10-15-2019, 01:35 AM
He acquiesces without complaint, and Lepis is startled just enough that she does not think to question the sudden appearance of warmth in his gaze or the familiar warmth of his smile. She's leaning toward him with something like a sigh of relief in her voice when he speaks, and she is struck for a second time in as many minutes by the abrupt change in the man she thought she knew.
The golden happiness that had been kindling dies away in a cold white fear that leaves her still and conflicted. She has little time to react before her mind is filled with foreign emotions. It only takes a moment to overpower the flurry in her mind with a solid wall of a single feeling .
Elio's gift is a familial one, and his spontaneous emotion sharing is something Lepis has handled a thousand times before. Softly, she presses calm toward him for the space of a heartbeat. She presses it just long enough to give him a chance to get a hold of his emotions, and firm enough for him to feel the difference between the emotions he keeps to himself and those that are released into the air around him. There's something harder to the edge of a projected feeling, something that prevents it from sliding seamlessly into another's mind the way a gift like telepathy might. Over a decade of practice has honed the dun mare's magic though, and she reminds herself to exaggerate the edge of calm so he might better sense the difference.
The method is the one her mother had used with her, and that Lepis has in turn used with her own children, Elio's older brothers Pteron and Tiercel. It is her boys that inherited her gift, she thinks distractedly for a moment, and not the girls. She withdraws it, and is then left with just the echoes of the red boy's emotions for the instant before her own start to trickle back.
Wonder and uncertainty, pride and protection. She smiles reassuringly, stretches out to reach him and plant a kiss on his soft forehead. She is reluctant to let him go, but Wolfbane fires off the name of her children. Their children, she mentally concedes, though they've been just hers for the better part of a year.
"Pteron is with Reia." Lepis names the piebald filly from Loess - the eldest daughter of Castile, a girl Pteron considers near-family. "Marni is probably in one of the meadows." Elio has explained Celina's absence, and neither of them name their missing boys. Until Wolfbane had hurled Eyas' name like a dagger, Lepis had assumed their middle child was with her father. Days-long trips away had not been uncommon for Bane and the children, and at first Lepis had let herself believe it was something like that. But then they didn't come back after a week, or a month. And then she had the other children and a heavy pregnancy and a territory to run and the weight of a thousand dreams for the future precariously balanced on her shoulders.
She cannot bring herself to admit aloud in front her her son that she has failed, and so Lepis does not tell her husband either. Soon, she thinks to herself, when they are alone. And remembers the earlier threat with an uncomfortable chill down her spine as she meets his gaze. He looks like himself again, but the ease with which he has shifted between the two extremes leaves her on edge. She has stood here before, on this precipice of uncertainty in front of a man, but it had not been Wolfbane and she had not thought to ever find herself here again.
She frowns, but asks "Where have you been?" Without any hint that she feels anything but perfectly delighted at the arrival of her husband and the reunion of her family. "The children would love to hear new stories of your adventures. They claim I tell the same ones, over and over."
@[Wolfbane]
@[Elio]
i present to you a novel
The golden happiness that had been kindling dies away in a cold white fear that leaves her still and conflicted. She has little time to react before her mind is filled with foreign emotions. It only takes a moment to overpower the flurry in her mind with a solid wall of a single feeling .
Elio's gift is a familial one, and his spontaneous emotion sharing is something Lepis has handled a thousand times before. Softly, she presses calm toward him for the space of a heartbeat. She presses it just long enough to give him a chance to get a hold of his emotions, and firm enough for him to feel the difference between the emotions he keeps to himself and those that are released into the air around him. There's something harder to the edge of a projected feeling, something that prevents it from sliding seamlessly into another's mind the way a gift like telepathy might. Over a decade of practice has honed the dun mare's magic though, and she reminds herself to exaggerate the edge of calm so he might better sense the difference.
The method is the one her mother had used with her, and that Lepis has in turn used with her own children, Elio's older brothers Pteron and Tiercel. It is her boys that inherited her gift, she thinks distractedly for a moment, and not the girls. She withdraws it, and is then left with just the echoes of the red boy's emotions for the instant before her own start to trickle back.
Wonder and uncertainty, pride and protection. She smiles reassuringly, stretches out to reach him and plant a kiss on his soft forehead. She is reluctant to let him go, but Wolfbane fires off the name of her children. Their children, she mentally concedes, though they've been just hers for the better part of a year.
"Pteron is with Reia." Lepis names the piebald filly from Loess - the eldest daughter of Castile, a girl Pteron considers near-family. "Marni is probably in one of the meadows." Elio has explained Celina's absence, and neither of them name their missing boys. Until Wolfbane had hurled Eyas' name like a dagger, Lepis had assumed their middle child was with her father. Days-long trips away had not been uncommon for Bane and the children, and at first Lepis had let herself believe it was something like that. But then they didn't come back after a week, or a month. And then she had the other children and a heavy pregnancy and a territory to run and the weight of a thousand dreams for the future precariously balanced on her shoulders.
She cannot bring herself to admit aloud in front her her son that she has failed, and so Lepis does not tell her husband either. Soon, she thinks to herself, when they are alone. And remembers the earlier threat with an uncomfortable chill down her spine as she meets his gaze. He looks like himself again, but the ease with which he has shifted between the two extremes leaves her on edge. She has stood here before, on this precipice of uncertainty in front of a man, but it had not been Wolfbane and she had not thought to ever find herself here again.
She frowns, but asks "Where have you been?" Without any hint that she feels anything but perfectly delighted at the arrival of her husband and the reunion of her family. "The children would love to hear new stories of your adventures. They claim I tell the same ones, over and over."
@[Wolfbane]
@[Elio]
i present to you a novel
