[private] you're not my homeland anymore

[clarissa]

you were my crown, now i'm in exile seeing you out

She manages to keep her composure until Tarte disappears along the horizon, and then her world comes crashing down.

One she is gone, the keening begins - it is a high pitched, terrible sound that echoes over the beaches of the Cove, her grief unfettered and raw. Her talons leave gouges in the black pebbles of the beach as she takes to the skies, her feathered wings shimmering against the fading sunlight. Her mourning continues as the dragon wheels through the clouds, cutting her way towards the border with Pangea. If he is to ruin her, she will ruin whatever pieces of him that she can cut away as well.

The white dragon lands heavily in the nest, flames waiting at the back of her throat. Swiftly she gathers up the shards of each of her children’s eggs and shoves them out of the nest, tucking them away safely for later. She will keep them because they are the few pieces of her children she has left until she can find them again. The children that she has raised are the only pure things left in her life, and she will not let Ghaul tarnish that like he has tarnished everything else. However, all of this - this nest, this home, this place - it must be destroyed. Every piece of it will be nothing but ash when she is done.

She is quick but also meticulous as she pulls the nest apart, trampling the bones of their combined kills beneath the materials she had built this nest with. Cress’s skull she tosses from the nest as well, though she will not take it with her - she is certain that Frenzy, if the girl returns, will want to keep the piece of her birth mother, and she wants her adopted child to have some peace in life. After today, Clarissa will not be back for her.

Once the nest is unrecognizable, Clarissa gathers up the shards of eggs in her taloned forelimbs, using her muscular hind legs to propel her back into the sky. As she pulls herself back to the treetops with wings that have begun to strain with fatigue, she lights the entire thing on fire. She is not careful or precise with her flames and the fire spreads quickly to the surrounding trees, but Clarissa is already gone, set off to find her children that Tarte explained had run north.

Her molten gold eyes well up with tears yet again as she carries herself south first, her eyes tracing over the terrain of Pangea as she flies overhead. She can see the valleys where they used to play, and where she had met his half-siblings, Draco and Desire. There is the river that runs through the kingdom, where they had splashed and swam and there, there is the place where they had made love the first time after he nearly died from being too arrogant. His arrogance is his downfall.

Finally, the terrain underneath of her changes completely, and she loses herself among the mountains of Hyaline. She has never spent any time here, other than when she finally fled Loess, and so the former kingdom of the East is alien to her, which is almost comforting. She keeps mostly to the shoreline as she flies and the journey goes quickly, and before she realizes it she is too tired to fly any longer. Tears gather in her eyes as she brings herself to a landing amidst tall redwoods, in a land that is even more strange to her golden eyes.

This is not a place for dragons, and she wonders if she will be welcomed here.

Stifling a sob she releases the eggs at last, curling around them as if her children are still nestled within them. The fire in her belly has dulled now and she allows herself to truly cry for the first time since tearing the nest to shreds, hardly noticing as she loses grip on her shifting and begins to melt back into a horse.

@[Yanhua]

[Yanhua]

Yanhua

Softly, the mist rising from the redwood forests in the south made its way up the main road, enveloping Yanhua in its midst. He trod quietly into it, lowering his horns for a moment when he passed through the outer curtain of white. The nothingness of a heavy fog no longer scared him like it did when he was a foal growing up in Taiga. By now the tingling embrace of the mist felt welcoming, compared to the icy grip of Icicle Ise. It was still cold, but nothing like the misery of swimming in those choppy, gray seas. He would take a heavy fog over the muscle ache and NDE’s any day.

Shaking the moisture off his whiskers, Yanhua breathed in the smell of the trees and earth as he kept to the wide pathway, then he exhaled and a hum of gentle yellow light brightened his already glowing hair. Like a lantern, Yan truly gleamed as he clopped along, but the light wasn’t simply for artificial purposes. With it, he chased away the longer shadows and could see the road ahead. He picked up a trot, flicked his tail, and left Nerine behind him for a while.

Almost as soon as he did, an echo found him. Someone or something nearby was suffering, and the likes of it stopped Yanhua dead in his tracks. He lifted his head and clenched his jaw, waiting for the images to come flashing through his mind: Anger, fighting and clawing; Betrayal, weeping and disbelief; Pain... the last images ripped through Yanhua’s brain like a bolt of lightning, but the sensation was over quickly. He was glad for that: the emotion had almost been unbearable.

“Hmm.” He exhaled, relaxing the muscles in his face again after the visions had passed. That echo had been freshly made, which meant he could bet on the creator being somewhere nearby. Yanhua, poised on his tiptoes, waited quietly and flicked his ears ahead.
There.
A faint sound, but still a recognizable one. Crying… someone nearby was sobbing. The chestnut stallion didn’t think twice; he left the main road and drifted off into the woodland hills like a curious, glowing ghost. The fog itself revealed nothing for a minute, and Yanhua could only follow sound through the maze of trees, but the pitch rose as he drew closer, its tone very unfamiliar to him. Not like any horse, and yet not like any creature he’d seen here in Taiga before. A mystery, Yanhua thought, losing himself to the trail of Clarissia’s changing voice and the deep darkness of Taiga’s endless woods, until at last the noise leveled out. Yanhua crept quietly ahead and peered out from the gloom, and there he saw Clarissa for the very first time.

She was just finishing her transformation. A few glittering scales were fading off her skin, revealing the golden pattern underneath, and in the late evening din she stood out in a way Yanhua couldn’t dream of, even with the help of his mane and tail. She was… one of the most intriguing and beautiful horses he’d ever seen, and her sudden appearance reminded him of previous encounters with mysterious passerbys. Taiga certainly didn’t lack a flair for the strange, he’d come to know. The ethereal mare had been crying, and for a second or two Yanhua thought she might be hoarding something. He couldn’t be sure. He only knew he couldn’t stand here (when had he come to a stop?) prying into her business, and he was almost certain she’d heard his arrival by now.

“Lady,” He called out formally (gently) to Clarissa, having no other name to go by, “your crying… I heard it on my walk. I’m sorry -” The horned stallion bent his long neck and turned his eyes away from the mare, trying his best not to be offensive, “- but I’m not one to turn a blind eye.”

Yanhua had never sounded so certain of a thing in his life as he did right now, speaking to Clarissa. Her suffering was quite literally his burden to bear as well, and it went against the very nature of Yanhua’s existence not to try and help a soul in need. He weighed the risk and focused on Clarissa again, then took a tentative step into her clearing.

“I’m a watcher in these woods, born and raised between the giants. Believe me when I tell you they can soak up your pain like water.” He murmured, finding it impossible to tear his eyes away from the gilded swirls covering her skin. “My job is the opposite.” Yanhua’s voice lowered, soft as the moss underhoof.

“Tell me how to make the tears stop," he asked her, "and I will do it.”

I GOT | Extra | FEELINGS

@[clarissa]