"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
Golden eyes open on a field of color and bright light that makes them blink shut again. Her chest heaves with the effort of breathing, burns with the strange sensation of air, and she bleats strangely, a sound not entirely equine, but not quite anything else, either. Despite the sun, the air feels cold to damp skin and down-feathers, and the ground feels strange and hard under the feet she struggles to place beneath her in an order that she cannot quite fathom. Her short brush of tail slaps wetly against shaking, scrawny, haunches, trembling beneath the pressure of gravity, as she stands at last on hooves still slippered and soft, and paws – paws! - with careless claws that scrape the earth. The girl thinks nothing of this strangeness, but her mother shoves rudely at her, scraping hard teeth against fat forelegs, then burying her black-velvet nose in the grey-brown threads plastered to the child’s neck and shoulders.
There is a beak too, and the daughter chews the air in protest against this rough handling with a small click-click-click, but to no avail. She is pushed and prodded by the dark blur of her dam whose breath rattles noisily in her nostrils, half spooked, half delighted, by the strange child she has birthed - a fantastic, chimeric, beast, already steady on mismatched feet while her minutes-older brother weaves and wobbles still on long, fragile, equine bones. The speckled bay colt moves in a careful, stilted, fashion, like a long-legged shorebird, and the mare breathes an easy name into his wet ears, "Avocet," and to the filly, something with stranger edges to it, "Manikin." The names fall against the girl's ears without meaning.
She pads to her dam's side, pressing the slick shell of beak against the russet brown belly and flanks, hunting intuitively, and, finding a swollen teat, nurses noisily. The jab of her beak elicits a squeal, the mare lifts a hind leg to kick out at the girl, sidesteps angrily, her haunches swinging away and toward the colt instead. Manikin trills an objection, still hungry, but a red-banded wing drops low, barring her return, so she bites at the stiff feathers with a growl, instead.
Manikin
What immortal eye, or hand, weaves beasts from dreams, sews sky to land?
07-30-2020, 12:29 PM (This post was last modified: 07-30-2020, 12:33 PM by avocet.)
His vision comes to rest, not on hooves - but paws. Avocet is still fresh - damp and shivering from the (cruel) cold shock of this new world - so he knows nothing about lions or wolves. Instinct will warn him of predators but it's only message now is to rise. To stand because it is safer on wobbling and teetering legs than to be folded down on the bed of meadowgrass they had been delivered on.
Click, click, click, comes the sound of his twin and Avocet tumbles down again when he loses his focus. The bay colt is determined and his younger sister has the luxury of balance, thanks to those non-equine limbs. The traitless child has only the gifts of his equid ancestors; those long legs that seem impossible to master in the first minutes after arriving into the world.
Eventually, he gets it. He still wobbles and Avocet makes no sudden movements. His small head dips low and he uses it for balance, not shifting one way or the other. The older twin stands still on splayed legs until something unusual happens. A word is murmured in his still-wet ear. It means something. He doesn't know what yet but the foal understands that this word holds something for him.
Avocet. His name.
The second word has a meaning, too. Manikin. His sister. Avocet feels brave enough to lift his head and watch as his beaked sibling moves along one side of their winged dam. Copying her, the bay colt moves to the opposite of their mother until he can reach for the opposite teat. He is careful - more mindful of his sister's sharp beak than concern for their mother - to reach for it and loses himself to the first meal of his life, slowly filling his belly with contentment.
It's shortlived, a feeling that doesn't last much longer than he's been alive. His sister trills and his mother growls so Avocet pulls away and sighs.
Popinjay snorts wearily, though she does not put up much more of a fight than blocking her flank from the beaked girl. The normally nimble mare is careful not to step on the tipsy boy at her other side, one ear following the sound of his breath while her eyes trace the shape of the filly mangling her feathers, watches as a frustrated tug plucks one of the long, stiff flight feathers from its place. The violence brings no more than a blink, with the spring comes the molt and the old feathers are loose and ready fall away.
Manikin, however, growls and shakes her prize like a dog with a bone until her brother's breath catches her attention.
What was that?
She freezes, head askew atop a twisted neck, caught midshake, and the soft, young feathers pressing through the down along her crest stand up like porcupine quills. Golden eyes peer beneath her mother's belly where thin legs and knobby knees give away his place beneath the shade of Poppy's other wing. The movement of those legs holds her rapt for a moment, and then the girl creeps forward on fat paws whose muscles have not yet developed the strength to retract their claws so they catch and claw clumsily with each step. She stalks without skill, and, coming upon the exasperated boy, reaches out with one of those barbed paws to bat at his rear leg and the damp bit of tail that twitches above his hocks.
Avocet.
He is not as strong and sturdy as their dam, and the chimeric girl wonders rather innocently if she could eat him.
Not now.
He is looking at her now.
Later.
She grins up at her elder brother as best she can through the stiff horn of her beaked nose, then yawns, stretches, and finds his gaze again. Perhaps he is sleepy?
08-08-2020, 10:41 AM (This post was last modified: 08-08-2020, 10:43 AM by avocet.)
Maybe Manikin isn’t so bad.
Avocet doesn’t have the reasoning to form that precise thought yet but she distracts herself with other things. (There are many, various noises coming from the other wing of Popinjay but Avocet takes the opportunity to enjoy her milk by himself. There are no sounds from his side and the long-limbed colt prides himself in his ability to be quieter than his sister.)
The peace doesn’t last long.
Something grazes a hind leg and instinctually, Avocet quickly lifts it. His ears pin and somewhere between raising his leg and turning his head to squeal angrily at the intruder, Avocet tumbles to the ground again. It takes him less time to rise than it had before but he is looking furiously at her while she is studying him. If the bay colt could accuse her of it, he’d call her Cheshire.
Instead, he just glowers.
"Maw!” Avocet pleads, pressing himself into Popinjay’s sides while he watches his younger sister with untrusting brown eyes. "Maw! Maw! Maw!" He says again, in case she hadn’t heard him the first four times.
Manikin pounces when he falls, but even as he is slow to rise, she is slow to do it, wastes too much time in the crouching, in getting the motion and balance just right, and when she leaps at last, he is gone and she lands in a clumsy pile of limbs that twist and writhe. Disappointment flavors her first hours. No milk, no meat, just dirt and stiff feathers.
From high above the tiny dramas, Popinjay watches passively, and it's a strange feeling that twists her smiling lips into complaint. The birth of twins has left her weakened far beyond the usual - she cannot be certain what the usual is but other mothers she has seen have not looked as she feels now. The dark bay is worn and weary, her limbs as feeble as her newborn's own and even folding her wings back beneath her own skin feels impossible. The foals tussle and she does not care, does not worry about the hunter's gleam in her daughter's eye, but the whining boy sets her ears back against her poll. She nips sharply at his curled mane while Manikin finds her feet again and lets her frail and fatigued wings droop down so that he is hidden from the strange little chimera.
Manikin finds her brother guarded thusly - her dam's size making the block efficient despite her lethargy - and growls.
Unfair.
It's unfair to play favorites, especially when she is so clearly the superior choice. She hisses at Avocet and stalks into the flowers nearby to shred their petals to confetti. Popinjay lets her hanging head turn, curling her neck to pin the speckled colt with a dark eye whose sparkling laughter is turned to disapproval instead.
"I don't know who you think you are, but I won't fight your battles."
A strange thing to say to a child - any child, but your own, especially. Children, it turns out, are not very much fun, at least, not when they belong to you. She lifts her wings slightly, testing them again and grimaces. No, not today, but as soon as possible, she will leave them both here and return to the Taiga alone.
08-13-2020, 03:41 PM (This post was last modified: 08-13-2020, 03:45 PM by avocet.)
He doesn’t squeal when his mother’s teeth graze the tufts of his ebony mane. He’s hyperaware of her, though. He feels the warm gust of her breath against his curled neck and the boy finds it comforting. He likes that she is so close; if Popinjay is that close, it means she can't be near Manikin.
Avocet feels a spark of something in his chest. This is his mother and it suddenly seems unfair that he has to share her at all. There is a dark curtain that falls and finally separates him from his sister. He can hear her frustration on the other side as she growls, sounding like she prods the protecting wing for some weakness or trying to find a give to the other side.
The colt presses into his mother’s side, content with his belly full of milk and her scent filling his small dark nostrils. Avocet thinks her invincible and thinks that his sibling won’t be able to break through the feathered barrier that his bay dam has created. It makes him love her all the more and when he looks up, his amber eyes are rich with admiration. ”Maw,” he tells her.
@[Popinjay] lifts her wings slightly and it jolts through Avocet like a lightning strike. Moments before, he might have folded his legs and bedded down. Now? Now he feels concerned as the colt looks to the red-striped wing in front of him and then back up at her. The sound on the other side is gone but he can’t really believe his sister is gone.
It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
His brow furrows as he stares up at Popinjay. He can’t say her name - he can’t even say his own - so he growls at his mother instead. Where did the hissing sister go?
