"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
There are things that she knows that she shouldn’t. Things that had happened before she had even drawn her first breath. The kinds of things you can’t tell others about, because they’d think you mad - horrible, and wicked, and beautiful things.
(A willow is growing aslant a brook that spills its water out into a violent sea, a violent end. They look like lovers, cradled against each other as the water carves trenches against the flesh of their sides. Glinting white beneath the waters surface are her bones, because one of them is dead.)
Once, they stood here, too.
Tangled in the oatgrass and wildflower, lazing under the dappled shade of hazel trees, years ago, their lives began. And now, with her wildly dark eyes and her champagne skin, with this meadow ground underfoot, she has become a perfect reflection. Only, today there is no oatgrass. There are no wildflowers, no lemon balm, or purple thistles - only snow, moved in wisps and spirals; delicate and deadly all at once. It buries the hazel trees, and cloaks the winding rivers edge where mermaids once rolled water off their hips and backs like pearls (a shoreline that also once ran red with blood ).
She saw them once, in a dream that felt more like a memory.
The cold is suffocating; her throat burns with the fire of it, but still her lungs feel empty as the clouds of her breath roll out with every exhale. She has stopped along the meadows edge even if she shouldn’t have (because once, they stood here, too), even if the sweat and fervor of her efforts had left her damp and quaking as the cold eats through her skin and fat to find the marrow in her bones, leaving a wave of prickled hair in its wake.
Because she has run for hours, long since a watercolour sunset bled into, and beyond, a tree-lined horizon. Because she has run for hours, until those colours gave way to a velvet blackness, which in turn gave way to the feeble light of a thousand stars that would become her unwavering compass. The cold could kill her, she thinks.
It covers him - covers him enough to make him feel almost dead, but he knows he truly isn’t. He is only numb with cold, muscles atrophying beneath frost and ice and snow that the slickness of his painted coat is not used to shielding him from. The snow itself isn’t what chills him - if anything it is the way the dampness of his skin seems to burn, reminding him of the volcano’s pulsing agitation he once viewed for himself, finding it ironically odd that a thing like cold could remind him so much of heat. The yearling attempts to keep moving within the uncomfortableness stiffness of his muscles, the particles and fractiles of snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes and whiskers, tumbling into the thick tangles of his growing mane.
He has come from the forest. He had spent long autumn nights in the darkness and the shadows of the shrouded trees, finding solace beneath their cold canopies and twisting, branched spines that shiver above him. But the fierceness of winter has driven him from the dampness of the sprouting pines, though it is not to home he returns to.
Home.
The boy thinks of the volcanic landscape, and though the memory of it is filled with warmth (with family, with adoration), it sours in his mouth. The remembrance is stained with red now - putrid and burnt in its color and smell, coughed up from the lungs of his father, splattered onto the thick, humid walls of his family’s grotto, smelling of death and decay and a cancerous thing that Warden could not get far enough away from.
His father had always been light to him - an eagle that soars in the sky above him, ever his guardian - but with the sickness that has crept into his father’s veins, Warden can only ever see darkness in his father’s eyes, and in every single memory there is a black stain that matches. So he cannot go home; it isn’t an option. Warden runs from the darkness.
Darkness would kill him, he knows.
It’s killing his father.
As the evening fades into deeper shadows, the expanse of frozen white now illuminated by sparkling stars and a harvest moon, the cerulean of his eyes glance upwards into the sky. His flesh cries out for the warmth of Tephra, but he remains standing in the snow, unable to even think about home (unable to admit that he most certainly is).
Suddenly, the young boy notices he is not alone.
His deep, intelligent eyes flicker to her (it appears he is not the only one who has been running), and he wonders how it is that both of them have found themselves standing beneath shadow and moon, shivering in the belly of winter’s breath. Perhaps she, like him, had no other options.
“Hello,” his voice comes without warning and the sound of it even startles him - the coldness of night has tightened his throat, creating a soft texture to the otherwise rich sound, even for a colt. The smoke of Tephra has aided him in such a thing, though soon it would wear off without the constant exposure. He feels as if he must say something else, should say something else, but falls as silent as the world around them.
She closes her eyes, breathes deep until the cold finds her marrow at last. If this is the end, she thinks, at least it’s beautiful. At least it’s quiet. At least it’s standing still, unafraid. A death like this couldn’t possibly be frightening.
(Snow is everywhere. The only sanctuary is here in the cave. The entrance is narrow, steep, and craggy; it hugs the snowy mountainside and offers no comforts, or chance of survival, should your footing be lost. It’s still the safest place, from him, from them, from here. She’s there, huddled in the darkness, all but frozen.)
When she opens her eyes again the cave is gone, and the only thing for miles and miles that she sees are the clouds of her breath spilling out into the night, lost. She doesn’t know who was in the cave, but the two of them are mirrored images - golden skin,dark and wild eyes, with spindly legs that ran too far, too often. She thinks she’s likely conjured her from pieces here and there of the stories her mother would tell her; stories of monsters, stories of horrors, stories of loneliness. The knowledge doesn’t stop her from appearing whenever Glassheart closed her eyes.
“Hello,” he says, the voice behind her.
And all at once she is afraid. All at once everything she’s ever grown up believing is realized. The monsters are everywhere, and when you stop, even just to catch your breath, they come. She’s angry with herself for leaving her back exposed; her mother had warned her a thousand times about the kinds of consequences for mistakes like this. It’s too late.
So, slowly, she cranes her neck to look across her shoulders at the creature she is certain in this moment will end her. She imagines the kinds of impossible things her mother narrated for her, things with bright red claws and pointed tails, monsters that wove flowers through your hair before they ruined you.
But he’s only a boy, his legs still too long for his body.
(“Are you alone?”)
The thought bubbles up, tangible, in the back of her throat but she swallows the words back down. They are not her own.
“Yes,” he tells her immediately, black tipped ears flicking towards her. But not always, he adds silently, his dark navy eyes taking in the curve of her neck as she turns warily to look at him, her vertebrae slowly allowing her to painstakingly find his face in the midst of white. The young boy is a bit perplexed at her reaction of him; as if he had been a shadow in the darkness, an oily thing that had crept up behind her - but that expression fades just slightly as the pale honeyed mare realizes he is just a child.
Just a child.
He is one, he knows, and perhaps it is because of this fact that he finds himself solitary and confined. He could do so much more if he was grown; if his muscles were bigger, if his strength was more, if his skills were preened to perfection. He could protect and serve, command presence and not allow fear to trickle into his mind - because a man can do so much more than a boy can. A boy can only hide away in the woods or the meadow from the rich ruby red of his father’s blood and wait for the day his mind reveals to him that the navy-winged stallion is no longer with them.
No longer with him.
Warden swallows painfully, realizing that the bitter cold has swept all moisture from his throat. He wonders what she’s scared of, or if she’s scared of the blood too.
“Are you?” he asks, remaining frozen in place and unable to find the strength to move closer. He is unsure and cautious, curling his neck so that the deep obsidian of his mouth presses against the ivory and auburn of his two-toned chest, his mouth champing absentmindedly.
“Yes,” he answers; an ode to the memories that don’t belong to her. The sound of it sends a wave of prickled skin down her back, and Glassheart shifts her weight, wearing her apprehension visibly. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s been here before, that she’s had this same conversation already.
It was different the first time though, almost like a dream.
Something inside of her is wrong. There is this presence, this feeling - it sits heavy on her chest, and she can feel the ache of it as it grows and expands with every breath that she draws. It’s taking pieces of her and stitching her back together using patches of someone else entirely. The memories are not her own.
The cave is not her own. The words are not her own.
But the answers lie in all the places she cannot travel. They’re whispered off the tongues of the dead, and in amongst the bones at the bottom of a cold and angry river.
“Are you?” he asks.
“Alone?” she wonders aloud. The obvious answer was no, but she can’t bring herself to say it. She doesn’t want to admit what’s battling inside of her, and furthermore, she doesn’t want to scare him. He’s young, and cold, and alone. He has enough on his plate. She compromises with, “I don’t know.” and decides to change the subject. The next question comes to her easy as something maternal inside of her itches. Was it her, or someone else?
09-22-2018, 04:29 PM (This post was last modified: 09-22-2018, 04:29 PM by Warden.)
His deep and dark oceanic eyes - steely and cobalt blue, unlike the bright cerulean that runs in his family (in his father’s blood) - continue to simply watch her, the cold night air tightly wrapping around his mahogany and ivory skin, atrophying his muscles with numbness. His own skin tingles at the sight of her own unease, unable to shake the feeling of doom that seems to shroud the small area that they are in despite his not knowing the reason why.
The darkness always follows.
That inner thought - wistful yet foreboding - is enough to cause the yearling to step towards her. He knows that his edging closer to her might cause the strange champagne woman to become more anxious, but he can feel his heart pulsing rapidly in his chest and his own fear now drives him forward, shuddering against the icy breath of winter’s dying strength. Still just a boy, lost and searching. Warden’s body itself seems to creak in protest as the movement warms muscles that had grown stagnant and tense within the cold, stopping after what seems like a long trek towards her, but realizing he had only taken a few hesitant, frozen steps.
The boy snorts softly, his breath a cloud of warm vapor against the stark whiteness of his bald face. His mane and tail are still growing - short and stubbornly - but his forelock now falls flat against the sharpness of the bridge of his nose, attempting to give him a more mature appearance despite the wideness of his navy gaze.
I don’t know.
He doesn’t know what to say to that; however, there is a weariness in his eyes that is easily readable - one that is understanding. He doesn’t know, either.
Where is your mother? It’s too cold.
Warden’s alabaster ears flicker into the cropiness of his dark mane and the deep auburn of his neck, pressing his ivory lips together into a thin line as if he had just been scolded, embarrassment and disappointment riddling his features. I’m old enough to be on my own, he wants to say, but the words of defiance do not come. It doesn’t matter.
His brow furrows, screwing up his youthful face as he attempts to push the thoughts of his mother from his mind, yet forced to think about her (because how could he not).
“She’s - she’s busy.” Busy brushing sweat from his father’s brow caused by constant fevers, busy allowing the darkness of rust to stain the gold and white of her body, busy caring for a dying man. Quickly, he speaks of something else (anything else). “Do you want to be alone?” He asks her this genuinely, his voice softening with a slight concern he isn’t sure how came to be nestled there in his throat.
Maybe she did, but so did he, and then they could be alone together.
That they can tell you a lot about who someone is if you only look.
His eyes are deep, and dark, and blue like the ocean; she can see the white, foamy tips of waves visible in the fractures of his irises, and almost smell the salt in the air. His eyes are strong, yes, but they are also steady, endless. So, when he moves towards her she doesn’t flee; she trusts him. Her own eyes are wild, and dark, and empty, and she finds herself briefly wishing in these moments that there was more to them than there is. But that’s her truth - that she is unremarkable, nothing unordinary, and that if she is truly honest with herself the stolen memories might be the only interesting thing about her.
(The one wrapped in gold has eyes that are wild and dark, like hers. They’re full of something that Glassheart tries to pinpoint, but can’t. The silver one has eyes beyond her years. They’re sad. They’ve known the kinds of things no one should ever know.)
She doesn’t know if she wants to let them go.
She doesn’t know if she can keep them.
When he answers her question he hides more than he reveals, but his ears swing flat against his head, and she’s sorry to have offended him. She lets it go, swiftly, and then moves forward to close the gap between their bodies. She’s never stopped long enough to talk to a stranger before, let alone touch one. Is this her, or someone else?
“Do you want to be alone?” He asks.
She still isn’t sure. She does, and she doesn’t.
The memories are revealing a world she’s never known before. They feel important. They feel bigger than she could ever be. They’re horrible, and dark, but they’re something. When they are at last skin-to-skin she drapes her neck across the length of his back, perhaps an intimate hold for two strangers, but the cold would have to make fast friends of them if they were to survive.
“I don’t know,” she echoes again, staring at a hazel along the river’s edge with vacant eyes while the clouds of her breath escape out into the winter air.
“I don’t need to be alone from you, though.”
She wonders then, what would happen if she left the meadow. This place triggered the memories, again and again. If she left would they still follow? Would she be real again?
The boy does not move as she goes to draw herself closer. It had been what he had hoped she would do, though did not wish to ask it of her. His nose twitches - white as the world around them - and everything else about him remains still and quiet. He did not want to disrupt her, to startle her, to do anything that would end with him standing alone in a frozen world, with nothing but the fierce and icy wind biting into his skin. I don’t need to be alone from you, though. Suddenly he finds himself hoping that she truly likes him, and did not linger with him out of pity or his youthfulness. He could take care of himself, he wants to remind her, but he remains silent because he knows it is a lie.
Warden is smaller than her by his sheer age, but not by much, as she drapes her golden neck across the smallness of his back. Finding the gesture extremely intimate yet at the same time necessary, he quietly scoots himself in closer. It’s a familiar position, to be held like this, by either his father or mother, or even his older sisters. It soothes the storm and his nerves almost instantly, though there is a tenseness in his muscles that reminds him he should still remain wary, always wary.
Do you have a home?
There is a pause that swells between them, echoed by the sheer silence of white snow and ice. He does not try to avoid answering this time, but keeps his cobalt gaze downward to stare absentmindedly at her hooves despite being covered with the wintry white of snow. He sniffs, then presses the slender of his ivory cheek against her shoulder. “I do,” he tells her, wondering if his absence has worried his sisters enough to send them into a frenzy, or if perhaps in his absence his father has passed. He wants neither to be true, but finds an inner voice scolding him for hoping for such things not to pass. Silly, childish boy.
“It’s far from here,” he adds thoughtlessly, leaning his head against her now. He's suddenly so tired.
He misses his family with a sudden ferocity that causes a wavering look of confusion to fall across his face. But it is broken and bloody, inked into darkness by a curse and a disease that no one could cure.
He's still too afraid to return.
The obsidian of his mane is deep and dark and bold against the paleness of the stranger’s golden neck and shoulder, somehow comforting despite the foreignness. His brow furrows, his navy blue eyes lifting slightly to peek at her from his peripherals, a soft sigh in his throat. “Do you want me to tell you about it?”
He has a feeling she would like to know, and that him asking her the same question she posed to him would unsettle her.
If she were being honest with herself, there is very little she remembers about her childhood. She knows that she ran for long enough to hate it; to crave stillness with every fibre of her being. She knows that she was loved in the ways her mother was capable of loving her, in the ways her mother was capable of loving anyone. She can’t remember the moments in between places - the words they shared, or if they embraced one another like she and Warden do now. It might have been nice.
She might have fought for those memories.
“I do,” he says against the crook of her of her shoulder as he pulls himself close. She can feel her heart as it swells, because the truth was that she had stood here with him out of necessity but that companionship is growing on her quickly - and standing here, skin to skin, with Warden doesn’t feel like it did in her memories, when her flesh could become so hot it burned.
“It’s far from here,” he adds, leaning his little head against her body.
She hasn’t felt a peace like this in so long, with their bodies entangled and the snow drifting lazily around them. For a moment she closes her eyes, lets her dark eyelashes fall against the tops of her cheeks and breathes in the silence. He asks her then if she wants to know about his home, and she does, but not here. The cold has made them idle, and despite the warmth shared between their bodies, it wasn’t safe to stay.
“I want you to show it to me, Warden,” she answers, lifting her head to seek the meadows edge through the snowfall.
He fidgets beneath the curve of her neck, feeling the subtle warmth of both of their skins in closeness. Quietness consumes them both for a moment and he feels the heaviness of his eyelids as they threaten to close with every steady blink across the deep navy of his irises. Perhaps he could stay here forever, trapped in this snowy white world with a stranger, instead of facing what awaits him at home - though now he cannot say what he will find there if he did return. A funeral spire for his father? Or the once-king on his deathbed, feeble and gaunt with a disease that has tore up his insides. Warden’s white nose twitches at the uncomfortable thought, pressing the flat of his forehead against her shoulder now a bit forcefully - like a child, pouting and hiding their face.
I want you to show it to me, Warden.
You don’t want to see it, he doesn’t say. He remains silent - for a boy, he is very cautious with his words and chooses them wisely; he knows his thoughts are rude, so he keeps them to himself. His mouth remains in a thin line, unimpressionable and neutral. Glassheart’s movement lets him know that she is looking towards the distance, where the snow melts away into the tropical landscape of Tephra, miles upon miles from where they now stand. Warden does not follow her gaze, but continues to stare into the gold of her skin, his eyes hard beneath a furrowed brow. He’s ready to tell her no, to refuse her of this request, to explain that the darkness here is nothing like the darkness he finds at home.
Please.
This causes a single ear to flip towards her and a little huff of breath to leave his ivory nostrils. He lifts his face slightly, suddenly feeling less defiant. “You do?” He asks this but already knows her answer, moving away from her with a single, sweeping step. Warden’s bald face turns to where she gazes, his chin near the deep auburn of his sloping shoulder, the cold air pulling the obsidian black of his forelock away from his eyes.
“Okay.”
The boy agrees, turning his body to stand just before her in the direction of Tephra. He stares into the nothingness for a moment, his internal thoughts easily written across his youthful face. “Let’s go.”
