"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
She's not antisocial, per se. It's not that she dislikes other horses – on the contrary, she finds them very interesting and terribly fascinating. It's just that she's never really sure how to go about talking to them. How do you start a conversation? What do you talk about? How do you ever know they really want to talk to you? You don't, or at least she doesn't, and the last thing she wants is to bother them.
That's why it's so much easier to just talk to the friends she has in her head. They're not imaginary friends, not in the way that other horses might have, because they're very real. These just happen to be dead, long dead in some cases. She met them when she'd been pulled across time and space by Carnage, and they'd helped send her back from the apocalypse. Far from being disturbed to discover their voices in her head, she'd been thrilled that she hadn't lost them. She hasn't had much time to talk to them, but she's learning their names, slowly. The first among them, and the closest so far, is her own sister Rain.
Scorch had never talked about her, at least not to Wrynn, and it's small wonder. Rain had been stillborn, she'd told Wrynn. She'd never known Scorch in life, although they had been able to speak once with a magician's aid. Wrynn doesn't doubt that, given the choice, Scorch would far rather that Wrynn and Rain have traded places, that Wrynn remained in the underworld, and Rain came back to the surface. "You shouldn't think like that." Rain's voice is rough in her mind, and Wrynn visibly winces, reminded just how frequently she fails at keeping secrets from her new friends. It's not entirely clear just where the barriers lie now, where her private domain ends and the domain shared by the dead begins. She doesn't really mind much, and isn't about to quibble about it either. As far as she's concerned, she would have happily given her life for any of the dead to rise, to come back and experience the life they'd never known, so she's not about to begrudge them a little bit of her head space. She just wishes she'd stop forgetting. Rain's mind-voice can be so strident sometimes.
"Sorry." she says to her dead sister, and she actually does mean it. "I didn't mean it to criticize mom. I don't mind that she feels that way. But she definitely does." Rain is silent, and Wrynn knows that her sister knows she's right.
"Oh!" her exclamation is a total surprise, and very real. She turns a corner past a stream, and comes upon another girl, one whom she recognizes quickly from the meeting. Ephrelle – bumble bee, flower, tattoos, the memory floods back quickly. She is only startled for a moment before a small smile replaces the surprise on her face. Respectfully, Rain and the others fade into the background, blessedly allowing Wrynn to better focus on the conversation at hand.
They may have been born around the same time, but Wrynn is small for her age. The girl is unremarkable, a pretty bay thing, although she's still got wounds on her barrel and her knees, although they've started to heal. Only her eyes look unusual – they're a rainbow, shifting from color to color like a strange mood ring. "Sorry, I wasn't expecting anyone to be out here." she says, her voice its usual feather-light quiet again. "Ephrelle, right? I'm Wrynn."
Though still young, Ephrelle is determined to become the epitome of what it means to be an Amazon. She has no desire for power (and is thus the perfect counterpart to Nayl), but does possess an extraordinary amount of determination. To build up her political acumen she’s taken to talking to anyone she finds – thus far that’s been a single mare in the Meadow.
With no guidance on how exactly one ‘trains’ for the army, Ephrelle has taken to running – full speed – through the Jungle until she all but collapses with exhaustion. She jumps over felled trees and weaves between dangling lianas, improving her agility as well as her endurance.
She has just finished one such run when Wrynn finds her.
Ephrelle is lying on her side in the stream, enjoying the cool trickle of water last her legs while she watches a trail of ants march past on the shore. She doesn’t immediately jump to her feet at the arrival of another horse, but she does stand, taking some time to stretch out her legs and neck as she does so. “That’s okay,” replies the black filly as she shakes her wet mane from her eyes. No longer the floppy foal mane, it grows longer every day, and is hard to keep straight. “Not a lot of people come out this far, I don’t think.”
With her own shares of bumps and scrapes from running, Ephrelle’s eyes go immediately to the wounds on her bay companion. “What happened to you?” She asks, wondering if perhaps Wrynn has been up to the same thing that she has. Perhaps they can be running partners, she thinks with a smile; that sounds much more fun than running alone.
She smiles when Ephrelle responds that it's okay, glad that she hasn't insulted the girl. Now that her fellow-filly is standing the girl can clearly see how hard her companion must have been working just before she arrived. Despite the stream, there's still obvious signs of sweat across Ephrelle's body, and the girl wonders what she had been doing.
She's about to ask when Ephrelle beats her to it, and she pauses for a moment, entirely unsure how to answer.
What could she say to someone who hadn't been there? How do you explain monsters and the end of the world – and was she ready to talk about talking to the dead? Would Ephrelle think she was crazy? Only one way to find out: Wrynn is many things, she decides, but a liar or teller of tales isn't one of them. She'll be honest.
She leans in closer to Ephrelle, her already quiet voice hushed quieter as though she's afraid of being overheard (not that it was likely to happen, this deep in the jungle). "I was fighting monsters." she says, matter-of-fact. Where other fillies (who would be making it up) would speak with pride and a hint of superiority or perhaps outright gloat, Wrynn is simply telling the truth. She might as well be reciting a dry history, a list of Amazonian rulers or something similar. "It tried to grab me, but I bit it." It's true, every word, seared into her mind just as much as it's seared into her skin.
And then she pauses, her quiet voice fading into silence. Surely - surely Ephrelle will have questions.
When Wrynn leans in before answering Ephrelle’s question, the black filly reacts without thoguyht, leaning in as well to be sure that she catches what Wrynn says. Her answer isn’t going to be running – Ephrelle can already guess that. She can feel her heart speed up at the prospect of something exciting, something that needs to be said quietly in case of spying ears. There is not much excitement in Ephrelle’s life and this is thrilling.
Monsters?! She gasps, green eyes wide but not at all disbelieving. Wrynn says that she bit it and Ephrelle nods, clearly waiting for the bay fully to elaborate. She doesn’t though, and Ephrelle needs to find out more details. “What kind of monsters?” She asks, “How many of them? Did it taste bad? What did it look like?”
She has never seen a monster. Pythons three times her length, jaguars with blood in their teeth, piranhas tearing into a monkey that had missed its vine and landed in the water – those things she has seen. They were terrifying, yes, but they were not monsters. She needs to know about these monsters that Wrynn has seen, and most importantly needs to know how to defend herself like Wrynn had. Biting a monster? It sounds terribly brave.
"There were two." A quick pause. "Well, technically three and a few more, but there were really two that I fought." She doesn't hesitate to elaborate, but she isn't bragging, isn't telling a story of incredible bravado that she'd just been waiting to share. Instead, she's sharing because Ephrelle seems legitimately curious, and she isn't shy about sharing when others are legitimately interested.
"I met one of them out in space. It was huge, and it was like goo. Like sap from one of the trees, but muddier." she struggles to explain the concept. "It had a huge mouth though, and it ate me after I asked it for directions! But it was okay, because after it ate me, I was where I needed to be." she pauses, realizing how incredibly farfetched it sounded, but knowing that it was all true, and that's all that mattered.
"Then I met the two. The first one was HUGE – it had to be as big as the central meeting-place in the jungle here." she remembers it clearly, a monstrosity. "It had a big center with these things that looked like snakes shooting out. And it had one single eye that could roll all around the center, and when it saw you, it'd shoot out a snake-looking thing." she pauses then, catching her breath. Her voice has stayed quiet and gentle as she's telling the story. "I got caught by it once, before I saw the big monster. That's where I got the scrapes on my barrel. " she gestures to it with her nose. Thankfully, it doesn't hurt much. "I bit it, and it was surprised and dropped me."
"I got away from it because I figured out, if it couldn't see you, it couldn't snakes you. So I jumped and I ran to get away from it. And I scraped my knees a bunch with that." Nothing glamorous there – just your garden variety filly hurting herself, but with a lot more 'running from monsters' and a lot less 'just being goofy'.
"Then there was one that was very tall and ran on only two legs. It was black and just had a bunch of mouths on it." That one had been arguably the more creepy of the two, although both had been pretty bad. "It would come closer and closer, slowly, and you'd just have to keep running. So I was dodging the one, and trying to run from the other." Coming from any other filly, this would surely seem like bragging. But coming from Wrynn, it sounds as though she's equally surprised she was able to do it. "I'm just glad I was able to make it." she says, entirely truthfully.
And then she's prepared to be silent, but she remembers at the last minute that Ephrelle had asked another question. "Oh, you asked how it tasted!" she says, with the rush of memory. Her face screws up in a look of concentration. It wasn't something she'd really thought about at the time – she'd had a lot of other things on her mind. "Well, it kind of tasted like…you know those berries that just taste sour? They look like they'd be good, but they're just awful, and when you accidentally eat them you want to go rinse your mouth out in the nearest stream? It tasted kind of like that."
