01-05-2020, 02:50 PM
Wanderlust is a feeling that Neverwhere is familiar with, a driving urge that pulls her in and out of Nerine, although these days what draws her back to the kingdom is not the lure of seeing but something else, something harder to pin down. She still marvels in how easy it is to navigate the world with clear vision, how easy to judge distances, colors, emotions. There is something lost, too, though, and she has not forgotten that lesson, has not forgotten the stumbling and confusion that day in Taiga, her first trip back out of Nerine, when the blindness fell on her suddenly and unexpectedly at the border. She had been so angry, so frustrated.
Unintended, but important, lessons.
Don't trust your eyes. Because sight can fade, it can lie, it can overwhelm - it will tempt you to believe whole-heartedly what you see, to ignore what you hear and taste and smell and feel, to forget the instincts that kept you alive for years traveling alone and half-blind across lands. This lesson is seared across her memory. As she walks, her steps are careful and measured, she navigates dark woodland and moonless nights with ease, but when she runs - oh! That is something else entirely! It would have been impossible, once upon a time, for her to canter up a trail, and yet she does, today, her breath puffing clouds into the brisk air as she passes through Taiga and back to Nerine. Someone else has had the same idea, she can smell him on the air, and her pace slows to a trot as the path grows rockier and the tallest trees fall away, giving ground to gorse bushes and a few scrubby, low, evergreens, but it is not until she is well into the kingdom's southern edge that she finally catches up around a bend. The dark stallion stumbles and pauses before carrying on and something in her recognizes something in him.
Blind. She does not need to catch up - to see his milky eyes - to know it because she can feel it in every step, every stumble and every cast of his head, trying to find his bearings. The dappled mare draws nearer, sparing only a brief grimace for the delicate scrollwork that traces over the midnight blue of his coat.
"Tell me, would you know if you were about to walk off a cliff and into the sea?"
Unintended, but important, lessons.
Don't trust your eyes. Because sight can fade, it can lie, it can overwhelm - it will tempt you to believe whole-heartedly what you see, to ignore what you hear and taste and smell and feel, to forget the instincts that kept you alive for years traveling alone and half-blind across lands. This lesson is seared across her memory. As she walks, her steps are careful and measured, she navigates dark woodland and moonless nights with ease, but when she runs - oh! That is something else entirely! It would have been impossible, once upon a time, for her to canter up a trail, and yet she does, today, her breath puffing clouds into the brisk air as she passes through Taiga and back to Nerine. Someone else has had the same idea, she can smell him on the air, and her pace slows to a trot as the path grows rockier and the tallest trees fall away, giving ground to gorse bushes and a few scrubby, low, evergreens, but it is not until she is well into the kingdom's southern edge that she finally catches up around a bend. The dark stallion stumbles and pauses before carrying on and something in her recognizes something in him.
Blind. She does not need to catch up - to see his milky eyes - to know it because she can feel it in every step, every stumble and every cast of his head, trying to find his bearings. The dappled mare draws nearer, sparing only a brief grimace for the delicate scrollwork that traces over the midnight blue of his coat.
"Tell me, would you know if you were about to walk off a cliff and into the sea?"
Neverwhere
...
@[Tyr] you may also have a weird sick post. I don't think I'm contagious through the internet.
