"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
08-07-2018, 07:50 PM (This post was last modified: 08-17-2018, 01:57 PM by Rhaegor.)
i kept my hope just like i'd hoped tothen sang to the sea for feelings deep blue
It's evening in Hyaline, and he should be asleep; but oh, how could anyone sleep when there's so much to think about! Even with his Dream Mother gently pressing sleep upon him, he resists; and, having far too many children to put to bed to be able to worry about the quiet and obedient one, Kagerus moves on to the next of them.
Minutes pass, the soft twilight shifting gradually to night. The golden boy considers trying to sleep, but the more he considers, the wider awake he becomes. There's mountains all around them, there's a lake and so many forests - it's too much to think about, and though his family is prone to dreaming, he prefers to contemplate life in his wakeful state.
Maybe I can just go for a walk...
Like a little groundhog, his head pops from where he'd been resting it on the ground. With bright, wide-awake eyes, he scans the grotto for one familiar figure in particular: Warlight. The antlered princess has an annoying tendency to disappear in the middle of the night without rhyme or reason, and so he banks his decision on whether she's present or not; and when he spots her lightly snoring figure, his mind is made up.
As silently as possible, the pegasus heaves himself to his gangly legs. In his naivety, he assumes that he is successful in this venture; but of course, Mothers both have a half-open eye on him, watching carefully for his next move. Usually they'd get up and put their middle child back to bed; but they'd discussed it recently, and decided that the three were getting old enough to go for some reckless adventures - supervised, of course.
But they didn't need to know that.
With what he thinks is the utmost finesse, Rhae creeps towards his older sister. When he reaches her - it felt like eons of the most silent sneaking - the little buckskin lowers his head to her ear, praying that his soft, nearly unused voice wouldn't earn him a sharp, nearly grown prong to the eye.
08-14-2018, 12:16 PM (This post was last modified: 08-14-2018, 12:38 PM by Warlight.)
For once, it is not the sensation of teleportation which rudely wakes her. It is a murmur in her ear - the whispered plea of a brother.
"Hmm?" Groggy and little confused, Warlight blinks herself into awareness. The night is alive outside their den; crickets and bats are chirping, and owls call back and forth to each other from the tree-tops. She would know the sounds and scent of Hyaline anywhere. More immediately, she is surrounded by only the soft breathing of her sleeping family, and the warmth they have created.
She prepares to return to her dreams, unsure of what woke her and unafraid of noises in the night - at least with both her mothers close by.
But the tickling in her ear causes her to turn her head and find the face of her quietest sibling aglow, and very close. Oblivious to their guardians' scheming, the filly is eager to cooperate with whatever he has planned, and she rises carefully. As reckless as she may be under under other circumstances, now Warlight seeks to glide across the stone floor, creating as little noise as possible from her small, hard hooves.
The last figure between her and the night is one she wouldn't mind waking, and the filly reaches to tug a wayward sprout of Koko's mane with her teeth in passing - but she doesn't linger. Two more steps bring her into the cool, free air, and when she turns to her brother there is a wild excitement in the breathy tones of her whisper.
08-14-2018, 02:45 PM (This post was last modified: 08-21-2018, 07:17 PM by Rhaegor.)
I kept my hope just like i'd hoped tpthen sang to the sea for feelings deep blue
His eldest sister opens her eyes as if expecting to be somewhere else, to which Rhae rolls his. Impatience roils across his skin like boiling water, but he forces himself to wait for her to come-to, knowing that any excess noise would definitely get him sent back to bed. Still, as Will snuffles and blinks, he presses his most-used sound into her ear, a little ssssss of needy anticipation that he’s sure will get her up.
And it does. With a care he’s never before witnessed, the little bay raises herself from the floor of the grotto, barely making any noise beside some scraping of her keratin hoof against the stone below. Nostrils flaring in excited roguishness, Rhae nuzzles and bumps her cute baby face like an overwhelmed puppy all the way through the cave and to the entrance way. He only stops, like her, when they pass the little body of their youngest triplet.
“Koko!” His stage-whisper rings through the cave, and he cringes at the noise of it - but even still, it does nothing to wake their palomino counterpart. Frustrated and getting nervous of being caught, Rhae sends a last nip to his brother’s ear - and gets a swift kick to the shin for all his thoughtfulness. Sleepy bastard!
As he finally makes his way to freedom, the openness before them banishes any venomous thoughts he’d been throwing - without any heart of course - Sviko’s way. The steep downhill of the mountain path that the family meanders down every single day suddenly seems a thousand times as intimidating now, and for a moment, Rhae wonders if he had been right to want to go on adventure - but when the wild breathiness of his sister’s voice finds its way to his ears, he knows he made the right choice. With Warlight by his side, he is invincible.
“I want to go to the lake,” Rhae offered. “I want to shine my light at it and - maybe we can see the bottom, or maybe it’ll reflect like the stars.” Even now, the boy’s brown eyes twinkle like those very same astronomical objects; even though his idea is quaint and perhaps boring, it couldn’t excite him even a mote more. Hoping that his big sister would like the idea, Rhae spread his wings, and then thought better of it.
He’s already awake, but they wouldn’t have noticed that.
Sviko knew exactly how to play the part - long, drawn out breaths and just a soft flutter of his milky white lashes against pale gold cheeks, and even a soft nuzzle against his sister’s shoulder for good measure - and his mothers (at least, to his knowledge) would brush their lips in a gentle kiss against his poll, and believe him to truly be asleep.
He’s ready to wait patiently for his guardians to fall asleep and continues to play the very important role of a sleeping colt; that is, of course, until the soft whispering of his siblings causes the vibrant gold of a single ear to warily tip back. Inwardly, his heart-rate quickens. They have got to be quieter! But that thought lasts only a millisecond in his mind because the soft pull of his sister’s teeth through his cropped ivory mane distracts him. He turns his head away from her (they’re going to get caught!), snuffling sleepily with a light snore just in case an adult ear was trained on their position. It’s then that his brother whispers his name, and Sviko’s ears press gently against his neck. They really were no good at this.
Rhae’s soft teeth then gingerly nip his tucked ears, with which he responds with a natural and thoughtless kick to his brother’s leg. It was a reaction he couldn’t have helped, even if he had wanted to. Realizing that it was either get caught right now or possibly miss out on something by waiting too long, Sviko throws his head up from his curled knees, unable to keep the charade any longer. He didn’t care if they got caught by sneaking out too quickly - he would not miss out on any sort of adventure simply because the timing was not right.
The youngest brother leaps up, his vibrant white legs snapping beneath him with unnatural spryness. He had been ready to leave their cave the moment Kagerus had ushered him away from the lake near sunset, and when Solace shortly after had begun grooming him for bedtime. The boy can hardly contain his excitement, but despite that fact was able to leave the cavern without waking his mothers and without receiving any warning looks from his older siblings for being ‘too obvious’.
He snorts softly once they are in the safety of the open spring air, his little feet prancing beneath him atop the lush green grass soaked in midnight blue and starlight. Sviko turns his attention towards his brother, curious to know what it is Rhae has planned for them - because, of course, if they were at a loss, Sviko already had two or three fool-proof plans for scaling the mountain’s face all before dawn.
The palomino colt is not disappointed, however, at his brother’s idea. He grins wildly, already leaping forward and bumping shoulders with Warlight. “Me too!” he replies, almost too loudly, and then lowering his voice: “I want to try too!” Because, of course, anything Rhaegor can do, he can do. Except fly, of course - and the shuffle of Rhaegor’s wings causes a look of sourness creep across his golden face. Though when his brother suggests a race, the grin returns. That he could do.
Sviko stretches his neck forward and blows a breath boyishly into his sister’s face before turning from both his siblings to attempt to gallop headlong towards the lake - perhaps even into it.
There were very few thoughts her quietest brother could voice that she would consider a bad idea. "Let's do it," she agrees in an eager whisper, "who knows what will be swimming in the lake at this time of the night."
There is a disruption behind them and Will turns to see Sviko is joining them. Silently she bobs her head in satisfaction, their trio was complete.
Somehow their mothers and older siblings remain sleeping peacefully, and they have gathered outside. Free at last she is ready to run, but Koko obnoxiously blows his morning breath in her face. Quick as a viper she aims to give him a well-placed nip to the sensitive skin around his smug muzzle.
And he better not yelp, or else another would be quick to follow.
Highly competitive and rightfully The Best at everything as the Older Sister, Warlight took everything her brothers did as a challenge. And as they charge off down the mountain she is close on their heels, looking for a way to dash ahead. She is far too awake to teleport herself to their destination so she grits her teeth and gallops as hard as she can under the full moon.
Her lucky break comes as Koko chooses a trail she knows well, well enough to know it's not the shortest route to the water. It may be the clearest path (and the safest in the dark) but she wasn't about to lose a race to both little brothers.
The blood-and-bone girl peels off onto a lesser-known deer trail, savoring the thrill of danger and the spike in adrenaline as a branch whips across her face. With a trickle of blood down running down her cheek and her breath ragged she hits the silver lake in an explosion of water.
First.
Smug as could be and more than a little disheveled, she turns to face her brothers.
I kept my hope just like i'd hoped tpthen sang to the sea for feelings deep blue
As if he hadn't just kicked Rhae's shin to the point of Total Destruction, their brother Sviko comes skittering out of the grotto, all legs and head and no anything else. Giggling at his brother's antics, Rhaegor playfully half-rears and bites at the other's ear again, barely understanding what he says because in the end, it's definitely not no or go back to bed, and therefore, Not Worth Listening To.
That is, until the palomino shoots down the mountainside like a flash of lightning.
"Hey!"
His screechy little boy voice is the last thing their mother hears as they grin at each other in the depths of the grotto, laughing nearly to the point of crying at the antics of their youngest three; it'll be nice to have the cave to themselves for a while, and anyway, kids would be kids.
Outside, the triplets are already halfway down the mountain. Rhae is right on Will's tail as they zoom down like reckless baby-demons, laughing and whooping and all bumping each other as they race. When she cuts left, and Rhae sees Sviko cut right, his attention is pulled in two directions and before he can --
CRASH!
As if in slow motion, the colt is flipped a full three-sixty around his head in the most graceful front flip ever performed, having been tripped by a low-standing bush the size of a small pond that he'd not seen in the obscurity. Landing in the softly vegetated plant with a cackling laugh and splayed wings, it takes the colt a fair bit of time trying to extricate himself AND all his limbs - he had two more to account for than the other! - until at last he leaps from the accursed plant, wings outstretched.
By this point, he can see that his siblings are in the final push for home, having reached flat ground with only some meadow and then the beach before them. Thrilled and hoping to still make it there without looking like a TOTAL loser, Rhae pins his wings at the elbow and uses the small amount of extension left to dive towards their destination point, using tiny shifts in his body weight and feathers to navigate between the ever- bigger trees the closer to ground level he gets.
Realizing he will not be able to pull up in time, Rhae screeches a warning to Will and Koko - who have already made it to the lake - before plummeting head first into a relatively deep part of the lake, which is luckily quite close to the shore. After a moment spent looking around in the blackness of underwater, Rhae unfurls his wings and gives a mighty push. As such, the princeling surfaces very quickly, using large strokes to bring him to the shore in quite a fast way.
"That was crazy!!" He sputtered, absolutely sopping, wings looking so bedraggled that an observer might worry that he'd ever fly again, the foolish thing. "Wow!" As the adrenaline still pumped through his veins, he totally forgot about his plan to beam the lake; instead, he dragged himself to higher ground and then flopped into the sand, head up staring at the stars in total breathlessness and contentedness.
![[Image: rhae]](https://66.media.tumblr.com/c013fae479a9e0c775688ff921306b4e/tumblr_pivbqpgHuG1xsr748o1_250.png)
![[Image: Warlightpageddoll1.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/NMPHtrtV/Warlightpageddoll1.png)
