Those lean sweet desperate hours - Michaelis.

[Aurane]

(‘I-I-I'm not sure I'm real.’ Wind clings desperately to her mane with his translucent, cold fingers. He flaps like a tatterd flag in a hurricane west wind; when he moves she hears the whispers of a thousand vocal chords he has captured in his travels. They are like fireflies in a mason jar, and he carries them with him always. His own airy voice is distinctly concerned. Melancholy.)
“Don't be silly.” The red woman mumbles soothingly, weaving through the bone-white labyrinth of birches. She lets out a wry laugh and snorts — it rings hollow here, in this stale moss-air — “That is just ridiculous.” She turns her head to try and look at him, but Wind is gone. Shrieking off into the vast everywhere. She grins wickedly. “Oh, Wind.”

(If he is not real, then we are lost. Then we have lost it.)
“He jests!” She snaps. An angry, desperate insistence; a sad, persistent hope in her own delusions. Her ears fill with quiet, quelled for now. “He's always worrying.” Wind has been her constant companion. Her stalwart messenger — her well-trusted adviser. They are connected, intimately coupled. He is as formed as she is, as utterly real as the timber and rock around her. Of that she is sure. So very sure. “I'm sick of everyone's incessant hand-wringing around here.”

Aurane is still smoldering when she stops, sick of moving for movings sake. Sick of wandering and finding nothing to sate the unrest in her gut. She has been provoked to distemper. Disheveled and narrow-eyed now, she is flushed flesh and a desire for unrest. Redder than before. A carnal, blood-fed coat flinching and smoothing over an unremarkable set of bones. She is not beautiful, but there is no ugliness in those defined curves and planes — she is a simple and efficiently designed catalyst: unassuming and fragile, but dangerous in her own right; whip-smart but deceptively dull- and hollow-eyed.

The red mare leans against the knots and crooks of a gnarled, black beech tree. Now and again she mutters a segment of a diatribe under her breath. But mostly, there is silence. A silence growing impatient.

A ghost precedes us. A shadow follows us
And each time we stop, we fall.

[michaelis]

wow this is trash. :|

Burning on, just like a match you strike to incinerate the lives of everyone you know.
And what's the worst you take from every heart you break? And like
the blade you stain, well, I've been holding on tonight.

His curiosity of the unknown could not entirely be contained, especially when it came to the strange occurrences of this land’s inbred magic. He’d been born and raised in the meadow; it was the home that he seemed to always return to. But now the familiar began to bleed into unfamiliar as the meadow now rested beside a looming forest.

He’s learned from his brief stint of living within the kingdom that the chamber’s towering pines that forests were filled with plenty of shadows to take shelter within. The sun’s rays found it more difficult to penetrate a thick canopy of branches and leaves than the open air of the meadow.

And Michaelis wasn’t one to pass up such an opportunity.

The blue roan strolled idly through the narrow pathways in-between the grove of trees. The undergrowth was still quite thick even though the sunlight had been greatly reduced in the area. But given some time the choking plants would soon die off and leave greater amounts of space between the numerous trees populating the forest. Most wither and die without the brilliant rays in their life. The shadow child was forced to abandon it and embrace the silvery moonlight in its place.

His mismatched eyes notice a stranger beside the solid beech tree and he is intrigued by the slight movement of her lips. She appears to be holding a conversation with only herself to answer. Michaelis wasn’t a stranger to unusual companions. Wind may be her faithful messenger, but shadows were his loyal friends. He wasn’t their master as he did not have the ability to create and necessarily manipulate. They sheltered him from the sun and when invisibility was needed they gladly enfolded him within their dark embrace.

But he saw them and he knew them intimately. They were jealous little things and demanded his attention constantly. Who was he to deny that others may have unseen companions? He is drawn towards the mare and halts an acceptable distance away. He didn’t want her to feel crowded or startled by his unexpected appearance. After all, this may very well be an extremely important conversation he was interrupting.

“Hello."

Michaelis
( The Shadow Child )

[Aurane]

She mulls it over. Turning it 'round and 'round in her head.
“Not real. Don't be idiotic.”
She snorts, shaking her head slowly back and forth.
“Not possible... This isn't funny....”
(And everything beings to flake away. Like dry, old paint falling off in hard, unkind shards. Revealing slowly the nothingness. The darkness. A vast, empty universe. Devoid of light and heat and energy. Inert and endless. Impossibly eternal.)

The red mare falls silent. Stilling her lips for a moment as she peers into the heartless black. There is no tranquility there. No quiet, not in the way they understand it. Just nothing. Unfathomable nothing. It is scary, but she is riveted. It's like a brutal accident. For a few ragged breaths you are separate with it from everything. Alone in the sheer weight of carnage. (...we are lost.) But an autumnal breeze slinks down her spine and the forest reconstructs itself. Timber, lichen and moss, gold-green dapples of light. She sucks in air.

“Hello.”
She blinks, her ears pressing back against her neck. When she turns her black-brown eyes in his direction, there are some residual rifts. Cracks of deep dark, receding into the bark and grass... and him. Bleeding into him, rushing to subsume themselves to his flesh. He consumes the wreckage of her world so naturally. The play of shade seems to crowd around his shoulders and thighs. He is a part of it. In ways that she can never be, she makes only cursory contact with the absence of light—he is undeniably familiar with it, in every way.

“Hello.”
Aurane pushes her weight off of the beech tree, turning her head to the side to examine him clearly. (He is not yours.) She steps forward softly, so as not to disturb the atmosphere around them. It feels delicate. Like a clear rain of sun could chase him away entirely. But he is curiously solid. A real, living creature, she imagines. Flesh and blood and bones. If they stripped down, they would be the same. The darkness would take him, the earth her.

The red woman moves in close, but cautiously so. Her nostrils flare, pinkish and thirsty, trying to catch his scent among all the other woody ones. It is there. Plain as day, a male and... maybe familiar scent. Piney? She knows this, but the moment to connect the dots passes her by. She is far too fixated on him; much too unattached to her new home, yet. “I'm Aurane,” She offers it tentatively, but the way her dark eyes move over him is near lewd.

A ghost precedes us. A shadow follows us
And each time we stop, we fall.

not trash!

[michaelis]

ugh sorry I'm so slow :|

Burning on, just like a match you strike to incinerate the lives of everyone you know.
And what's the worst you take from every heart you break? And like
the blade you stain, well, I've been holding on tonight.
His presence seems unwanted, at first – pinned ears and direct eyes. But those dark eyes seem to almost instantly be drawn into the wispy tendrils flowing about his frame. He forgets sometimes how unusual this can seem to others. It was as natural as breathing air to him by now; he doesn’t take much notice to the way they cling to him or blur the lines of his solidness to the naked eye.

The shadow child doesn’t consider himself to be a curiosity as opposed to some of the more interesting people he has met. He’d much rather surround himself with others he found to be intriguing enough to consider his – completely disregarding his own talents at the same time. Michaelis was content to indulge in his hobby and remain free of the heavy pressures of true kingdom life and the struggle for power. He’d rather remain behind the curtain, in the dark where he now belonged, and provide the support needed for his chosen ones to succeed in life.

He acknowledges her soft ‘hello’ with a small dip to his head and his mismatched eyes watch curiously as she makes the decision to invade his space instead. She is overly cautious, but he couldn’t blame her for that. She was alone and he was surrounded by a seemingly dark aura of shadows. She was smart to be wary and he calmly stood still for her inspection, but not without a bit of amusement twinkling in his eyes of warm brown and golden yellow.

The tendrils are swift to try and hide him away from what they considered to be prying eyes, but he was merciless in banishing them from his side. Now they sadly flickered every once in a while along his body in desperate attempts to remain at his side. But he wouldn’t put up with unintended aggressiveness towards those he found interest in pursuing for his treasure hoard. One cowed tendril attempted to make amends and twirled down along his cheek to the bridge of his muzzle and the shadow child extended his face towards her – an invitation to further investigate if she so wished.

“Michaelis.”

Michaelis
( The Shadow Child )

[Aurane]

The final, stubborn  vestiges of her broken illusion surrender themselves to him.
Michaelis, unbeknownst to him, takes the void of her fear and doubt; finds a place for the darkness of her apparition among his own real companions.

He waves and lumps with the obscuration. She considers him carefully, compelled by fear and curiosity, both. (The shadowy parts of his body flicker with the tokens of her mind; the teeth and claws residing therein. The implosion of a world, and the greyscale destruction of a great fire. The chipping away of her existence, and Wind... But the fleshy parts of him are a lovely respite. He contains and dispels them at will.)

She watches the affectionate finger of  shade move down the plain of his face. There is something tender and penitent about it, searching his cheeks and bridge for his love and attention. She shivers, whuffing softly in his direction. Her ears perk intently, her prosaical eyes catching a lusty glint, fed by his invitation and by the siren of those wanton curls.
Her caution is allyed, just the shamelessness of her coveting is left.

She reaches her muzzle forward to meet his extension, lipping at the air near his chin; jerking back as the tendril snakes, before pressing forward again. She wills it onto her own skin, but she is not him, and it does not oblige. She is nothing like him. The shadows do not move for her, only around and against her. They skulk close to their master – but she yearns for them so. Burned by their avoidance, the red woman snorts, lightly nipping close to his cheek, lost in the moment of his patient reach. “They are rather attached.” There is a girlish sulking to her voice.

But she can understand that. He is magnetic, to them and to her, still eyeing the shade but with a petulance now. “That must come in handy...” Like a child, she cannot keep mad – not at something so delightful.
Blinking, her vision fills with the sweetness of possibility.

A ghost precedes us. A shadow follows us
And each time we stop, we fall.