"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
Something in the boy has hardened.
It is evident in the pale gaze, the lean muscle, the flare of the nostrils.
Because he had been weary once, tired; because he had thought to step outside of the cowardice he’d worn his whole life.
He cannot shirk the stench of Death anymore. It is a permanent thing, it has grown roots around the ribcage, sunk teeth into the meat of his heart. There is no outrunning it and he has been forced to accept it. There will always be that ache, that understanding, the flicker of a memory just outside of his grasp.
He has not seen Mazikeen in years, though he is certain that he would still feel the burning, the stutter of an arrested heart. Nor has he seen his mother, though the memory (not his, no, never his) of her death would still take him to his knees. And his sister, Este, he knows she would still smell faintly of the death that had nipped so greedily at her heels in the darkness.
(Has he avoided them? Perhaps. Perhaps he is merely a coward in new ways, different ways. Perhaps this is not something he will ever outgrow.)
He wanders, as he has for years. But he does not skirt borders in fear any longer. Not as he had as a child, terrified he might be cast out but even more terrified of what lay beyond the borders of the only home he’d ever known.
He thinks bitterly of the child he’d been. (Had he ever really been a child? Surely he had never known the unfettered innocence that children are meant to worn so casually. No, he had sprung forth from the womb already weighted down by the understanding that he would never know peace, not really.)
He wanders because he no longer has a home. And does he want one? Or is he still frightened?
Valkyrie has been a student of change all her life, she’s enjoyed learning how to adapt. How to fit herself into new situations, mold herself to whatever strangeness arrives with the next sunrise. Not that she had ever been in any real danger, she had support - she had help and love. But the older she got, the more she enjoyed figuring things out on her own - just to see if she could.
Today, though, Valkyrie is not attempting to learn anything beyond joy. She is a bright red and gold swallow, swooping through the summer air - and enjoying the fact that there isn’t anything at all on her mind as she does so. It is just this simple movement, just the air moving across her feathers.
Until a familiar figure catches her attention and she practically drops out of the sky from the wave of the nostalgia that slams into her. For that moment she is not the mare that she has grown into, she is a long-legged filly in a land that no longer exists. Her first home. The girl making wishes to glow in moonlight and who believed with all her heart that Hyaline and her family were indestructible.
She doesn’t know whether to call this sensation pleasant or unpleasant - but because of who she is, she immediately decides to investigate further so she might know.
Valkyrie manages to land in the meadow and it takes a moment to re-orient herself with the loss of sight in one eye now that she is back in equine form. Just as she is thinking it might have been a mistake - she finds him again and wastes no time in moving forward. Her working orange-gold eye picks apart the features that are so strangely familiar to her. Half as vague memories from a foal, and half from stories told by her mother - who was happy to spend sleepless nights harboured in the Pampas telling Valkyrie and her sister of the friends she held so dearly in her heart.
There had been no hesitation at all about her approach until the moment where she becomes close enough to speak, stopping just a handful of feet away. Doubt creeps in just then (what if this wasn't who she thought it was?) and it seeps into her voice, turning it quiet. “Selaphiel?”
It is the sound of his own name that startles him more than anything else, the abject horror of being recognized when all he so fiercely wants is to dissolve into obscurity.
He stops short at the sound, though he does not recognize the voice. And when he swings his gaze toward the source, he does not immediately recognize her either. So he merely pauses there, suspended animation, studying, trying to remember if there is something that he has forgotten.
(And he does remember.
In glimpses, he remembers, the twins. The way he had looked at Mazikeen and said, ‘so you’re happy, then.’ And how he had been relieved on some level and absolutely devastated on a more cellular level. Because he had not been able to save her, because he’d promised her that he’d tried, because all he’d wanted was to be useful to her and he’d failed.
He’d failed.
Not just his friend but all of them.
His friend, his mother, every one of them.)
He exhales.
He does not remember the child’s name, if he had ever known it. But he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that her mother is Mazikeen. Her father is Firion.
His own half-brother.
The one who’d saved her when Selaphiel had failed to.
He shifts his weight, prepared to flee. Because no good will come from this, he knows that. But it is the quiet of her voice that keeps him rooted there, the uncertainty in her gaze.
“Hello,” he says and he cannot address her by name because he’s not certain he’d ever known her name at all, but it is evident in the greeting alone that he recognizes her, that he knows who she is and all that she represents.
Her doubt evaporates easily - all it takes is no outward contest against her naming of him, even if she also doesn’t get an obvious affirmation either. She knows him as Sela, but thinks this is too familiar considering they have not properly met yet. He is someone she considers family, an uncle - not because of his blood relation to her father, but because of his friendship with her mother. It is thrilling to get to talk to him, this figure that had shown up in her foalhood stories. The version of Mazikeen’s life that she shared with her young foals was heavily edited of course - talking about the ice angel she walked in shadows with, the half-squid that lived in the lake, the blue tinted shifter-queen were all relatively safe subjects.
It’s a bit like meeting a celebrity - it’s exactly like seeing a mythical creature from stories suddenly walking around as if it were nothing.
The gold-accented mare doesn’t feel offended by the fact that he does not greet her by name, offering it now without fuss. “I’m Valkyrie.” A smile returns easily to her expression now that she has her confirmation and can feel that funny excitement freely.
She’s only just starting to think what now when words are tumbling out of her before her brain can catch up “Are you cold all the time?” And then almost immediately she laughs at herself. It’s a rich sound, though not particularly boisterous.
“I’ve been wondering about it since I was a foal.” She offers by way of explanation. It does not occur to her to apologize for asking it, even just to be polite, or to fret about the idea that he may not want to talk to her. She is just content to stay in the moment as long as it lasts - and enjoy the feeling of being blessed with this chance encounter.
Valkyrie, she says, and he knows now with certainty that Mazikeen had not told her their names. (Had she known that it would have served only to wound him? To further drive home the point that Firion had saved her when he could not?)
“Valkyrie,” he echoes but there is no inflection. There is no softness. Just the memory of how he and her mother had decided that they were friends enough to call each other Maze and Sela. Just the memory of how sweet it was to have friends once. But also the memory of how much it had hurt. This is why he does not draw any nearer to the daughter, the niece, just stands there and looks back at her while she smiles. (Would he have smiled back in some past life? No, probably not.)
Her question almost certainly would have elicited a stronger reaction in his youth. He might have even found it within him to laugh. It would have been a breathy, surprised thing, and he would have turned immediately bashful at the sound of it. But it would have been a laugh all the same, because who would have ever thought to ask him that?
He shifts his weight, uncomfortable with the idea that this is a question that has followed her from childhood. Uncomfortable with the idea that he has lived in her memory at all. He swallows and glances down at his leg, cut through with a gaping crevasse, the ice of his hooves.
“I don’t notice it anymore,” he tells her without meeting her eye again. In truth, he had never noticed. There had always been more pressing issues at hand. The stench of death that followed his sister, the pressing urgency of every other death he could not prevent and then felt all the same. After a beat, he lifts his gaze back to her face. “It doesn’t feel like cold when you’ve never known anything else, I guess.”
He could shrug, but he doesn’t, he just lets this admission linger in the negative space between them.
His answer isn’t satisfying in the least, though she bites her tongue and keeps that thought to herself. It would be easy enough for her to find out for herself. Valkyrie powerfully wishes to step forward and touch the halo, or his skin, for herself and see if it is as cold as the snow she remembers racing through in Hyaline.
But he seems uncomfortable enough already and she does not want to push it - as though this very conversation is just a thin pane of frost itself, and one misstep could see it shatter far past the point of salvaging.
So instead of following her physical impulses, Valkyrie is forced to sit with her thoughts and so she remarks quietly - her metallic orange eyes glinting as she connects some half-hazy memories from her youth. “All pain is like that, isn’t it?” When it is so consistently present in your life that you don't even notice it any more.
It feels like a terribly naive question, but then she is still a naive mare - she does not know this about pain first-hand, just pieced together from the faces of those she loves. She feels like a foal, like standing here with someone who was - is? - friends with her mother puts him automatically at a higher tier of adult than she is. She is not made of hard things, of ice or steel, and if the fire of her mother exists somewhere inside of her heart, she has not found it yet. She is warm at best - the heat of a spring day, not even bright enough to scorch.
The child had been born in the days after Gale had perished, he knows. After his own mother had died by Gale’s hand, after Firion had done whatever it was that Firion had done to save them all from him. Selaphiel shifts his weight now, studying the child. (She is grown now, yes, but to him she is still the same child he’d watched from afar, aching as it had occurred to him that Mazikeen was happy and it had absolutely nothing at all to do with him.)
He has no way of knowing what that glint in her eye means and he makes no effort to decipher it, only goes on studying her for a long moment after she’s gone quiet.
He is not an inherently cruel thing, Selaphiel, but he has learned that all kindness comes with a price and, because of this, he has strayed from it. Because he cannot stand to shoulder the pain of this, too. Because if there is any one sort of pain he can prevent, it is this.
He tilts his head a fraction as he considers her answer. It is an attempt to commiserate, he thinks, an attempt to find some common ground. But the worst had already passed by the time she’d been born. And certainly her birth had been proof that the worst was over. Because Firion had saved them and Mazikeen had found someone else worth loving.
“Is it?” he asks flatly. It is not cruelty, merely the absence of any warmth. “You know this from experience?” It is not an accusation, though he suspects that she has known none. Because he knows that Mazikeen, after Gale’s defeat, would have done whatever it took to protect her family from pain. Even at the height of that terror, she had done what she could to protect her friends from it.
“I’m sorry,” he says abruptly, turning his gaze away from her face. “It’s nice to meet you, Valkyrie.” Though it is strange to have met his brother’s daughter without ever having met his brother himself.
