"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
09-07-2016, 01:59 PM (This post was last modified: 09-07-2016, 02:10 PM by Thorunn.)
Maimed.
The filly (now a mare? Who's to say) makes her way to Tephra through rage laced, defeated eyes. She'd heard whispers that Eight was here from Cress, when they initially planned on making a recreation of the Valley. Is that what she wanted? She can't remember what she said, all she can feel is the pulsating pain with every step she takes toward Tephra.
Since father and mother died she'd been alone. Val long gone. The Valley disappeared into oblivion. Eight, though, that was a constant for her. The only adult she knew other than her family members, the only one who stuck around with constant assurance. She sought him out now, sought out the home, sought out whatever she could find. Tephra. The volcano. Just head that way.
Each step is a labor.
She should have healed. She woke up on the mountain like everyone else, but did she grasp the gravity of the situation? No. Her powers were insidious, it's hard to feel them missing. Immortality does not have a feeling or a sensation. Blocking mind reading...did she even know she had it? Truly? She guessed it once, but that's all. A guess. Her lack of healing tells her something is seriously wrong.
Her face is a scab, obscuring half of it, blood crusted and dried from days before. Infection might set in at any minute if she's not careful. She doesn't know what infection is, but prior to heading to Tephra she went to the Mountain. Once she crossed the borders her face...well, it healed. A ragged scar under that crusted bloody mass that refused to calm itself. Healed, yes. Painful? The minute she left the Mountain and her face felt the true weight of her blemish it throbbed.
I will run the streets and hostile lands, I will touch the rain with all I have
I will breathe the air, to scream it loud. My feet will never touch the ground.
Although Beqanna had dropped the majority of them in a safe place after the destruction, they did not go without injuries. Camelia’s happened to be when she’d been running. The deer had passed her grazing place (wide-eyed, white-tailed, driven by instinctual fear) and she’d looked up only to see the world folding in half. Tree-tops from the Chamber brushed the tree-tops from the Gates and her panic had shattered her warm soul like a hammer to glass. She’d run (just like the deer, just like woodland creatures, just like the entire kingdom) but she’d tripped. Her right shoulder had slammed into a rock, slicing a deep gash in her skin and forcing a deep ache into her bone.
She continues to limp now, as she explores Tephra. The free bleeding has at least stopped, but the scabbing is cracked and angry and her shoulder aches with every step she takes. Camelia’s nostrils flare when she breathes in a unique scent among the bitterness of the sulfur. It’s undeniable that the new land is beautiful (as Beqanna has wished it to be) but the smell of it is something the aging mare does not favor. She misses the sweet smell of the flowers in Heaven’s Gates, but she also misses everything about Heaven’s Gates.
The dunskin turns her direction of travel toward the smell, eyes seeking out the sight of a young mare. Camelia’s trademark sunny smile dances across her lips. When she is within earshot, she calls a greeting. “Hello! Welcome to Tephra.” She waits to say more until she’s closer. Coming to an uncomfortable stop (her mouth twists in a brief look of pain before it settles), Camelia glances over the mare. The most noticeable thing is the scabbed injury on her face. “Oh, honey, that looks painful. Come with me, we’ll wash it out in the salt.” That was the first thing she had done when the meeting was finished; limped toward the sea in the distance and allowed the salty water to wash out the dirt and bacteria from her bloody shoulder. It would be a good start with this girl.
“Can I help you? I’m Camelia.” She gives another warm, motherly smile and then waits for the young mare’s answer.
Thorunn misses the approach of the other mare, mostly because the pain throbbing on her face is taking up all her senses. It's healed under that scab, she doesn't know how, but it did. Something is awry, something is amiss...but she can't place her finger on it. She managed to the Mountain, woke up partially healed, and once she left? Pain, searing. But it was still healed, just fresh and cracking and sick.
Her head throbs as she peers at the mare through a bloodshot eye. It hurts to move her mouth too much, the edges of the scab prickle as she starts to form words. She'll speak slowly, she decides, and only as needed. Small words between gaping silences. She's become her father inadvertently.
"Thorunn," she manages, though it's slurred as she tries not to move her lips too much. This elicits a wince from her, and a half smile from her non-injured side. The entire right side of her face is a scab, moving from just inside of her left eye, down along the bridge of her nose, ending along her upper right lip. She nods to the mare, following her - laboriously slow - to the salt sea. "Thank you," she manages.
The sky is dimming - the snow falling in light flakes upon the land that they had found. The air is moist and hot, but amidst the edges of the sea, it is cool and still and the crystalline snow still has a fighting chance to live.
Here, Eight stands, silent as he watches the ever drifting sea. The past month had been something so unknown to him. Even still, his body felt foreign - a sailor adrift at sea. He could not say he entirely missed the magic that ran through his veins, but it was as if it was a missing limb. It throbbed and he could not satiate it - a tickle in the back of his throat, a phantom limb. It was freeing too, of course - he was no longer sought out to mend or meddle or melee. He was simply another face in the crowd, someone easily enough to pass over, to blend into the normalcy of the crowded meadow of Beqanna.
Even now, Tephra is silent - the word of their new home not quite reaching the ears of all who sought it. It is comforting, in a way. It was always solace he found in the thicket of pine trees, in the high ridges of the Valley’s mountains - the quiet settled him, he was never one to converse very much.
But tonight, the silence is ruffled with soft voices, a slurring of sounds that conjoin with the lapping waves on the beach. His head turns sharply, unused to being surprised without his veil of magic, and his eyes alight on a small chestnut form unsteadily following a dunskin body. The form resonates instantaneously - Thorunn. You, the small girl he had steadily watched over in his minds eye - a fiercely silent thing that curled across the Valley, but refused to name any friends. And the dunskin, he had met you before too, a harsh greeting when you had crossed the border to find your daughter.
But there was something not quite right - the stitch in your steps told him that sometthing that shifted, it was not all what it had been.
As he ebbed closer, your wound gasped out to him - a shredded and horrible thing that eked it’s way across your face. Lesser, was the gash upon the dunskin coat, salt crystals cherry picking their way across your healing form.
The rage gapes upwards from his spine, an ugly and vicious thing (although who could say why he cared so much - he, the man who cared for nothing at all). “Who.” - it was all he could manage to summon from his throat .
Would she name her?
The thought occurred to Thorunn as she traveled. She knew that Eight lived here, it's part of why she journeyed so far despite her injury. He was as close to family as she had, and simply because he was a familiar face. The thought of finding the Amazons to find Val or her other sister (she can't remember her name, the little snake girl with orange eyes) was far from her mind. Val wasn't there. She didn't need magic to know her sister was long gone and faded into oblivion. The thought was saddening, but it was her new reality.
Accept. Move on.
Would she name the mare? The one with the fleshy horn and the sick grimace?
No, to do so would be her downfall.
It would be weakness not to deal with the mare herself. Her father would have made her do it (She's not sure, she should be sure but she's not. He's fading from her mind these days). She would be judged and saddened to force the responsibility onto another. She's learning now that magic is gone, except on the Mountain, and her healing is gone, except there. A patchwork. She learned - too late - to ask the mountain for her immortality. It's back now, but too little too late. It can't fix, only prevent.
She's a patchwork mess that peers at Eight as the scabs peel off in the cool salt water. There's no open wounds to soak anymore, the Mountain healed it. (She has no memory of the witch mare and her moss hair, healing her in her hedgewitch ways) It's just a fresh scar, keloid and seething, making its way across the right side of her face.
"I don't know," says Thorunn. It's a lie, but she's banking on Eight losing his magic to not be able to tell. She doesn't need to hide him from her mind (She can't, anyway) she's learned this art. Deception, her father called it. Great in battle, even better in life. A lie, truly. It's obviously from a horn, and its intentional swipes are obviously ... well, intentional. She looks him in the eyes as she says this, orange and seething, before wiping the last of the scabbed material on her leg. Fresh, exposed, no longer beautiful like her mother.
I will run the streets and hostile lands, I will touch the rain with all I have
I will breathe the air, to scream it loud. My feet will never touch the ground.
They walk slowly. Camelia isn’t trying to match the young mare’s steps, but with her own limping gait they both inch toward the sea. She gives her name (“Thoruun,” spoken on scabbed and sore lips) and another bright smile dances across the dunskin’s mouth. “Thoruun. It is a pleasure to meet you.” She is honest. There isn’t a thing Camelia would want more in the world than to meet someone new and assist them in their struggles. She’d even offer to be the extra support in Thoruun’s step if it weren’t for her own uncomfortable leg injury.
They reach the sea in good time, however. Camelia dips her toes in, feeling the rush of cool salty water send a tingle against her leg hairs. There is another presence – one she has felt before – that ends the aging mare’s contentment. She turns, spotting Eight approaching and asking a question that sounds like a gunshot being slung from his mouth. Her warm eyes darken with faint thunderclouds. She’s only come across Eight once before, and he had been just as rude and harsh then as he is now.
Yet, he is the sire of her grandchildren. Camelia dips her head toward him in greeting, but doesn’t say anything otherwise. Thoruun’s answer sends a shiver down her spine. To not know who inflicted harm on you; it is a sickening, depressing thing. The aging mare steps closer to the younger, her brown eyes deep with compassion and worry. She glances between Thoruun and Eight. Judging by their expressions and their way of speaking to each other, she presumes they know one another.
“Should I, ah, leave?” She is hesitant to do so – she doesn’t want to leave Thoruun here with Eight seeming so wrathful. Yet she does not wish to intrude on their reunion or whatever this is. Camelia shifts her weight uneasily, wincing again as her healing leg aches with pain.
"No," Thorunn says it too fast, too loud, making even herself jump at the urgency. No, hush yourself, you are independent. She tells herself. Since the loss of her family Thorunn carried on alone just fine. She'd made it this far, hadn't she? Some stroke of luck saved her after that mare destroyed her face - but that was it. A stroke of luck. No real talent or skill. She happened upon the Mountain just in time to keep from what should have been death. Or infection. Or both - slowly, but both.
"I've known Eight since I was a child," she explains. When did it become past tense? When did her youth become more of a passing thing than a current state of being? She knows when, deep down. When her family left she thought she'd grown, but the world kept forcing her to age despite her wishes. It was at long last, but it was here - adulthood. The time to step away from her parents shadows in this new land, with her new face, to make a name for herself.
"Camelia has been kind enough to help me," her words are still forced, whispered through a scab that broke open to reveal fresh, keloid material underneath. It ached and whined but she kept her composure. "So this is our new home?" All together, the most she's ever spoken - but it's a start.
