[open] nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet

[Eilidh]

In the early hours of morning, Eilidh is wandering the meadow on a path that the moonlight illuminates.

She knows where it leads. In fact, the wildgrass is likely worn from her repeated travels. She comes here often, to think, to listen to the quiet. The next bend between two ancient oak trees bring her to the place that hurts her heart to look at, but will renew it to visit. When she rounds it she’ll feel the hot prickle of tears in her eyes.

The wheat grass grew wild. It took years, undoubtedly, but it had claimed inch by inch until the bulge of earth that hid her bones was lost beneath it. Here and there the grave is dotted with lilac cranesbill and yellow toadflax, and while the buds have closed tightly for the night, Eilidh imagines they must be quite beautiful in the daylight. She thinks Moselle would have liked that, and so a fragile smile finds her mouth. She had always loved a light in the darkness.

Eilidh moves her eyes to the sky, then. Moselle had come from the stars, and she wonders quietly if now she has returned to them; another light in the darkness.

Isn’t it funny how so much changes, when so much left is still the same?

And while years have changed the meadows outline and now poplars and birch trees stand where they hadn’t before, so much of it’s content remains. Her bones are still where Eilidh had buried them. Her mother was still dead, and the memory of that day still very much alive.

It was the last day she used her mind to move anything.

(Let it grow stagnant, and rot.)

She didn’t want to move mountains if it meant burying the things she loved beneath them.

[abysm]

Abysm comes from a dream —

One moment he wasn’t there and the next, he was.

Moonlight and morning limn the edges of his gilt skin, all champagne and foam. His hair lays in wild damp curls, managing to almost look like bubbles. He’s just come from a dream in which there was a rainstorm. That accounts for the damp dripping mess that he is as he walks forth into those earliest hours. 

It was the most beautiful rainstorm he’s ever experienced. No thunder. No lightning. Just gray clouds for days and fat happy drops that slid along his skin like kisses. 

Her kisses to be exact. 

He’d known it was her because these were his dreams he stepped in and out of. It was her dark eyes that always looked for him and looked at him. But he couldn’t recall the color of her skin this time or the last. Just that her slim muzzle had pressed to his then with a wild snort, they were off!

They’d run through the rain together and it had been one of the best times of his life. Just as someone else was remembering the worst and he stumbles across the path of that someone else as if he sorrow had been latent enough for him to follow.

There lays a mound before them that grass and flower have obviously grown up over. It occurs to him that it might be a grave but he doesn’t ask - not yet anyway. She’s beautiful to look at but sad and he likes them that way, though he’s not sure why. But all he can manage to say is this and inelegantly so,

“This place is beautiful and I didn’t know this part of the meadow was here.”

He truly didn’t, had he not seen her go by then followed her there. 

Abysm then hopes he’s not intruding because the air there seems very heavy and hushed with things he does not know of.

@[Eilidh] ha! now you get bys post from me <333

[Rhaegor]

I kept my hope just like i'd hoped to
then sang to the sea for feelings deep blue

Even in silence, Rhae remains relatively oblivious to the sadder things in life.

True though it may be that he overhears things he shouldn't when standing in crowded places, and true too though it may be that he has had visions of deaths of strangers and of other ill begotten events, his young mind doesn't fully understand the depths of these things' meanings. He would one day, and soon - so soon in fact that the sweetness of his childhood will begin to sour, realization after realization dawning upon him as he reanalyzes his memories, returning to visions (almost dreams, like his Mother's and Sister's and Half Brother's) and tasting ash in his mouth as their truths make themselves known to his growing eyes.

For tonight, however, they are not grown: and they do not see the wisdom in leaving the scent of his mysterious oldest brother be. At the whiff of Abysm, any rational thought processes grind to a halt within the colt's head - the champagne stallion represented something of an enigma to the young prince. He'd been somewhat present during the very first months of the triplet's lives, willing to participate in their existence while it represented little actuality or gravity; but as they'd grown into their conscious minds, the triplets - but Rhaegor especially, in his silence - had noticed the way that Abysm stood out from the rest of them, even from Velk and Valdis. Perhaps he heard it or perhaps he had it foretold, but Rhae remembers biting words going from Abysm to Kagerus, remembers feeling the tension there, the malice, the hatred.

Rhae loves his mothers, as young boys should. He doesn't have the full story about what happened - and even though he is comfortable enough to speak with Abysm, he's never garnered the courage to actually ask.

So when the dream-walker's scent appears out of the blue, Rhae forgets his inhibitions and hurries down the path, not noticing its well-worn grooves and the way the trees curve away as if expecting travelers - or a traveler, to be exact. What he also doesn't notice is the scent that precedes his brother's, or the body to whom it is attached; instead, he scurries up in wonder next to the grown stallion, cool brown eyes wide in some mix of admiration and terror.

Idolatry, really - but a confused kind.
Though to consider any faith certain would be a stretch.

"Brother, I'd not thought I'd find you here." The words come at their fullest volume, above a mutter but not full speaking volume either. "I -" But the word twists and screws when his eyes catch on the mare standing respectfully over a mound of earth, and another vision of death comes to Rhaegor: not of this one, or of one in particular, but enough of an image to correct his disposition. Immediately his posture straightens, lips clamping shut, head dropping low.

I'm sorry to interrupt, his body language reads.
He wants to examine the mare more closely, intrigued as ever by the mysterious and the feminine and the beautiful. But out of respect and sheepishness, he keeps his head down, eyes trailing the intricately woven forest floor.

Rhaegor

[Eilidh]

She isn’t afraid of the night.

She smiles, instead, whenever the last veins of sunlight gently come to rest behind the mountains. She likes the way the dark can hold her, how it could hug the contours of her body so completely - envelop her. It reminds her of home, of a childhood spent sidled up against her mother’s breast. She had never been as safe as in those moments, and so when the wolves howl love songs for the moon, Eilidh listens without her body quaking, and drinks the melody like wine.

Moselle, in so many different ways, had been her light in the darkness, too.

(“This place is beautiful and I didn’t know this part of the meadow was here.”)

So, when he speaks out from behind the gentle slope of her hips she doesn’t falter.

“It is, isn’t it?”

Or, rather, it is now.
Back then it felt quite different - when the rain nearly drowned her, and the ground was slick with mud and blood, and sorrow.

Eilidh’s dark eyes are still drawn up toward the stars, combing the constellations. She needs a moment longer, takes it, draws the early morning air, fresh with dew, into her lungs. She says goodbye, again. And then, when at last she turns to face him she wears a cordial half-smile on her face. It’s true that the air between their bodies is ripe with secrets, but she doesn’t mind the bright, albeit clumsy, encounter.

She’s done enough dwelling to last a lifetime.

She’s unexpectedly pleased to find that he’s beautiful, too (because who doesn’t like to look upon a pretty face?), with colours that brought him forward in the dark. She finds his eyes and thinks, fleetingly, that they look kind.

“My mother,” she offers solemnly when she has finished taking him in, gesturing gently toward the dirt and wildflowers and addressing the obvious question lingering in the back of his mind. She is about to ask him why he’s dripping wet, but the abrupt locomotion of the next guest’s arrival steals the words right off her tongue.

They look similar - not the same, but there are hints here and there hidden in the lines of their bodies that suggests a relationship; one confirms it when he speaks. The newest arrival looks awkward and uncomfortable at her discovery - as though he is sorry to be there. And while she can see that he is, Eilidh has never had time for grudges. She offers a second, cordial half-smile, and moves a step forward in the brothers’ direction.

“No,” she says, gently, with a softness in her eyes that some could call weak,
“It’s nice to have company. I’ve been alone for so long.”

Too blunt a truth for strangers, perhaps, but hers all the same.

“I’m Eilidh.”




@abysm @Rhaegor