"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 warmth of the spring sun is slow to reach the depths of the crystalline lake. The nereid, as sluggish as the fish around her, slowly opens her green eyes. She stretches, extending her pale forelegs into the rocky bottoms, and looks up toward the distant surface. It glitters and shines, and today at last it is bright enough to lure her upward.
She breaks the surface near the edge of the lake, water streaming from her head and neck. Propelled by her finned tail, she moves forward until her hooved forelegs meet the rocky shallows, and then her tail transforms below the water into more appropriately terrestrial legs that carry her onto the shore.
The air is cooler than the water, and she shivers as she shakes, losing the vestiges of her aquatic form as she takes deep breaths of the spring air. Her fins shrink away, leaving only the semi-translucent veils along her ribcage, and those that make up her mane and tail. She blinks a time or two to clear her vision, and then turns her attention to the quiet Dale.
There was absolutely nothing going through Helion’s mind as he flew through the mountains - which was exactly how he liked it. Things tended not to stick in his brain for very long as it was. There was no obsessing over past deeds, no worrying about the future. Just the simple joy of feeling the sunlight upon his body and feathers - and knowing he looked pretty dashing the entire time.
Possibly accidentally blinding someone below as the sun reflects from his shiny coat but even those worries slide through his brain and end up somewhere they will not bother him. If someone finds that he is too bright for them, they can simply close their eyes or look away.
Fatigue is starting to cause his muscles to ache and, luckily, the Dale stretches out beneath him - beckoning him with a shimmering lake and the dapple of spring flowers amongst lush grass.
He is coming in low over the lake when movement on the bank to his left catches his eye and a delighted laugh bubbles up when he recognizes a familiar figure emerging with a fishy tail and then transforming into a terrestrial horse as if that were just something that happened every day.
Helion angles his wings to veer his course towards her and lands down the shore from her - trotting forward with a brilliant smile illuminating his pale silver eyes. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t my favourite fish.”
The Dale ahead of her is quiet, but behind her something moves over the water. Turning, wondering if perhaps Orieta had chosen to join her on the surface after all, Moira instead finds a pegasus descending over the still lake.
”So is it really spring time again, or have you been hanging around too long and fooling with the climate?” She says in reply, knowing that the Dale around them is oriented to the sun overhead rather than the golden stallion in front of her, and that he’d done no such thing. The same is not true for the grinning Moira, who finds that she cannot pull her green gaze from the silver eyed stallion, drawn as if in orbit to his presence as she has always been.
”I think you’ve gotten brighter, my friend!” Moira adds, feeling he tickle of her scales transitioning to hair. It is a sensation she’d almost forgotten over the years; she is so rarely dry enough that she loses those parts of her nereid heritage.
She’d ran for the sea the first time it had happened, she remembers, and it had been Helion to cause it that time as well. Embracing the inevitability of the transition as she reaches forward to embrace the taller stallion, Moira asks: ”Do you have time to tell me what you’ve been up to now, or will you come back and tell me later?”
That he’d been up to something - something bright and light and worry free - she assumes inevitable.
Helion loved the idea that he was sun-enough to be able to influence the seasons and he laughed brightly at thought. Even being sure that Moira was just teasing him did not diminish his joy.
He steps eagerly into the hug, delight radiating from him (or maybe that is just his natural glow) at seeing his oldest friend again.
When she asks if he has time to tell her what he’s been up to he steps back enough to look her in her seafoam eyes as he smiles, tilting his ram-horned head. “Are you kidding? I’ve just found you again, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Exploring, mostly. New lands, clouds in the sky that you can walk on. Sometimes I still can’t believe how much the world has changed since we were little.” Helion shakes his head, the disbelief over the change causing a grin rather than any sorrow that lingers. His family had lived in Loess and then when it sank they became nomads - and that itself felt like so long ago now he barely remembers what it was like to have roots tied to a particular land.
Like water fading into warm sand, the last of her scales disappear as she pulls away from Helion’s embrace. The nereid smiles up at him, and at the easy declaration that he will stay just for her, she shakes her head a little in embarrassment even as she suppresses a delighted laugh.
He tells her he has been exploring, and that their world has changed. At that she nods in agreement, and is no more disturbed than he by those changes. There has always been water, and that is all she’d needed. Ischia had been her home, but so had the kelp forest at the edges of Baltia, and now this calm and sunlit lake. She is as adaptable as the rest of her kind, and so long as there is water she is content.
Her brows lift as if in surprise at his question, and her tone is teasing as she replies: ”Isn’t every story I tell enchanting?”
With enough time to answer if he chooses, Moira continues with an answer that is less than riveting: ”I’ve mostly been in Baltia, but Orieta got tired of the saltwater, and we’ve been here a while now.” Moira is as easy-going as the breeze, and when her daughter expressed a desire to move to new waters, the nereid had complied without much persuasion.
She realizes after speaking that Helion wouldn’t know who Orieta was, and finishes: ”My daughter, Orieta.”
A light laugh escapes Helion at her question but he only adds a wink instead of responding verbally - because, of course she’s right. All her stories thrill him, he loves hearing about what fills her time when they are apart. And when she tells him, Helion’s imagination easily fills in the blanks to Moira’s story - painting beautiful scenes in tropical waters. Baltia was more of a mystery, which delighted him a great deal. Whatever exclamation he had been bound to make about that underwater, easily and effortlessly spinning her short answer into something that was - indeed - enchanting and fully capable of holding his attention, is pushed away into the back of his mind when she clarifies that Orieta is her daughter.
“You’re a mom?”
The question comes out a little more shocked than he intended it, and he shuffles his shiny wings in something close to embarrassment as he regains his composure. His smile is bright as he easily rationalizes that it is just surprise, nothing else, that had temporarily knocked him away from his composure.
“Does her dad live here too?” He decides to ask, because he’s genuinely curious, and because it’s the first question to come out among the many that are buzzing around in there. It’s just one more thing about her that’s fascinating - for him, it doesn’t feel like it was so long ago that they were young foals meeting for the first time. The idea that either of them could be parents throws him just a little (even though in reality there had been more than plenty of time).
Raised in a large extended family, Moira has always wanted the same thing for herself. Finding sisterhood had been difficult in these quiet times, and having a child - having a daughter - seemed the best way to make that for herself. And she’d been right, finding that the precocial Orieta had required very little of her at all.
@Helion recovers quickly from the revelation that she has a child, but Moira recognized the shock in her friend’s silver eyes as she nods an affirmative response. She opens her mouth to speak, but just as quickly he’s smiling again, and she closes her mouth just to smile back at him in return, unable to help herself.
Whatever had surprised him about the revelation he has mastered, and Moira is too busy turning toward a splash in the water to immediately probe further. It is only a fish breaking the surface in pursuit of a damselfly, and Moira turns back in time to hear him ask about Orieta’s father.
Now it is her turn to be surprised. She’d lost count of the nests she made before the one into which she’d tucked Orieta’s egg. That egg, iridescent white and glowing bright from the first moment, had only one possible father. Moira had not known the black-eyed Baltian well enough to recognize his features in their daughter, and she has made no effort to seek him out in the time since. When Orieta is old enough to ask, she intends to tell her his name, but beyond that he is well-anchored in the sea of her past.
”I imagine he’s still living in Baltia,” Her tone is casually dismissive, accompanied by a brief shrug of her shoulders. It feels strange to move them without feeling the flutter of fins at her sides, and Moira glances back at her bare sides and the long strands of her tail for a moment, the silky hairs equal parts blue-violet and shimmering gold.
When she looks back at Helion, the glowing cause of her transformation, she remembers the shock from earlier, and that she’d been about to say something.
“No kids for you, then?” She asks, curious and direct. ”What about lovers? Anyone I need to meet and impress?” Moira’s tone remains light, yet as the words leave her mouth she knows they are dishonest. She doesn’t want to impress Helion’s lovers. She doesn’t want to think about them at all. Doing so now brings an oddly bitter sensation to the back of her throat, an unfamiliar astringency that she does not care to dwell on for a moment longer.
A change of subject then: ”How is your sister? Your parents?”
