"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
His skin feels electric beneath the gleam of moonlight - uncomfortable in that it is a strange and slightly unusual sensation, but now that his cuts and bruises had healed, the silver light pools gently into the hollows and dips of his worn face, cool and gentle against the sharp angles of his jaw. It does not burn his skin, or blind him, so the blue roan stallion sighs deeply, his breath rattling in his throat as it escapes into the air. For a moment he almost forgets his stoic guide at his side, lost in his thoughts and basking in the delicate, gentle glow of early morning darkness.
But she is there, sturdy and patient, ever the guide. Still nameless, she reminds him of someone deep in his memory, lost and forgotten in the gaping darkness of the catacombs from which he had emerged, a blurred face with blue eyes. A stag, perhaps? Regal and true; a protector. However, the memory is fuzzy and causes his chest to tighten, so he presses it no longer and instead leans into her slightly, listening fervently. He no longer shies away from the sound of her voice but instead is enchanted by it. The words she chooses fill his mind with such vivid pictures that he had not thought about in a long while, rolling through him with enthusiasm, deeply stirring within him.
“Magic,” he repeats with bated breath, his voice robust and grainy compared to the gentle chime of her own. The word sparks the memories again - wolves beneath the moonlight, trees taller than the sky, a lake golden from the sun… “There is magic here?” He whispers it as a question, but in such a way that she could assume he already knows the answer - yes. Magic - he remembers magic.
For the first time in a long time, a chuckle reverberates in his chest, low and hearty but extremely soft as it cascades through him. “Mushrooms,” he repeats her tenderly, in no way chastising her affinity for the fungi, but merely finding her excitement alluring and simply endearing. He wishes he could go on, explain how mushrooms might be the only plant he truly had seen in the depths of the darkness, and how most often it had been a source of nutrition and he too, found them delightful. He inhales as if to begin, but the words never leave him - to overextend his unused voice and to try to filter through the many thoughts in his head is too tiresome for him, for this extremely eventful night. It would be too much.
She speaks of death and the slight smile, ever so faint on his charcoal lips, fade respectfully. Death is something the entire world has in common, and the reminder of that morality is enough to quiet him into silence. Death he is familiar with - death, he knew too well.
As if to bring him from his stupor, the warmth of her breath alights on his muscular neck, sweet and tender upon the cold, damp flesh. Even now she has yet to press him for information, to pry into the why and how of his arrival.
“I’m Balto,” he offers, turning his gaze to hers as he slowly and carefully opens his eyes, afraid that any amount of light might cause him pain, but curious to really see who has drawn him out into the open.
-- once the king of beasts but now they feast on thoughts beneath his vacant crown.
He seems to be finding peace in the early morning darkness.
Keeper has to look away at last. She feels intrusive just staring at him as the moonlight touches his neck and then his face. It is like spying on a pair of lovers that have just found each other after so long apart. Moonlight caresses his fur and brings to life the tired sinkholes in his flesh, the eye pits and hills of cheek that show his age and his time long removed from anything but the cave. She looks back though, cannot look away for too long because his sigh brings her gaze around to him again and there it is - moonlight on his face, and a peace unlike anything Keeper has ever seen.
When was the last time he stood like this, in the moonlight?
She never thinks to ask him; he leans into her and the trust that is becoming apparent is enough for her. “Magic,” he echoes, his voice gaining a timbre and strength to it that she is not familiar with. He seems taken by her mention of that. In a way that makes him question though he already knows and Keeper can only answer him in that same gentle murmur, “Yes.” because she has seen it.
The King she serves is scaled like a dragon of old, she has met a stallion that could change into a cougar, and a cricket that turned into a mare that was perhaps never a cricket at all. She has a sister with black points and black hair but skin as green as the stalk of a plant, and a brother with snowy white wings that she used to hide beneath as a foal. Even her father had horns from the addax atop his head! Not to mention the fact that her grandmother has been alive for at least two centuries or more.
“Magic.” she repeats, unaware that it has affected her too. But that came later, long after she leaves him because there will come a time when they separate and she goes on a quest, and the quest leaves her different - changed, full of magic in some small way that Keeper would never have imagined. But that comes later, because she cannot think of leaving him now, or really ever. This night becoming morning but still so dark is too precious to her to give up. Keeper discovers that she has a problem - she can’t let go, not of this moment, not of him.
His chuckle breaks the spell the moonlight and his face had her under. She blinks, momentarily stupid and still dazzled by him as he mentions the mushrooms. Keeper feels a hot rush of embarrassment go to her cheeks but horses can’t blush, thank heavens! It had been a silly thing to mention, she realizes that now but also realizes that he isn’t laughing at her but with her, as if he knows all about the allure of mushrooms. She’s never hunted for them in caves, just beneath the trees in the big woods, so cannot imagine that that might have been all the fare he’d had at times.
She catches the inhalation as if he might go on with something to say but it never comes. Only silence, but it is a silence that is companionable to both of them and she does not mind it. Keeper is content with this, her breath on his neck and the way his face comes round to her at last and how the beautiful blue of his eyes lock onto hers as he gives her what he can - his name. She has to bite back a laugh, thinking how alike to foals they are in mimicking what the other says as his name leaves her lips in a breathy rush because she has to try it out and see how it sounds coming from her mouth. “Balto.”
If occurs to her then, a name for a name. Smiling, she tells him. “I’m Keeper.”
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
@[Balto] we do! Keeper and I love him to pieces! <3
His crystalline eyes open, so blue they are nearly white as their irises are revealed, but their brilliant color shines for only for a moment. Then his pupils adjust to the light (though to her it would be a lack of light) and grow large and round, nearly all encompassing his gaze, save for the tiny sliver of blue around the rim. Peculiar to gaze upon, most likely, but it is a gentle look, not at all foreboding or sinister despite it’s dark abyss.
Balto takes her in (or he tries too; his sight isn’t well) for a few seconds, blinking with a curious and inquisitive stare.
They are of few words, but the blue roan stallion is glad. It bewilders him that she can seem to understand him so well, even in the few dark hours they’ve spent together - and he’s only just learned her name.
“Keeper,” he repeats, just as she had, with a certain gusto that is unfamiliar to him, but tastes sweet on his tongue. He had laughed before, within the darkness, but it is different now, out in the open and with a woman - the warmth of her against him is exhilarating, in a way that a young colt first fancies a filly. But that’s not exactly how it feels because Balto is older, perhaps much older than the woman beside him - but he feels alive, for the first time in nearly a decade. Thanks to her, thanks to Keeper. “Anything could have been lurking in this cave,” he mentions breathlessly, tilting his head slightly to survey her a bit more carefully. So trusting, so willing to help, so curious. You’re brave, he doesn’t say, but instead brushes the charcoal of his lips against her mane to rustle the soft tendrils carefully, gently. “Far more brave than I.” He wouldn’t have even thought to breach the shelter of his cavern without her - he would still be lurking beneath the shadows in the darkness.
He wants to tell her he didn’t come from darkness, that he wasn’t born within the shadows but he had to grow accustomed to it, that it hadn’t been a choice but a need to survive, but again, he says nothing. Daybreak is soon - who is to say he would even see her again? Soon they will depart (he knows it - the sun’s rise will drive him back into his cave, without a doubt) and there is nothing he can offer to cause her return to this lonely cave, deep within the forest.
-- once the king of beasts but now they feast on thoughts beneath his vacant crown.
His eyes are the blue of Hyaline’s lake, she realizes, stunned.
Keeper had not noticed that before, as they seem more crystalline and so vivid a blue as to be almost pale in color. Hyaline’s lake is like that sometimes, and that is all she can think of as she falls into the unfathomable depths of his eyes before pupil swallows up the blue with its enlarged black roundness. The blue becomes but a sliver of a ring around the pupil but there is nothing sinister in his look, for all that it holds her captive, it is gentle in its manipulation of her own gaze.
Her eyes are black on black, like an animal slinking through the dark that is finally startled by a flash of light on their face. Just like that same animal, she is familiar with a life shrouded in quiet and instinct. That is how she can understand him, he is like her deer - shy and wild, quiet and beautiful, and she is surprised that he lets her close enough to touch him, to talk to him. The deer never let her do that! They raise the white flag of their tails and show her their fleet cloven hooves as they run from her.
He is bigger than even the bucks that she chases after, but she is not afraid of his size or his nearness. It never occurs to her that he could hurt her. She recognizes that he is a stallion and she is a mare, that there is some gap of age between them but it is one that seems inconsequential, as inconsequential as the division of their sex - he and she, and that other instincts could come into question here. Despite it all, Keeper is not afraid of him for all that she can feel the thick rope of muscles beneath his skin whenever one of them shifts and their bodies touch.
She hears him say her name and it breaks her concentration, snaps it clean in two as if had been no more than a twig underfoot and her gaze wavers from his for just a heartbeat of a moment. His breathless mention of something far more nefarious lurking in the cave was a possibility that had never occurred to her, and for a second, she feels a slight admonishment in his tone until his lips rustle the dark and light strands of her mane and she looks up at him with a smile.
“I suppose there could have been…” she trails off momentarily, a pinprick of daylight visible in even their forested corner of the world that she has forgotten even existed outside this time with him. “But there was only you.” she finishes, equally as breathless, because the coming of the dawn is a signal that he’ll retreat which is something that Keeper had known would happen. It was as inevitable as the dawn was. Come sunup, he’d tuck himself back into that cave and she could hardly blame him. She’d seen how the moonlight had been harsh enough on his sight, she could not imagine how worse sunlight would be and she’d not have him dayblind on her account.
Keeper knew that she would come back as often as she could, each and every night if she had her way about it, to draw him out into the night with her. He’d grown on her, the way moss does on a rock, and he’d not be easy to shake off like the flies in summer with a shiver of her skin or a flick of her tail. No, Balto had become something more - something magical, for all that he dwelt in a cave in the forest.
She thought it was like something out of one of her grandmother’s tales:
Girl finds a cave in a forgotten corner of the forest.
Girl finds boy (man) inside of the cave and tries to show him the world.
Boy (man) stays in cave and each night, girl comes back, time and time again.
Keeper knew she would be back.
Time, nor the cave could keep her from him.
Trouble found her face in the form of a sad look that she gave him, knowing that he’d have caught sight of the pale light pearling the sky above the trees. Or he might have known instinctively that morning was fast approaching and that he’d go, and she’d go too, to finish her search for mushrooms and now, moss but thinking of him the entire time until she could circle back to his cave and coax him out of it again. Keeper sighed, and buried her face in his neck, sad to go and reluctant to leave him just now.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
@[Balto] I figured we could wrap this thread up for now until he's finished with his quest? Then we could post them together again so Keeper can tell him all about her new bear-self and he can tell her all about his quest? <3
