"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
From my breast the cold heart taking, Give it to Belerma's care
I was born white, like milk. Like poppy seeds crushed flat and drained. Innocent. Pure.
That never lasts long.
My first memories are of being alone. There was no one to herald my coming in this dark, tainted world, nor anyone to to explain why some days I was green, or pink, or a lovely shade of blue. The other foals had no interest in me, or I in them (what good is friendship if one day you should simply die, or be taken away?) and the creatures of the earth could not speak my language, so I was alone. It never bothered me so much, that heavy weight no child should ever bear, except when the milk-mare came to feed us lost souls.
I called her that because she came when the hunger was too much for all of us, her two rows of heavy udders stretching from hips to breast and swinging low as she walked. The strange mare never spoke to us, or comforted us, but she had purpose and meaning and so, in a way, she became a mother to us all. It was only when she left that the empty, cruel feeling of my abandonment settled in again, turning my coat to a sullen shade of grey.
The days passed.
I could leave. I’d seen others do it - the older ones. Where they went was a mystery to me; my world consisted of these small corners in the den. Half of my mind was elated by the idea - to spread my clear wings and soar above them all, laughing! Yet the other half was not so convinced - death awaited those who left and, besides that inevitable end, those glass-clear feathers on my back could do little more than flex.
So I remained. To wait for a savior, or to save myself.
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
This summer seems longer than those of his previous years – fall is little more than a distant blur on the horizon.
The temperature is pleasant, and the bright sun overhead is softened by a lively breeze that tosses the dry strands of his mane. For a long time, the lack of water had felt strange, but he has adjusted. It’s a little easier, truthfully. The opalescent scales of his white markings are dull without near-constant submersion, and he no longer has to deal with (sometimes) unwanted attention from strangers. His good looks are still undeniable, but pushing through the brush, the smoky black stallion with his faint scowl and long legs falls just sort of ‘supernaturally attractive’.
Taking the path less traveled is a still a habit though, and Ivar is following the coastline of his way to Tephra. Going through the commons lands – forest, field, meadow – would be a shorter journey, but it would also be a more populous trail. Still, it’s not a path he has taken in a while, and he gets slightly turned around a little afternoon. The trail had forked and he’d taken a wrong turn, misremembering the trail from a trip two years earlier. He finds his way in an odd sort of meadow rather than the scrubland he’d been expecting, and there are rather a lot of children around.
Ivar has been dealing with a rather large number of children lately, he thinks idly as he tries to discern the location of the sun overhead. The stallion is still squinting when he loosk down and locks eyes with a grey filly slouching somewhat nearby.
“Hey kid,” Ivar says without thinking twice, his tenor voice smooth and even. “You know which way it is to Tephra? I got turned around a few miles back. ”
From my breast the cold heart taking, Give it to Belerma's care
Initially, I would have hated the term ‘Kid‘ being slung at me so casually. The word has no distinction, lacks even the ability to coin my gender, and seems harsh in its delivery. “I’m not some kid-” I begin to protest, my stoneflint gaze rising with instinctual defense and mistrust, but when they come to rest on the stranger’s face I can do little besides stare. Had I truly thought myself capable of offending such a creature? David himself gazes back at me, hewn from pied marble. Child that I am, beauty and lust should be of no consequence to me but here they are, warring inside of my narrow breast as he waits for my reply.
“I’m an orphan.” I breath at last.
It simply should not be; this scene of a vagabond stallion and a lonely female child is nothing if not seemingly dangerous and yet … the mannerisms of his person, the narcissus quality of his appearance, even the smooth tenor of his voice all persuade me into believing I would never close my eyes again without drawing the shape of his lovely face to mind. “How can such beauty exist in a world so hideous?” I wonder.
“I don’t know the way.” I admit with crushing defeat. The one task given to me by a possible ray of hope and I (useless thing that I am) can’t even tell North from South. There’s a chance still, if I play my cards right - if I can raise my head just so, with the tilt of my delicate chin; or if I can round my stormy eyes with unspoken pain and tremble like the frailest of exotic birds perhaps … perhaps …
“Maybe together we could figure it out, though?” I prompt, and the blush of a rose spreads like ink across my once-gray coat. “It can’t be all that hard … what’s your name? Especially if you’re asking a kid for help.”
i somehow entirely missed that you had replied to this D:
so so sorry!
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
‘An orphan’, she says, at the word rattles oddlyas he repeats it internally. Her parents or dead – or simply absent. Both options seem equally unfortunate to Ivar, and yet the girl seems more defeated by her lack of geographical knowledge than she does by the fact that she is utterly alone in the world. To Ivar, who has never met someone without family, it seems her situation is too dire to worry about small things like giving a stranger directions. What did they eat, these lost children of the Den (for that must be the place he’s found himself in)? What stopped something from eating them?
It is not something that Ivar has ever thought about; not something that he ever needed to consider. The pied colt had a complete nuclear family (well, as complete as it can be when the parents never speak to each other). He was never threatened with abandonment, and even as an adult of child siring age, he cannot fathom leaving a child behind or being a child alone.
The tobiano stallion is accustomed to the way other react to him. That is why he is here in the Den, after all. He’d rather risk getting lost. He doesn’t notice it in the little girl, not in the way she blinks her sad eyes and shivers in the wind. He has already decided to take her in when she offers to help, and he is momentarily distracted from his offer by the way that her grey skin slides to pink.
That was interesting.
“I’m Ivar,” he tells her, briefly distracted by the transition of color and struggling to piece together an answer. “And for your information, I only asked you because you were the closest.” Admitting that he’s lost at all was a wounding blow to his pride; he can’t have her thinking that he’s totally helpless. “I know its north, but I took a wrong turn and ended up here.” His brown eyes look up to the sky, but it is still too close to no one to get an accurate read of direction. The sea is too distant to be of help, but that blur of the horizon might be the Mountain.
Might be.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he asks, looking back down at the rose colored filly. “I bet travelling is more fun than hanging out here. If you wanna come back here after Tephra I can drop you off. Or you could come back to Loess with me? ” Surely there will be someone there to take care of her. Heda maybe, or possible Zhenga. Mares are better at that sort of thing after all.
From my breast the cold heart taking, Give it to Belerma's care
Sometimes, I’m not aware it’s happening. The color shifts are like trading clothes; one shirt slides off, a silken robe glides on. In fact, I myself had been unaware of the exchanges until another rude little foal had commented loudly on the matter.
They’d received a bite in following fashion, but now I think it might have been an unfair sort of exchange. After all, they’d led me to a young sort of revelation. My legs at the time had carried me away to a small reflection pool, bent me low to the earth where my eyes had then unveiled my own likeness in the reflection of the water’s surface. I’d been fascinated with looks, (much like the present) and that same elation had brought yellow to my cheeks and then, my coat.
“So beautiful.” I think, as the young stallion gives me his name. A precious sort of gem, which I tuck on a shelf next to the only other name I’ve been given, Gunsynd. Now the odd collection of letters wouldn’t be so lonely with Ivar stacked beside them. “If that’s what we’ll call it, fine -” I shrug softly, not so eager to return the sting of his comment on my location as compared to the other foals. “at least I get to leave, while they have to stay.”
It’s enough to draw my attention away from him. This one goal had been an illusive star in the sea of endless sky and now that I’ve grasped it, I’m eager to ride the astral coattails to wherever this Tephra or Loess might be. Two blushing legs draw me forward; I whisk past the scaled man with the faintest of touches. “The beach is this way. We can follow the shoreline, right?”
My primrose lips are finished speaking. With the coquettish tip of my doll-like head, I peer back at Ivar and smile.
