"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
09-08-2020, 10:17 PM (This post was last modified: 09-08-2020, 10:58 PM by Wherewolf.)
The gold of his dapples gleams softly metallic, the thick hair of his winter coat giving a plushness to that shine. Wherewolf stands at the edge of a cliff - a thing he has no doubt learned from his mother - and his stomach lurches - a thing he is sure she has never felt at all. He feels like the wind might pull him right over the edge the way it tugs at him, and he snarls at it, defies it. Then, tentatively, he unfurls dark wings, and suddenly the way the wind pulls at him is more eager, hungrier. The right wing outstretches to its full length, crisp feathers stretching out to taste the air, but the left...
"Oh hell!"
Both wings snap back to his sides and the boy tosses his head with a litany of curses belting out across the sea. There is no reason that his wing should be so uncooperative. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The injury healed so long ago he can't even remember what happened or if there had been any pain. His neck twists, bristling mane standing on edge as if radiating his irritation, and his short tail snaps loud enough to wake a sleeping dragon on the Isle. His dark lips curl away from white, wet, teeth.
"This is shit." Everything is shit. Anger blossoms in his breast like fire and he, in a rare fit of creativity, imagines that the fog of his hot breath in the frigid northern air is smoke curling up as if from a chimney. He feeds that anger all his angst and insecurity. All the little hurts and insults, even the ones he knows weren't real; the ones he made up, and the arguments that only happened in his head.
Trapped. He isn't truly stuck here, in fact, almost nobody cares where or when he goes at all, yet he feels trapped just the same, as if his heart is pressing against sharp wire bars. He can feel it with each thrum and beat, sees it in the pattern of shapes that play across his eyelids when they close and shutter those sea-green eyes from the stormy grey waters crashing on sharp rocks below.
Trapped.
His eyes re-open on the pallid sky, slick with clouds and promising snow. The colt looks at the sea, at the wicked rocks below, and it is a simple thing to let himself fall, to spill over the precipice, and plummet through the air. The blasted wing will open, or it will not. He almost doesn't care, the healing will soon do for the pain of shattering on those rocks, will soon repel the water from his lungs like a clam half-buried in the sand. In short order, the wreckage of his body will join itself together again. Great wings unfurl again, they catch the wind beneath them and, for one brief, shining moment, his fall slows, he drifts on the updrafts of the sea, and then - oh, and then! - that traitorous left wing twitches and withdraws the smallest amount, and inch, a centimeter, almost nothing at all, but the wind catches him up in a vicious spin. He cartwheels into the rough black cliff wall with a yelp and a flash of light that flares up behind his eyes, giving way immediately to darkness and to oblivion.
Broken-legged, broken-winged, he lays crumpled on the unforgiving beach below and the clouds above open, weeping wide snowflakes that dust his too-still body with icy down.
09-10-2020, 03:20 PM (This post was last modified: 09-10-2020, 03:34 PM by Nashua.)
stars when you shine, you know how i feel oh freedom is mine
Nashua is an artful flyer for his age (though that might have more to do with his easy-going nature; far easier to move with the wind than against it). Despite some of the doubt that he harbors within, he projects the image of a strong, confident pegasus that cuts through the air with ease. Each wingstroke carries him with a sense of purpose and it calls him back to where Nashua has laid his fealty, with the Isle and to Leilan.
The flight north isn't easy. It rarely is, with the way that the wind suddenly whips one way and then another. Storms seem quicker to anger on this edge of Beqanna and those that take claim of the skies need to be aware of it. Perhaps it why so few are seldom seen flying on this part of the map. But above gleams Nashua - glinting gold and copper - beneath a winter sun and standing out against a blue sky and building clouds, taking command of it like he's always been destined to fly these great heights.
He is at much home here in the heavens as he has been in misty, tree-chapel Taiga. As he passes over the Redwoods, it catches his attention, and he looks below to see the Pines and Sequoias christened with new-fallen snow. It sparkles invitingly and the young pegasus almost considers landing for a visit with his mother and Yanhua, to share his latest adventure. The way that the treetops glimmer turn his thoughts his another way and as he continues towards the cliffs of Nerine, he finds himself thinking of the girl that he had last encountered there. The thought glitters in his dark green eyes and Nashua wonders if Noel might still be in Nerine. (Probably not, he thinks. But the chance of encountering her again is enough to make him land not far from the cliffs that had tested their wings and growing aerial abilities.)
Swooping easily down, Nashua flares his brown wings and skids forward on a patch of ice. With the wind at his back, he closesthem to help slow his slide. He isn't alone on these clifftops and when the chestnut pegasus finally does stop, he watches as another gleams in the winter sun like he and Yanhua. The iridescence of his dapples catches the sun and it makes Nash all the more conscious of his stripes, something that only happens when he enters the North. (For as much as he loves his home, there is a part of him that hasn't found a way to quiet the troubles that linger in the back of his mind. He is the son of the Taiga Guardian, an aspiring member of the Freyr's court and yet he is also the son of the Monster. It's a triad that tangles deep in his soul.)
There's a twinge of guilt because he has never formally met this boy - his half-brother. The few times he has asked after Wherewolf has been met with a scowl from his 'aunt' Neverwhere or worse, Lilliana's face closing up in a way completely different from when he has mentioned Celina or Elio or Gale. The wind whips forward again and as the striped stallion moves towards the dappled colt, he watches in wonder as the boy spreads his dark wings. Nash moves into a trot and for a magnificent moment, the younger pegasus catches the breeze from the sea and flies. (Nash didn't doubt that he could but there is still a sense of pride that he feels. Wherewolf is finding the sky as he should.)
But ah, as Nash knows (as he has been taught from Celina and Popinjay), the wind is a fickle thing. It changes direction like the sky trades weather; always. The copper stallion jumps into a canter and catches a wayward breeze with his proud wings. He keeps them spread for a moment, and then like he had practiced with Noel, tilts his weight forward. The descent starts to come faster, quicker than it should and there is none of Nash's earlier grace when he lands with the seaspray and snowflakes biting his slender face. Shifting his weight back to his haunches, the pegasus splashes against the shallows of the surf, and the hoofprints left behind him tell the story of the struggle it took him to stop and find his hooves as he had pulled up his wings.
@[Wherewolf] is a muddled mess of golds and browns heaped on the icy ground. His noble wings splayed in a way that they should never be. When Nash finally stops in front of him (and briefly assured that the colt wasn't dead), his voice echoes against the quiet as the snow falls. "Get up."
There's something alluring about death. Maybe it's the way he can't seem to reach it, that it, like so many other things, will be denied to him, seemingly forever. These are the first thoughts that limp through his stuttering brain when consciousness rears it's bright, haloed head again. Blood stains his pelt but the myriad wounds from crashing into the hard cliff face and breaking to pieces on the rocky beach have already closed and the splintered cannon bone is knitting itself together when he hears the hooves crunching on the gravelly shore, but Wherewolf does not open his eyes to see who it is. He does not care who it is. The feeling of bone healing at this ridiculous rate is like bugs crawling under his skin and the boy grimaces and groans, flexing his thick neck, and then he swallows a whimper because the twisted bones of his wings have not even begun to repair themselves yet.
He feels a muzzle close to his own, feels their breath intermingle in the bitter air, the scent of grass intertwining with the menthol smell of pine and redwood, and the cold smell of ice overlaying it all. Northerner; a thought that does not bring the boy as much comfort as it should. A warm voice tells him to get up and, defiant, Wherewolf's ears twist back. His eyes remain firmly shut.
"Why should I?"
Blind, it is easier to sink back into his usual recalcitrance, it is easier to say no when he cannot see how close those hooves are to his skull - something which, much like when that golden girl-child attacked his wing, might uncover a hidden memory, but he avoids this, too. He bristles under that firm voice, bristles under what he perceives as a command. The muscles of his jaw ripple when he clenches his teeth together, when he resolves to lay on these cold stones forever; until the snow covers him, and until it melts again; until the sea rises and the sun swallows the world.
09-18-2020, 09:23 PM (This post was last modified: 10-02-2020, 01:54 PM by Nashua.)
stars when you shine, you know how i feel oh freedom is mine
Nashua tries not to think about death overmuch (though maybe he should; that daring is bound to get him into trouble one day). He isn't Immortal like the rest of his family and out of all his maternal siblings, he is only one who will grow gray and wither away with age. Death could come creeping one night while he sleeps, claiming his life before Nash could open his green eyes to another dawn.
Maybe that's why Nash doesn't think about it often. Maybe that's why, for the few times he's imagined it, Nashua imagines his end will be something filled with glory. He likes to imagine that since this life is not something he will survive, he might do something of such merit or honor that will allow his memory to live on long after he is gone. (He doesn't think of it often but don't think that Lilliana's son isn't capable of grand aspirations. He just dreams differently.)
Standing in front of the adolescent pegasus, the older snorts gently. If there had been any doubts about the paternity of the golden dappled boy, the way that he heals himself solidifies the fact in Nashua's mind. (And he thinks of Celina, the scar he still bears from where her kelpie teeth had bitten. Of the way, he had told her, My turn.) Giving his head a nod, he lowers it to where Wherewolf lays his.
He listens and though teasing, it isn't said unkindly. Nashua's voice - still hoarse from Loess - comes out gravely. "Your epitaph will be very short."
I'm dying. The boy tells him and Nash fights back a smile.
"Here lies Wherewolf," he starts, "son of the serious Neverwhere, Queen of Nerine."
Pulling his wings tighter around himself and finally lifting his refined head, his green eyes glance down to the colt. "I could add more if you stand."
This teasing feels personal, and Wherewolf is lost somewhere in between a flare of rage and wanting to be too cool to be affected by it. His lip twitches into a sneer that reveals white teeth, but he remains prone, desperately clinging to his resolution to lay on the sharp gravel until the world ends in fire and oblivion. Then, maybe, he will be allowed to have some peace, but apparently not today. No, not today, today he can feel the anger boiling over and his intentions being plucked out from his grip like grass from the thin soil.
"Nobody ever asked you to add anything!" The boy erupts, suddenly, twisting his legs beneath his body to lunge clumsily forward at the gold-striped bother buzzing at his ears like a mosquito. His teeth snap together in the air with a sharp sound lost against the backdrop of the ocean's waves lapping at the shore. The rocks dig into his knees as he struggles to find his feet but the little cuts are nothing, they heal almost as fast as the stones can cut him, and he ignores the blush of pain that only adds fuel to the fire of his callow indignation. At last, he admits defeat, his blind anger hamstrings his attempts to stand on the snow-slick gravel and he fixes a white-rimmed grey-green eye on Nashua.
"Get him."
His voice is a whisper. It isn't necessary, either, because his duplicate always knows what he is thinking. It's a blur of tobacco and gold and tarnished silver, charging Nashua broadside from the left as he looks down on his prone half-brother. Pompous ass. Wherewolf lets the duplicate crash recklessly into the chestnut stallion while he finally gains his footing, neither trying to cause, nor caring prevent any real injury to either fighter. The colt rolls his head slowly atop his bristle-maned neck and scowls.
10-02-2020, 02:57 PM (This post was last modified: 10-02-2020, 02:59 PM by Nashua.)
stars when you shine, you know how i feel oh freedom is mine
He's right.
Wherewolf certainly hadn't asked Nashua to say anything at all. The striped pegasus just happened to have the pleasure of being near the same cliff that his half-brother had. The chestnut just happened to see the younger colt attempt to leap (and Nash had certainly hoped the boy would fly). And now, there was the matter of trying to get the sooty buckskin to stand.
It didn't have to be his responsibility.
He could leave the crumpled heap of dark feathers and golden dapples on the ground. Nashua could turn around and let the boy figure out how to find his hooves. He certainly wasn't a newborn foal needing help learning his legs. It didn't have to be his business at all. A gust of hot air and a flare of his wings and Nash could leave the colt right here. He could take to the sky and let the problem of the bristly-maned colt stay on the ground. Abruptly lifting his slender head up, there is a moment where Nashua does consider it.
And then he wonders what happens if he does leave.
Who comes for the boy?
His words - that teasing of his - works where his other attempt had failed. The boy twists and turns his body, trying to gain enough ground to stand. The icy slush - that same slick surface that keeps Nashua from moving on his toes too fast or angling too sharply away from the other pegasus - seems to prevent Wherewolf from doing so. If the youth hadn't been so intent on holding onto his shallow ire, the brothers might have used their time more productively and helped Wolf to stand. Instead, a green-blue eye fixes on Nash (with accusation?), and the gold-stripped stallion can feel his narrow slightly in response.
There is a whirl coming from his left but Nash doesn't have enough time to react. The whirl - the shape - is another version of @[Wherewolf] and there is a look of contempt for the copy. His dark ears snake into the flaxen on his cornsilk mane and his head turns sharply to the hastily-approaching shape. Nashua swings his haunch to the right as his hind legs move underneath him and his shoulders serve as a pivot to move away from the reckless Magic. Tightly drawing his wings up against him (the bones there are the most prone to breaking, he's learned), the chestnut pegasus tries to move away from the false Wherewolf.
The impact - when it does happen - might be more focused on the shoulder than the barrel of his side. Grunting when the duplicate colt makes contact with him, the older stallion feels his lips curl with the blow. The motion pushes Nashua more to the right and a throbbing ache starts to blossom near the point of his shoulder, beneath the massive wings that he had held so deliberately against his sides.
Trying to stay a step ahead of the young pegasus, Nashua takes another side-step to the right and tries to position himself in front of the duplicate. (He keeps a wary watch on the original, just in case his half-brother intends to fight his own battle.) "You got up," Nashua calls out, a half-jibe and somehow a whole truth.
Still watching the duplicate, Nashua moves his body so he remains head-on to the copy. He tries to prevent it from rushing him from the side again. Glancing to the now-standing Wherewolf, he asks: "Still feel like dying?"
Nashua evades the duplicate’s reckless attack with a skill that suggests he has fought before, but it is unlikely that he has fought many battles with someone completely unconcerned for their own welfare. It does not matter at all to Wherewolf if the duplicate is crushed and destroyed, its wings torn from its sides, its bones broken and piercing through ragged skin. As long as it could stand, the duplicate would fight – if that is how the dappled boy directed it – like a mindless machine, and the tight coils of his bitterness tempt him to thrash away at his brother, loosing feathers and blood and wretched, aimless anger, but he pauses at the question tossed his way.
“I always feel like dying,” his voice is a whispered growl, but the words leap easily to his tongue. They feel true enough, though he is not overly concerned with the veracity of the claim. There is so much of his mother in him, wound between each fiber of his being, but this is his own, he is sure, this desire to die. He's wrong, of course, his mother has never planned for immortality, but he doesn't know and so he clings greedily to this theory. “But I never seem to get there.”
This he says more nonchalantly, shrugging a shoulder coolly and in the same instance, sending the duplicate charging again in a wild scatter of gravel and sea-ice. How many kamikaze colts does Nashua wish to fight today? How many can he fight? For one shadowed moment full of all the anger and venom of his being, he considers how easy it might be to overwhelm his brother, but there's a deep chasm that separates him from wishing he could die, and wanting someone else to do the same - really wanting it - and he still hasn't learned to fly. At the point of impact, the duplicate falls apart, a heat mirage shivering away around the red-gold pegasus. Wherewolf's scowling lips tilt into a ghostly smirk as he releases his hold on the magic, shreds of himself scattering like ribbons in the air and blowing away, caught in the updrafts around them.
11-05-2020, 01:39 PM (This post was last modified: 11-05-2020, 01:51 PM by Nashua.)
stars when you shine, you know how i feel oh freedom is mine
Nashua never seems to be far from his humor. When his half-brother speaks about death and how he keeps trying to seek it, the chestnut pegasus snorts. Nash stands there with his wide wings partially flared - half-ready for the next move of the dappled duplicate - when he looks to the original. "A bit melodramatic," says the striped stallion. "You don't think of investing that energy into something else?" His older brother calls out while he shifts his weight towards the charging clone of Wherewolf.
The copper stallion draws in the wing that faces the copy of his younger sibling in an attempt to spare the more fragile bones that it holds. He angles his bulk into the front-facing shoulder and Nash decides that he'll give a good twist-and-buck if the duplicate continues to keep barreling towards him. It won't do any real damage but maybe a good kick will knock some sense from the duplicate to dappled boy.
When the two collide again, Nashua turns into the air. The duplicate recedes to nothing but sea spray and Nash spreads both wings wide to balance himself. He scuttles against the icy gravel but he doesn't fall. The landing isn't graceful but he manages to land on all four legs. The older pegasus flares his nostrils and his breath comes out like clouds against the cold; Nashua huffs but stops himself from cursing as he settles his wings along his chestnut sides.
The scowl (it makes him look so like his mother that it unnerves Nash) on the dappled colt's face finally yields. The edges of his mouth start to curl like the smoke that emerges from the nostrils of the now standing stallions. The ocean before them keeps angrily crashing but @[Wherewolf] finally smiles.
Nash barks out a short laugh, caught off-guard by it. He shakes out his neck, releasing some of the tension that had been building there.
"How about this," the stallion starts to propose. "The day that I feel like dying, I'll come find you. Between your tenacity for death and my tendency for the idiotic, I'm sure we can figure something out."
He's always figured that when he goes, it will be for some noble cause or another. That blaze of glory he's imagined is likely to be spurred from a moment of bravery. If Wherewolf remains so keen on dying, Nashua might as well find them both something worth dying for.
Even though he smiles, even though he has decided not to try to kill @[Nashua] in earnest, there's little room in Wherewolf's walled-off heart for the friendship his brother offers, so he looks at the hawk-winged young stallion askance, one dark ear slowly turning backward. The hard grey-green of his eyes softens to something a little closer to their natural brightness, but the sullen expression remains.
He knows he shouldn't behave this way. He shouldn't antagonize Ama, and he certainly should not have gone after that Taigan girl. Not my fault, he tells himself with practiced ease. Not his fault he is like this. He tries desperately to distance himself from his mother yet so easily blames her for his faults. Whose example did he have to follow, but Neverwhere's? Distant, scowling, full of sharp words and long silences, and so close-fisted with her affections.
Not my fault, it's the mantra he repeats to himself, again and again, wiping away his own sins until he believes himself blameless in the face of the wrongs done to him by his dam. It's easy to do, all it requires is to nurse that hollow feeling in his chest, to remember how it felt to see her greet Amarine and Lilliana so warmly when for him she had little more than cool indifference.
It's not his fault, but he perpetuates it, and that ghost of a smile fades away. It will not be so easy to chink his heavy armor. His wings settle lopsidedly against his ribs and the tarnished silver of his tail snaps loud and bright against his flanks. He steps closer to the wheaten pegasus with bared teeth and standing so close it is impossible not to mark the similarities in their shapes. He steps close enough that the feathers of their wings bristle against one another and the golden markings they share through their sire dapple the one another in shifting light, and he snorts explosively with his muzzle lifted as close to Nashua's face as the other youth will allow, sending a cloudy spray of condensation in his direction. Then the buckskin colt turns abruptly away, probing the cliffside for a way up again that doesn't require the use of his traitorous wings.
"I'm not a team player," his voice is gravelly in that strange way of adolescence, somewhere between childhood and the grown man he will become, more like the treacherous whine of ice about to break, "and I'm not in the market for a savior, either."
11-26-2020, 08:28 PM (This post was last modified: 11-26-2020, 08:30 PM by Nashua.)
stars when you shine, you know how i feel oh freedom is mine
Maybe there is too much of Nashua's mother in him for the striped pegasus to seal off his heart. Maybe he doesn't know-how. Maybe Nash isn't so different from his Nerinian half-sibling and is just obstinate; he just won't.
Maybe it is because that Nashua resulted out of something so wrong that the young stallion was determined to right everything he could.
(He fights the fires of his anger with Wherewolf because he agrees with the colt. It is not his fault that he is this way. It is not his fault that he is so angry or indifferent. He's felt it before. Has known it before when a colt trying the Isle on for size had felt like picking on Nashua for being younger, fine-boned, and missing his mother and twin. They had sparred as young studs were apt to do and when Nash had clamped down on a piece of tender flesh, the brawling youth had called him a 'bastard'. So he had bitten down harder, fought fiercer so he didn't have to wonder what the other adolescent might have been implying.)
His ears pin into his cornsilk mane, a warning to Wherewolf. The flaxen-haired pegasus thinks he understands his half-brother but that doesn't mean Nash won't hesitate to remind the younger one of his personal space. Pressing his mouth into a tense life, the copper stallion bites back baring his teeth in return. Nashua lifts his head higher, the muscles in his thick neck stiffening.
The golden-dappled colt turns around, leaving Nashua to snort in the empty space that he left behind. He stands there for a time, watching the form of Wherewolf grow smaller as he tried to find a way
Nashua flares his wide wings and within a few beats and a canter stride, he is in the air. He takes to it naturally, confidently as he always believed that the wide-open sky is there waiting for him. Nash has never known the winds or his wings to fail him. The praise (and lessons) he received as a youth from Celina and Popinjay taught him to never question them. What he does question is why a pegasus - even a plummeting one - wouldn't attempt an easier way back up the bluffs and cliffs of Nerine.
Hovering for a few more flight strokes, he reminded himself that Wherewolf proclaimed he didn't need a savior (and some part of him thinks that maybe he deserved a few hours wandering the cold beach, looking for a trail that Nash could probably find in half the time). He grunts before tilting a wing down and hovering above the silver buckskin. "You're better off swimming down the coast!" he bellows over the crashing waves. Fighting the winter drafts blowing up from the ocean, he flaps his wings powerfully.
"Wait for low tide," he shouts again over the saltwater. "There's a cove around those crags." Huffing again from the exertion, he adds: "there's an easier way back up than that death trap." Nashua assumes his half-brother isn't thickheaded enough to attempt climbing the sheer cliff face his head is angled towards, but then today has been full of surprises. Maybe Wherewolf intended to spend the rest of it clamoring up it for a suicidal descent that did nothing to knock any more sense into him than the first fall.
Nash doesn't intend to stay and watch. He gives the boy another long stare and then rounds back to the Isle, up into the sky that never has never failed him.
![[Image: jCdBK6.png]](https://img.nickpic.host/jCdBK6.png)