risa just nods to the girl’s comment that her father probably isn’t far, not picking up on the edge to her voice. Parents tended to stick pretty close by to the children they cared about - as far as she could remember, anyway. As soon as she wandered away from this tree she’d probably find her purple father again if he wanted to be found.
She might have even remarked on this outloud, not yet having relearned what to keep in her thoughts only, if something startling didn’t happen right then.
Some small light materializes above the girl and Risa leans away, pressing back into the tree just a little, and then, as if the smaller light had just been a warning, the entire sky erupts with light. A startled cry escapes from Risa, she blinks her too-new eyes against this new light.
Some instinct she doesn’t understand keeps her rooted near the filly, keeps her from abandoning the girl that she can now see clearly. “The sun is back.” Risa replies in a strangled voice, pressing herself even further back against the tree as if it will shelter her from the burning light, into the rough bark and it further irritates the skin she had rubbed raw on it a few moments ago. There’s a whisper of warmth against her skin too, like the sun is telling her not to be afraid of it, but she is. She very much is.
The sun.
Had either of her fathers ever mentioned the sun?
They had mentioned the dark things and how they were not electric like she was. They had told her not to be afraid but to be careful. They had not mentioned the sun and there is something strangled in this stranger’s voice that tells her she should be afraid. Her star-strewn father would be disappointed to know that her heartbeat accelerates with fear. Her purple father would be softer, more understanding, she knows that and she considers making a run for it, going to find him, adhering herself to his side with that electric current. But she doesn’t know how far she has wandered and she doesn’t know her way back and she doesn’t have any real reason to trust this stranger but she sounds just as afraid as Sigrid feels so she stays.
Slowly, she forces one eye open. The light is blinding and her face wrinkles around a pained grimace as she edges closer to the mare.
“Is it going to hurt us?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper. She has no way of knowing if the sun can hear her, if it’s coming for them specifically. It is as she opens her one eye fully that she notices, again, that ball of light that hovers above her. Thinking suddenly that the sun must have sent it, she lets out a yelp and skitters even closer to the mare but the light follows, whispers softly that there is nothing to be afraid of. It is a star, it will not hurt her. The sun is a star, too.
“Why is it so bright?” she asks second, full of questions about this thing she’s never heard of.
i’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell?
Threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell
