"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
09-01-2021, 05:04 PM (This post was last modified: 09-01-2021, 05:44 PM by bolder.)
There is a look of delight on his face, softening the otherwise sharp expression normally found on a wolf. The only other shifters that Bolder has known have been his Uncle and Aunt, and before that, he had known none. He had grown up thinking that such magic was rare. There had been no shapeshifters in the North (not that he was aware of) and Bolder had been taught that those who took too many shapes lost track of their own.
But this blue-iridescent girl seems to know who she is, and Bolder takes this as one more sign that his father just didn't understand who he was.
The dark-russet wolf leaps forward, moving in silent agreement to Sickle's suggestion. He keeps a cautious eye on the phoenix, thinking that if there was an egg expert between them, it would most likely be the bird. Oceanus disappears overhead and the lanky hunter slows, coming to an eventual stop once the tree canopy hides most of the blue sky. Bolder still isn't entirely sure that he wants his companion to come from an egg, but the other shifter had suggested they start there, and the rapport he feels from their shared gift makes him trust her.
Bolder shifts again, thinking that a vantage point from the branches might make their search easier.
To what?
His brain imagines the hawk he often becomes while flying around Hyaline. But ever since Uncle Gale had shown him the power of more, Bolder decides to try something different. He recalls a bird - not as majestic as Erne or as colorful as Oceanus - but the young adolescent wolf becomes a tawny puffin that balances awkwardly on a thick tree limb when it lands. This won't work he thinks, before turning into a brown squirrel that races up the rest of the tree, stopping only to glance back for Sickle.
A bubble of laughter escapes Sickle when Bolder turns into a bird she’s never seen before and then a squirrel. She follows his lead again, but it takes a few moments for her to settle into a dark blue squirrel - her excitement causing her shifting to flicker uncontrollably through different shapes and colours.
It’s been a favourite way to pass the time for her, changing into smaller animals so that she could see the world from a different view. As a sparrow she could weave through the branches of the trees in Tephra and as a snake she could explore the world underneath the flowers and through the lush ground cover.
While climbing the tree, she decides the silence isn’t very fun. “I hope if it’s an egg it hatches as quickly as Oceanus did. I don’t know how to look after an egg.” She admits as she scrambles across a branch, peering down and around and underneath it too - just in case. In a burst of inspiration, her shape changes slightly and she leaps to the next tree as a flying squirrel - gliding across the space as another peel of delighted laughter escapes her.
“What your name, anyway?” She asks when her laughter fades and she pokes her head around a leaf to look for her new friend, just as Oceanus lets her know he hasn’t spotted anything yet.
09-24-2021, 01:56 PM (This post was last modified: 09-24-2021, 01:58 PM by bolder.)
Bolder pauses to watch Sickle, and his youthful excitement grows as he watches the young shifter flicker wildly between color and shapes.
It's something that he is very familiar with, and he smiles, ready to share some insight that his mentor, Mazikeen, had once shared with him. The older youth waits and then when she is close enough that she can hear him, the pegasus calls out: "Do you practice often?" The dark blue squirrel then leaps up to the next branch, intent on reaching a perch that will offer them both an extensive view of the Meadow. "My Aunt says that one of the best parts of shifting is being able to change your mind!"
He watches Sickle scamper across one branch, peer underneath it, and then alter her shape slightly. She adds flaps of skin (as far as Bolder can tell) near her arms and forelegs and then takes off the nearest tree. Grinning, the yearling does the same and leaps after the other shifter, marveling at what such a little shift could do.
"Bolder," he tells her as he latches on to the bark below her and then scurries up to eagerly meet her, keen on continuing their search through the underbrush, without realizing that she has something else he lacks: a shadow. "What's yours?"
It's easy to assume that Bolder asks whether she practices often because she's obviously so good at shifting. “Oh yeah, whenever I can! I used to practice with my brother a lot but he’s… well he’s not around right now.” Sickle’s mood droops visibly but when Bolder mentions his aunt giving him shifting advice, she perks up a little at the coincidence of it. “Hey my aunt was helping me with my shifting too!” Vastra was a pretty grumpy teacher but it had become a game with her and her cousins to see if they could get the older mare to sparkle. Sometimes all it took was a particularly ridiculous shift or shade of pink, but sometimes those stormy grey eyes wouldn’t light up for anything. It was a great game.
She pauses in her search, beaming when Bolder follows her lead and launches between the trees and introduces himself. “I’m Sickle.” She replies, still grinning. This is fun, the meeting new friends part.
She’s just about to check under another branch when she notices something a little odd about her new friend. You know, aside from the fact that they’re both squirrels at the moment.
Bolder can sense the way Sickle's mood drops at the mention of a brother.
It's something he understands, though he has a brother and a sister. Though his stay in Hyaline has granted him much, it had not come without its losses. "I have a brother, too." He tells Sickle, "And a sister." He chimes in, a kind of verbal support to understanding that not everything can be done with the comfort of siblings.
Like childhood, sometimes leaving them behind is necessary for moving ahead.
"What's your Aunt's name?" he asks, wondering if this was another cousin. But no, he thinks. If Sickle belonged to the Pack, he would have seen her in Hyaline. "Mine is Mazikeen and she's...," the young shifter exhales some of his pride. "She is really powerful."
His bushy tail twitches as he thinks of how else to explain the Alpha, but the other squirrel draws his attention to the base of the tree where a shadow version begins to skitter up towards them. Bolder turns around, looking down towards it, and chitters to Sickle, "Do you think that's... it?"
He swallows, dread suddenly filling him. His mind had ventured to think that his companion would be something great, like Oceanus was to Sickle, or perhaps it might be something large and powerful, like an Orca or a Leopleuridon. But this? The shadow continued to climb towards them and Bolder could feel his hackles rising and his large tail twirling in warning.
Sickle thinks she’d like a sister too one day, but only after she gets Malik back. She’ll have to remember to tell her mom that - no more siblings until they get the original one back. It’s too bad that Bolder doesn’t have the same aunt as her, that would be pretty cool. Though it would keep the aunt very busy. The name Mazikeen is familiar but she answers his question before the memories start to sink in. “Mine’s Vastra!”
And then her mood falls while she watches the shadow-squirrel shitters up the tree towards them without really paying attention to it anymore.
Because she’s remembering her trip to Hyaline, and the white mare that had looked at her with such sadness. The one who had fought with her dad until Sickle had lost consciousness and then woke up back in Tephra. That was Mazikeen, or so she had been told.
Bolder’s question brings her back into the present for a moment and she tries to focus on the approaching shadow.
“Try shifting, see if it changes with you.” Her excitement is twisting with uncertainty, making her squirrel stomach very upset. She isn’t sure how to ask the question that she can feel growing in her mind and she doesn’t want to distract Bolder from meeting his companion so she just bites her tongue and worries.
Bolder stores the name away - Vastra - because connections were a form of currency in Beqanna. When he had been small, he and his triplet siblings had been given a wide berth in the North because they had been the children of the King of the North, Grandchildren of the Ice Dragon. Two of their uncles had been Guardians in that realm, one holding Taiga and the other Nerine.
He wonders who this Vastra might be, apart from another shifter like he and Sickle.
(Another one, he thinks and the thought comes glowing from his stripes. Bolder hadn't seen another in the North and now that he has left it behind him, he has found many in the Pack and now more in the Common Lands. Perhaps there was hope in showing his father that he was wrong; the more shapeshifters he finds, Bolder hopes he can show his father that while they are powerful, they can be good, like Mazikeen.)
His companion seems distracted, and Bolder the squirrel looks briefly away from the approaching shadow to the filly. If such an unknown wasn't rapidly approaching them, the striped adolescent would have asked what had called her away and where she had gone.
But the shadow climbs closer and closer, scurrying sporadically from one side of the elm to the other. Bolder's tail continues to spin in a warning and he even barks at the thing, but it doesn't deter its approach. His silver eyes glance at her, but he takes Sickle's request and changes into a noisy sparrow. He moves to a lower branch, and continues to chatter loudly.
The shadow squirrel pauses, and Bolder watches as it stops midway up their tree.
"Quick!" he squawks to Sickle, hoping to encourage her to his branch. He flutters from one side to the other, making room for his new friend and noting that whatever was coming towards them was changing shapes again. This time it was something bigger, and it seemed to loom towards them like a bad omen.
She watches when Bolder shifts into a sparrow, chattering loudly at the shadow squirrel, but her attention is drifting. It’s back home in Tephra with her mom and wherever Malik is. It’s back in Hyaline on that night where nothing particularly terrible happened (in her memories, anyway) but she had still cried when she got home.
Sickle doesn’t feel very brave right now as a squirrel in this tree with Bolder. She turns her head to him when he squawks and encourages her to join him on his branch but getting closer to someone from Hyaline is the last thing that she wants to do.
So she shakes her head, unable to get any more words out through the thick clog in her throat. She lowers herself as much as she can against the branch she is clinging to. As though if she just holds it tight enough, she might be able to disappear. She might be able to forget who her dad is and how completely confusing it is to meet someone nice from Hyaline when she’s convinced herself Malik is being tortured there.
But maybe Bolder isn’t nice at all. Maybe he is just pretending, like Gale had.
And maybe the shadow is coming to take them both back to the mountains.
This thought further roots her to the spot where she is, unable to move at all out of fear except for the tremble that shakes her furry tail.
He frantically flaps his wings, though his taloned claws clutch tightly at the bark of the branch that Bolder had landed on. Despite the way that his lower half still clings to the tree limb, the young sparrow remains airborne. When it becomes apparent to Bolder that the other shifter won't (or can't) move, he squawks again and abandons the branch entirely for Sickle. His speckled wings tilt down as the striped bird flies towards where the shadowy mass approaches. The glint of his talon catches menacingly in the sunlight, (and though Bolder can't know he does it, he curses the creature in a bird's tongue, calls it a moldering worm) and the winged creature continues to flap his wings until Bolder puts himself between the entity and the squirrel known as Sickle.
His moon-marked head becomes pointed and snarling, as he grows and grows, until Bolder is an angry red-and-gold Raccoon. He snarls a warning at the thing, and it stops.
The creature that had been a similar size to the filly - something small and rodent-like - no longer was. It becomes nothing but a writhing mass in the center of the tree. Bolder watches the thing with guarded silver eyes, but the way it moves makes him think of the early morning fog in Taiga. Somehow, though, it's flat and lacks dimension. Strange, Bolder thinks as he continues to stare at it. He doesn't look away from it, but one of his shoulders drops slightly so that he might see Sickle if she looks in his direction. Whatever the shadow had been before, it was nothing now.
And more oddly, it remained directly in front of them with no indication that it intended to come closer.
"Sickle?" Bolder asks her in a hushed tone, "Do you think you can move?"
A flutter of wings alerts her that Bolder has come closer when she did not move and she presses even closer to the bark beneath her small body, squeezing her eyes even tighter while her distress moves across her coat in the shades of greens and browns around them.
Since she is not watching, she does not know that he is snarling at the shadow and she flinches at the sound.
The voice that comes a few moments later is hushed and not as frightening, but she doesn’t trust it. All her plans at just continuing on as if nothing was bothering her slips away and she breaths in deep ragged breaths as she considers the question.
Can she move?
She doesn’t want to, but she thinks she can and that she must.
She uncurls but makes a point of not looking in Bolder’s direction. Instead she is looking down, planning a path off this branch while she mumbles. “I have to go.” Sickle considers telling him good luck with the shadow, that she’s enjoyed meeting him, that she wants to know if he’s seen Malik. But she’s so scared of the answers that it is so much easier just to run. She hasn’t been good at running when she should have before - so she does now.
The iridescent girl turns into a collection of greens that will hopefully make her hard to track and she falls off the branch, turning into a swift on the descent. When her wings catch her, she twists and flies as fast as she can back home.
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