"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 STORY GOES OR THE WAY THAT I WAS TOLD
THERE WAS A KING THAT ALWAYS FELT TOO HIGH
AND THEN HE FELL TOO LOW
When the Reckoning had undertaken, some thousands of miles away from the foreign shore he was traipsing, it had been a small mercy for Falk. He had never wielded fear like a weapon. Not like his father, not like his younger brother—both of whom are but distant, strange boughs on a tree he had broken free from before he could even catch a glimpse of it.
As far as he knows, he is the only one for whom the horror sinks like a rotted gut and makes him feel irreparably immoral. Not that Falk is perfect, he is the cast off of tyrants and villains—he is the body of monsters and the blood of extermination.
Underneath, it boils and surfaces as tar in his throat, rendering him hard and bitter is spates. But unlike them, he tempers it with the honor he gained on his own terms, off distant shores and in rain-soaked skies.
The fear has always felt out of place in his bones, the thing that made him clumsy in his own fit body—he was paying a price, he had decided long ago, for whatever sin it was that made this seed grow thick and mean. Mother had never minded the ungainliness. She believed it, likely, to be childhood sea-legs; he believed it to be imps tripping him up at every step.
Mother is dead and imps don’t exist.
He is who he is and he has grown much in his migrations.
He comes back a man, one of no particular note.
He is medium-height, dark-skinned and eyed. He no longer bears the horns that curl tightly around his head; his wings are the same (or, they look the same, even if they are made of borrowed material), white and stark again his side. The muscles of his back and shoulders hulk and move brutishly under his dusky skin, having spent so much time charting the wide open skies and developing those machines.
Flight had been spared when his horns had shed from his head and his hooves had soldered shut. When the fear had released itself and slunk back to the dark, ancestral soup from whence it came. Waiting, it would seem, though Falk also returns ignorant to the Mountain and its larceny and to the reclamation process.
He spots the open, spring-brown meadow and pumps his wings, slowing his body to descend. It comes at him fast and when his hooves touch down, the momentum stumbles him, as it is wont to do. Every time. For him, it is normalcy. The giving, soft ground squishes under his weight as he makes a wide semicircle to catch his balance. When he does, he stills, breathing the crisp, fragrant air—home’s air, if it could be called that, now.
It has been so long, he realizes he feels like a stranger in wild lands, which is really no different from the past who-knows-how-many years.
03-21-2017, 07:29 PM (This post was last modified: 03-26-2017, 12:08 AM by Abelia.)
i swore that i'd never let you back in
In the very distance, or so what it seems to give the impression of being far away, the birds are singing a sweet morning melody. The presence of dawn had arisen quite early this spring day than the passing winter days. Sunlight had already lit up the horizon. It had been a slow pace, as if winter held back the warmth of the sun, making its way above the treeline of the forest that borders one side of the meadow.
So far it looked to be a warm and a promising day.
She yawns absentmindedly, watching the rise of the sun with hazelnut eyes. It feels like she has been asleep for a thousand years, and in truth, it likely has been that. She does not recall the last time she has been in Beqanna, but it had been enough for her to feel the memories of her birthplace slipping away. However, that was one of the shortcomings of being an immortal soul. She is not an old soul though, at least compared to those that have been gifted (or cursed, depending on who you spoke to) with immortality.
But something had changed her.
When she came back to Beqanna, the world had pulled at her body—it felt like she was being torn apart, like her limbs were not hers to move anymore. Her life slowly began to be pulled away from her, uncoiling the energy from her body and all the things that had made her feel so young. And along with that went with her beautifully, sharpen horn. All she had left was a pair of wings (thankfully, she had thought once her transition had occurred).
While the transition had been unexpected, and rather painful, she is left uncertain of what to think of it. Beqanna had indeed changed, but to what extent she has no idea. It is only here, in the meadow, this morning that she tries to figure it out. Waiting patiently for someone (anyone) to inform her of what has happened here. It was with an open mind, and deep wishing, that she hopes to find it has not changed much.
Then again, anything was possible in Beqanna.
And even waiting, patiently, no one does come to find her. She is not simply dishearten by the lack of others seeking her out. After all, not everyone was a morning bird like her. If it was possible she would stay up all night and day. Doing what exactly she had no idea, but she had always found the simplest of things to thrill her young and eager heart and mind.
The mare sets out from her spot held for many hours, wandering towards here and there across the meadow. A promising day indeed was on her side. The sight of the winged stallion draws her attention in the distance. He hoovers down clumsily, but catches himself in a manner that looks effortless to her. A smile crosses her soft lips at that. She shifts her line of direction towards him, closing the distance between them with a quick pace.
“Hello there,” she calls out to him as she draws closer to him. Her simple smile has not faded from her lips. In fact, the winged mare is smiling ear to ear. She is glad to finally find someone (maybe this someone would have the answers, she thought). “I’m Abelia,” she greets and at last comes to a stop in front of the silver smoky stallion.
THE STORY GOES OR THE WAY THAT I WAS TOLD
THERE WAS A KING THAT ALWAYS FELT TOO HIGH
AND THEN HE FELL TOO LOW
It took a half second longer than it would most others for his eyes to finally drift to the Mountain, squinting against the blind of nascent light haloing its spiny ridge. “Hm,” he huffs, sweeping deep into his memory for all the maps he might have drawn out—uncouth and jumbled though they would be, from a baby’s whimsical mind—to set straight what peak this is.
He has crested Beqanna mountains before, side-by-side with mother or some powerful bird of prey he had followed from the seaside, his flight being the only place where his clumsiness has never seem to slow him up. Those ice-capped (probably the Tundra’s vast, rugged range) and dry, but this one comes to him like a stranger and disorients.
This looks the same—this grass, those trees that hem all manner of kind and unkind flirtations in; the river that babbles through it, overflowing with spring runoff.
But, doesn’t every meadow look the same, really? To him, perhaps, whose eye is not keen to this cluster of flowers or this moss-clothed rock. Besides, it has been so very long, and could he truly say he had ever paid attention to anything much beyond the tidal pools (rich with all manner of curious creatures) and sea-soaked rocks he had spent some heady, childhood days scaling?; the friends he had made there, all a-whirl in his brain, stuck in a warm, fuzzy place he can revisit when the wanderlust finds him lonely
(He had been sweet then. And happy. Really happy. He is not sure what he is now.)
He had flown too high and too absentmindedly to notice that the Cove was gone—exercised by an irate goddess from the ocean’s lips; its inhabitants unceremoniously flung into briny throat, for all he knows. The Tundra was thawed and reconstituted; the Jungle was felled; the Chamber was razed. Beqanna had been wholly fractured and reset, a new reality that those who had never up and left had come to make peace with long ago.
The Beach is still there, though. Mother’s body will not be.
It will be long gone by now.
She chases away his perplexity; her voice, like a songbird, cuts through the haze and commands his eyes back from that austere stone shrine. “Oh,” he turns his body to face her square-on, tucking his wings up against his side and away from the mud. “Hi.” His voice is low and rough, so like that of the father he does not know. She is so much brighter that he is; so much more intricate, spotted and patterned with stripes. She sings rather than rumbles, like something hard and rocky. “Falk. I’m Falk, I’m sorry, you surprised me a bit, I was thinking...” his own confusion pressing through.
More importantly, she smiles, and it lights up her face.
He smiles back, though it looks as if must break some ice formed over winter’s chill.
Abelia had not made the notion to search beyond the field and the meadow just yet. The familiarity of the land and memories with her recently returning comforted her more than ever anywhere else. She had lived in the meadow for a time once—years before she had left into the world outside of Beqanna.
When she came down from the mountain, she had not missed the changes that extended far beyond the tree lines. Her horn and everlasting age may be gone, but the wings upon her back would not go without use. And even a good pair of eyes (old age surely might make her blind eventually if she never gets her immortality back) aided her in seeing the changes.
The kingdoms and herd lands she knew growing up and exploring where gone. The sandy dunes was nowhere to be seen either. It had been a home to the winged mare at one point—a thought of her mother and sister briefly touch her present thoughts. Now a new world lay just over the horizon, and along came with new faces.
Still, she is not sure though what it all means.
Abelia peers at him curiously when he notices her. The girl just notices now he had been in his own world. It was another world she often visited too, a world that touched beyond physical reality. A dreamer world she lived in, and she was the dreamer.
When he turns to face her, she straightens up a little, feeling his full attention on her now. His voice is rough and low. It almost reminds her of a frog she once heard. Yet, his was a little softer and gentler in her opinion. “Hi Falk,” she says beaming at him again more than ever.
It had been a long time since Abelia had been around others—she is brighter and bubblier than usual. Approaching and making conversation with others usually had never been her thing to do. She most of the time preferred to keep back and watch from a distant; however, she at times would crave for the companionship of others and anything that changed her world.
Falk smiles back at her. Despite how broken and strange it looks, Abelia does not take notice to it. She simply sees the smile for what it is right now—warming and welcoming. “What were you thinking about?” She asks with a tilt of her head, brow furrowing just a bit as she looks at him curiously.
THE STORY GOES OR THE WAY THAT I WAS TOLD
THERE WAS A KING THAT ALWAYS FELT TOO HIGH
AND THEN HE FELL TOO LOW
He is so glad for its absence, because the fear likes good things like this.
They clamor for it, rattling the bars of his ribs and stomping angry little bruises in his gut. They become overwhelming—they become wild and unchained and they whisper to the basest part of him like sirens on slippery rocks. The part he has, at times, wished could be excised or otherwise lobotomized from his body; and at times, he embraces it. Staring into that abyss, he finds faces upon faces staring back at him, all dead-eyed but steeled in the arrogance of their own darkness. They, the dead-eyed family, have no moral compass but an appetite that acts as their Polestar.
It would have been easy.
It would have been animal, and it might have made him a king somewhere.
He has subsumed himself into that fear. He has, though it was not his proudest time, and even then he found he could not exact precise control over it. He is not a perfect krampus. He is a damaged one—and that might seem like a good thing, but instead it is a dangerous thing, because the fear slips from his fingertips like loose sand and seawater that he cannot grasp adequately and so, without need to keep orderly, the fear casts itself off, errantly.
Falk cannot control it. Not always, but especially not when faced with good things. Or boiling, carnal things; or deepest, darkest things.
He is glad, once again, that it is gone, because it would so love her. And it would have her, because he knows the way those jawing, fanged soldiers see blood in bright smiles and war in dreamy eyes. He smiles on, hoping the unsure nature of it—anxiousness and loneliness lay behind it, in equal measure—becomes calmed and more real, in time. (He could smile freely once, though that was very long ago, when he scaled and tumbled down seaside cliffs and examined strange bug-like things in tidal pools. That was when he was carefree and the fear came wobbling in like soft-handed toddlers, his playmates barely noticing their reckless adventures inside their brains.
How they all have grown.)
“Oh,” he shakes his head, suddenly keenly aware of how odd it might sound—it is easier, and more rational by far, to doubt the accuracy of his own memory than to suspect the world has been rearranged, “I just. I’ve been gone for such a long time, I feel a bit… disoriented.” He laughs, trying to cast off any shadow of doubt, “I suppose that happens, though, doesn’t it? Time plays tricks and all that.” He casts a small glance to the Mountain, letting his brow furrow, but never dropping the cocked grin, “feels a bit like going crazy.” He says nothing of his horns or hooves or fear. He cannot imagine he is the only one to have been changed by… whatever had changed him.
It sits like a big elephant he refuses to mention for the sake of remaining cool.
03-31-2017, 10:34 PM (This post was last modified: 03-31-2017, 10:37 PM by Abelia.)
i swore that i'd never let you back in
She is familiar with the way fear is.
It grows like a weed within you. Fear is relentless, thrashing and crashing to find its hold within the soil of your soul and mind. It searches endless through your being, looking through the faded memories and emotions that are locked away in the darkness, finding anything to bring you down and into something horrific and disturbing. But she is not touched by fear, no matter how many times the wicked world has tried to get her, she will never be touched.
Her imagination is too strong to be filled with the shadows and corrupting words that fear puts in your thoughts. Her heart is too big for the good of all things that exist in this world and beyond—she is always finding the hint of a good even in the worst of others and events. Always searching for ways to make things better.
It is her inner flame and passion that drives her forward. She looks towards her own inner heart, not seeking rewards or punishments, but rather ways to make it all better. It is her own code of morality and virtue she hangs onto, blossoming from a world that does not exist truly. Above it all, she is a dreamer.
She dreams of a world in color and magic. There is only peace and beautiful things to see. It is her haven, her place to go. When the world is cruel to her she flees to there. There is never a time she stays too long here in the world of reality. Eventually, she will be gone from here when the world comes crashing around her again.
But, for now, it does not.
Abelia listens to Falk with both ears forward. She is keenly aware of the changes that he speaks about too. Beqanna was nothing like it had been before—curious and intrigued by the events, she must find out why. But, Falk, this stranger, seems to be in the same predicament as well like her.
“You aren’t the only one feeling crazy,” she laughs, admitting her own feelings of craziness as well, “It isn’t the same here. Something is really different.” Abelia had felt it in her bones the second she came down from the mountain, a part of her soul was taken away—a piece she might not get back.
Her smile fades a little, but still holds softly against her thinned lips of white and gold champagne colors. “I lost part of me when I came down that Mountain,” her attention drifts away from the stallion towards the Mountain, “Maybe time is playing a trick on all of us.” It sounds strange because she never had to worry about time. “I never had to worry about time before but it seems like I might have to now,” she adds with soft laugh.
THE STORY GOES OR THE WAY THAT I WAS TOLD
THERE WAS A KING THAT ALWAYS FELT TOO HIGH
AND THEN HE FELL TOO LOW
If he could see inside her, he might shrink away.
It would be a primal thing, of course. An ancestral evocation. He wouldn’t mean to, but it would be a mixture of revulsion and precaution that would cause him to cast her away to a kinder, more gently made wind. At the end of the day, he was conceived of in a frothy, furious blood ritual – it is an origin that he cannot shake, even if the details of it had died on his mother’s stiff lips. (His father is an unknown quantity to him, but he knows his mother never spoke of fear or used it like a dagger.)
It is what made him full of fear and the instinct to give fear.
It is what makes him, him, sat in half shadow and light.
It would be counterproductive, to send her away, like a flower evading the sun.
That is why he doesn’t, because she is safe from the prying claws of his mind and because he has faith in better things to guide him – if darkness does not find him first and turn his aimlessness to weaponry, it had almost sunk its fingernails into him once. Almost, in a cove overseen by an iron man; and if his father could find him, he’d bear down on him until the fear found a captain or he found a shallow grave in the dust.
(His father would hardly countenance a weak krampus in his hedgerow.)
But she is here, like sun, and his fear is gone so he opens up, ever so slightly, untangling himself in her warmth. “I’m glad,” and he supposes he truly is. Better to be mad with someone else than alone. “I wasn’t paying attention, I guess, when I came back. Or, I thought I got turned around,” he gets turned around often enough, but no. No, that mountain is wholly alien and suddenly he begins to wonder what force could draw a mountain up from flat ground – what could it do to that cove; what could something like that do to the friends he had made?
Other than that strip of briny coast, and those vague songs of childhood laughter still echoing in the hallways of his mind, he had no home here before he left. His mother was his family, his everything, and she had died – provoking his travelling spirit and off he had gone.
She speaks of time. Her time is his fear, he guesses, but she mourns the partition. “That must be scary.” He has never really worried about time. He isn’t old or young enough – it hasn’t been an endless part of him like it had her, “I can’t say I’m half as wistful for what I lost...” His voice is hesitant, teetering on the brink of a revelation he prefers to keep to his chest, “is that connected then?” He glances the way she looks off, pensively, except his brow is furrowed tighter than ever and he unfurls his wings, as if he means to take off.
“What happened here...” Does it even matter? Everyone around them, bright in new sunlight, seems unperturbed; he is free, though she is less so.
Her aura comes off easily, spilling out of warmth and goodness. She can only be and give others what she feels. And when she gives she does it so wholeheartedly without second guessing. It is her inner belief and intuitive thinking that find only in the best of others—simply believing in the fact that all are likely misunderstood if another’s personality comes off wicked and cruel.
However, Abelia is simply simple-minded in the way of the world. There are some that do not even have one ounce of good in them. Their very soul burns with a passion to create chaos and destruction no matter what. However, she simply would argue differently. Perhaps in the way Falk has had been formed—an evil father creating something quite the opposite of whatever he had intended.
She would have found that good and beautiful.
“Oh don’t be silly,” she says quickly when he speaks of about her predicament of losing time and turns her hazelnut gaze back to him, “I’m sure nothing will happen! At least I don’t think I will all of a sudden just plop on the ground dead.” She giggles at the thought of it—no matter how strange the idea might be she cannot help but laugh at it.
When Falk mentions losing something, she can hear his hesitant voice in his words. Almost like he is choosing which words he should use and share with her. Part of her wants to dig a little deeper, but Abelia too has her own reservations of keeping her life a little more closed off than she comes off to be. “Oh,” she whispers loudly feeling the connection he is making. It feels strange to think something such as the huge earthly rock could do something like that. However, she knows there is something more beyond simple magic in Beqanna. Gods and faeries that come and keep the balance of the world in order.
Abelia watches as his wings unfold, “UH! You aren’t leaving, right?” She asks in protest almost at his actions. “I mean—are you going somewhere?” She wouldn’t let him leave just like that, no after he was making some sort of connection to what was happening and the answers she has been looking for. “We could figure out what happened together,” she offers quickly, unfolding her own wings too.
![[Image: HzeOUhk.png]](http://i.imgur.com/HzeOUhk.png)
