"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
04-21-2019, 09:26 PM (This post was last modified: 06-29-2019, 04:39 PM by Ausra.)
Ausra
How many hundreds of lives has she waited for a world like this? It is beautiful in an incredibly foreign way. Some places just speak to the soul. She has been born a thousand times before but never into a body made like this one. Her legs are long and slim, deceptively strong. She has been strong before, but this is a body built for war. Her lungs are a bellows, massive wells into which she can draw this worlds air in order to fuel the locomotion that this body seems to crave. Of all the shapes she has taken over the millennia this is immediately a favorite.
Perhaps she’ll stick in this one if she manages to earn herself another round.
As with every other time she comes into consciousness as an adult. Whatever she is, she assumes she is an ordinary one as this is the way it has always been. Sometimes she remains an ordinary whatever-she-is, and other times she doesn’t. That doesn’t effect the outcome, or it hasn’t yet.
Ausra arrives on the edge of a body of liquid that she finds to be water. Her body responds to the scent of bonded hydrogen and oxygen and she drinks from the stream to satisfy the urge before tentatively crossing through it. Finding that she does not melt or nearly get eaten by anything she can see she splashes up into the marshy grasses on the other side and heads toward the scent of salt. Crossing the isle she comes across a surprising structure and studies it for a long time. There are words, faded, but she cannot read them, only recognizes the shape of a language transcribed on an object that could not have been made by a being like her.
When the sea laps at her hooves she considers turning away to look for a creature like the one she now is. However the tide is low and she notices that one might make their way to the not too distant mainland if they swam and moved across the sandbars. Her experiences with oceans make her a little wary, waves and monsters are features of massive bodies of liquid in just about every world she has experienced. Ausra considers that she has only died on her first day twice and decides to risk the crossing.
Something swims nearby and Ausra keeps clear of it without getting too excited, reaching the mainland easily. This body is versatile. She does look back, blue eyes scanning the water for whatever had drawn close to her beneath the waves but there is no more to see than sea and the strange island. Satisfied that she has made the right decision in leaving the odd little island she proceeds with what is always her first task: finding another.
When she does, or is rather found herself, her body knows the tongue in which she must address the creature that is like enough to her that they must be the same and she asks (as she has so many times before) “What are we?”
04-21-2019, 09:48 PM (This post was last modified: 04-21-2019, 09:49 PM by abysm.)
He has lived but once; this life, current and staid.
Not true;
Once, he was a boy in the dark - in the vast nothing, until he was made into something. Not made - pulled, snatched, stolen.
Abysm rarely thinks back to his beginning. Not any more, not now. He snatches at grass between thoughts and idle flicks of his tail, thinking about dreams and how he feasts in better fare in them. Ends up dreaming himself from here to there with a mouthful of green poking out between his lips.
He materializes in the meadow, naturally. It’s his favorite haunt and of course, he arrives looking completely ridiculous. Arrives just in the nick of time to see a pretty little thing come up out of the water. It is apparent she’s had quite the swim, or fright perhaps. He thinks it is possible something in the sea has scared her; monsters and such.
Abysm chews his cud much like a cow, following her with her eyes until he realizes that just as he can see her, she can certainly see him. In fact, she has and decides to make her way over to him. Now, he could dream himself away in the blink of an eye but he doesn’t. He just chews his mouthful of grass a little bit faster.
The champagne-and-foam stallion chokes just a little as she asks her question, looking rather dumbfounded that she has no possible clue as to what she is. Can it be so? It must! He eyes her a bit more critically than is normal, trying to ascertain if she is daft or something else entirely that he’s never encountered before - like an alien. She’s certainly not a ghost or monster, or even a daydream.
But her oddness is appealing as much as her physical presence is, and it keeps the dream-manipulator tethered there a moment longer. “We, are horses.” he states really blandly as if he too, finds it to be rather dull and disappointing.
04-27-2019, 04:00 PM (This post was last modified: 04-27-2019, 04:01 PM by Ausra.)
Ausra
She receives an answer to her question without difficulty or the need for further explanation on her part. Perhaps the other being thinks her a little mad, or impaired in some way but it answers very simply and establishes that they are indeed the same and that there is a general name to be applied to their kind. The two of them are similar enough in coloration and build, both refined in appearance though in differing ways. No matter how many races she infiltrates she has yet to tire of discovering the beauty of variation, both subtle and striking in the species and world she has appeared in.
Ausra takes in the stallion with keen interest, shapely ears flicking slightly as this body makes a decision about him. This is a nervous species, suspicious, flighty. It seems there is nothing alarming about the overo and she remains where she is.
“Thank you. I am Ausra. She manages to call up her name in this tongue with little trouble. It is full, strong, and beautiful sounding but does not seem unusual when held up alongside the few words she has heard in their language. Sensing she has not alarmed the male as of yet the bay permits herself another question. “What is this place called?” While not the only question she wishes to ask it seems an important beginning to getting her bearings. Sometimes she wears out her welcome quickly with too many questions and will try to resist asking what she might be able to find out on her own. Most will just think she’s come from far away (so far away) or suffers from a kind of amnesia.
But behind her eyes are universes repeating, expanding and collapsing over and over again...and she is too sharp and eager to be mistaken for a fool if one just pays a little attention.
06-23-2019, 09:20 AM (This post was last modified: 06-23-2019, 09:21 AM by abysm.)
He thinks nothing of the sort! Not mad or daft; just odd and all the more lovely for it. It could be argued that oddities like herself were rare in this realm, and he’d argue so because for all the shortcomings of others despite their fantastical appearances, they were rather dull and predictable. Neither of which he suspected she was.
Abysm could taste their dullness in their dreams; bitter and unfulfilling. It lacked the richness he sought and found so rarely. Of course, he sought something else too and never found it as he skipped along through their dreams, sometimes altering them on puckish whims that struck him as mean but enjoyable. Doing so gave him a heady sense of power that he easily grew drunk off of. Or at least drunk enough to forget her dark eyes and mix of navy-white skin, like spilled milk just after dusk in the dark blue hour of coming night.
His eyes catch the flick of ears and the keen look to her face and it pulls a charming smile from the pinched tuck of his mouth against such things as smiles and politeness. “Ausra…” he rumbles in a deep masculine tone, tasting the syllables that spill across his tongue like foreign exotic wine. The flavor is strange and beautiful - just like her. “I am Abysm,” and there is a trace of sardonic mirth loitering around the angles of his face.
He tilts his head to the side, considering her. “This place is Beqanna, the land of the sunrise. But to be specific, you are in her main meadow.” For the first time in a long time, he actually looks around after answering her. He considers the meadow with a short but measuring look before turning his attention back to her. “You’re not from around these parts I take it?” Oh it was obvious! But he still had to ask - to know - to hear her say it.
Her face is captivating.
There is a light within it that draws him to her.
Close enough to touch their muzzles together for a moment. Then the moment is gone and he’s back to where he was originally standing, as if he hadn’t ever moved or risked a simple touch - to feel skin on skin, whiskery and velvety.
Abysm, his name takes its place in her mind, resting neatly atop a thousand others but there is something about the color and shape of it that will stand out no matter how many new acquaintances stack up on top of it. There are a few like that, reminding her of treasured articles from the collections of possessions she’d assembled in past lives, little things that caught the eye no matter how often they were seen. Whatever the reason for this, it is pleasant to connect with someone so quickly, even if the encounter sours in the end as many often do. Ausra does not shy from connection no matter the risks.
She has seen many meadows and things like meadows but the way he speaks of it tells her that it is a commons of sorts. The lushness of the flora despite how much the place must be frequented does make her wonder about the cycles of seasons in this world and how the plants so thrive but she is not about to spend her time in this feral form working at being a scholar. “No, I am not from these parts or from parts around them.” Comes her reply because he watches her with enough intensity to indicate true interest rather than obligatory nicety.
In a blink he is close, nose to nose, their breath colliding before she has the chance to toss her head or be surprised. The flightiness of her body is suspended by the sensation of that brief touch, and the tension that flips toward attraction and tumbles back again. He is gone again, back to the place he’d been just before, though the breath she next takes still smells of him.
“I cannot do that…?” Her soft statement curves upward at the end like a question because she isn’t sure. This body might come with some enhancement she has not discovered but the Traveler doubts it. She resorts the more mundane method of taking a few steps nearer to the stallion and then stopping so that there remains still a couple of body lengths between them. “And are you from here Abysm? What do you fold together to be before me and then away again?” The question might sound like nonsense she realizes, the words she chose influenced by her histories instead of being tempered for her audience. She has folded things herself, spaces and moments, in other past spaces and moments by means both fantastic and scientific She cannot help the occasional slip when something overstimulates her natural curiosity.
