"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
04-26-2023, 03:45 PM (This post was last modified: 04-26-2023, 03:49 PM by litotes.)
LITOTES
There’s a fire in the cattails and there’s nothing he can do about it.
The smell of smoke and muddy water mingles with the sickening scent of singed flesh. Everywhere is somehow both light and darkness. Someone is screaming in the distance.
There’s a fire in the cattails and his gangly foal’s legs won’t carry him fast enough. His child’s lungs can’t handle all this smoke. If he could move, the terror would keep him frozen in place, wide-eyed.
Plain, cremello Litotes. Helpless and tiny.
He tries to bleat but nothing comes out. Blackness is encroaching on his vision as he collapses further into the dirt. He doesn’t understand dying so there is a sort of peace he feels as he slips away, his months old mind finding oblivion too soon. It’s as he’s giving up everything to the smoke that a much larger body hurtles into his body.
“Up, NOW!” it screams. The boy feels a rush of fresh adrenaline as he lurches upward, too blinded by smoke and panic to realize it’s his father harshly nipping his back to keep him moving.
This is some kind of new nightmare, so very different to the peace of giving up.
—
Litotes feels the peace of giving up as an adult, the gentle slip into a quiet nap. One that he lurches from with a gasp, eyes losing their bleeriness to a childlike panic. He launches upward, barely registering that the sun that was out earlier is now hidden by a bleak, overcast sky.
He shivers.
He takes a deep breath.
He’s losing some part of himself.
and let the cool air in, feel the night slip in as it softly glides across your back and i hope you leave right before the sun comes up so i can watch it alone
there's a whisper in my bones keeping me restless and whole
There is a kind of peace to this routine, a comfort in the path she treads.To another, it might appear as though she follows a meandering path with no destination in mind. To Istrid however, it is familiar. One she has followed more than once in an endless loop. Always there is something new. Something interesting to occupy her time.
Where others might see restlessness, she sees only home.
She had taken the form of the large, black cat early this morning and had yet to relinquish it. What she found as a panther was always so different from what she found as a horse, and today, she is interested in different.
The sun warms her dappled black coat as she pads silently through the dried, rustling grasses. Warm enough to weary her limbs. Warm enough that she soon begins imagining long naps in the afternoon sun. And when she stumbles across the pale stallion already napping, she imagines it must be a sign from the universe.
She eyes him curiously for a moment, pink eyes bright against the pitch of her fur. When he does not wake, she settles onto her belly, front paws tucked under her chest as she stares at him. She stares until her eyes grow heavy. Until her head droops and that promised afternoon nap overtakes her.
His gasp awakens her, launching her awake just as he had been. She hisses at him as she skitters backward before settling into a wary crouch. She does not know it had been a nightmare that had awakened him, so she watches him with unblinking eyes, unsure whether she should be preparing to attack or flee.
To say that Litotes is shocked to see a panther crouching across from him would be an understatement. His initial gasp is followed by a second, quieter one. He blinks as every muscle in his body clenches at once, a slight quiver in his haunches following. Lie doesn’t move just as Istrid doesn’t move, and his stoicness is feline, hinting at the nature he, too, wears beneath his skin.
For a long stretch of moments, the shadow-weaver doesn’t move. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t breathe.
But after those few moments, those long moments of contemplation, the teeth in his mouth begin to change. Flat molars become curved fangs. The throat in his neck becomes something primal, predatory. He stares back at Istrid, golden eyes just as unblinking, barely masking the childlike panic still behind them.
Then he growls—
And in a single, pale flash, he launches forward.
Hooves become wicked sharp claws and deft pads. Where once a regal stallion’s head stood high, now a wildly maned lion’s face snarls. He draws up just short of Istrid and bats roughly at her head, claws just barely out.
“Were you hunting me?” he rumbles, voice just a touch hushed, betting on this panther being something else beneath her dark pelt.
and let the cool air in, feel the night slip in as it softly glides across your back and i hope you leave right before the sun comes up so i can watch it alone
there's a whisper in my bones keeping me restless and whole
His panic is bitter in the air around them, lingering in the wake of the dream. She can taste it as assuredly as she had been able to taste the rabbit she had breakfasted on hours earlier. She has always been able to feel it, their fear. Always been able to sense it alongside the ever-present urge to ease it. Yet she does not. She doesn’t know what had caused the pungent halo of panic, so she does not know how he might react to having it erased.
For a long moment, they simply stare at one another, pink eyes clashing against gold. He does not move, so neither does she.
The moment his muscles bunch and golden skin ripples however, she reacts. She cannot help herself. His snarling face comes at her, and she recoils in a defensive crouch, round ears pressing flat. Though he stops just before reaching her, the paw that bats at her is met with a smack of her own paw and a louder warning hiss.
She is prepared to launch at him if he so much as flicks a whisker, but she is instead taken aback by his grumbling words filling the space between them. For a moment, she stares at him, frozen in her defensive, flat-eared posture. When it becomes clear he won’t immediately resume his attack however, she coughs. The harsh sound dispels the barest trace of tension from her body, and she wrinkles her nose as his words finally register.
“You think I wanted to eat you?” Though she doesn’t say it, her incredulous tone perfectly conveys how disturbing she finds that notion. Chuffing out her disdain at the very thought, she eyes him skeptically. “I was sleeping, like you.” Another chuff. “You woke me.”
