"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
The sunset plunges the entire countryside into various shades of fiery red and burnt orange. He hesitates along the treeline until, finally, he begins that short trek to the riverside. His shadow is impossibly long beside him with the barbs along his spine greatly exaggerated. Grimjaw has dreaded the idea of seeing himself and it still makes him sick to his stomach just thinking of it. Having a handsome face had been his one redeeming quality before coming here. It made people tolerate his biting words and forgive his wrongdoings.
He draws a slow breath in as he comes to the water’s edge. Slowly, cautiously, he leans over to meet the bright red of his own eyes. This bone mask swoops beneath his left eye and then forms a horn over his right. The jagged edges of it look like fangs that he certainly did not have before. His brow furrows as his heart breaks - and the emotion can barely be seen on that awful face.
Grimjaw flaps his wings to disturb the water and send ripples splashing over his reflection so he doesn’t have to see it anymore. The sun sinks further beneath the horizon until everything is a shade of purple and black, just like him. He turns from the water and steps back toward the tree line as he grapples with the strangeness of this new form.
But Asena said purple was his favorite color, hadn’t she?
He scoffs at his own optimism. How careless, to try and rebuild his ego around a single compliment. It would take only one insult to tear him down again. But isn’t he already a house of cards just waiting for the faintest breeze to rip him down? Grimjaw can’t help but laugh at the sad, sorry state of himself now. At least he still has a decent voice beneath this mask.
He lifts his head at the sound of someone approaching but he makes no move to meet them halfway. “Is someone there?” he asks in a voice woven from lavender and cardamom.
be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
Wishbone cannot count the number of times she has stared into her reflection in the past couple of years. In those months after her heart started beating again and her lungs started breathing again, she had spent almost every waking moment looking into surfaces that bounced her face back into her eyes. A defined face had replaced her high cheekbones. The plethora of scars scattered across her knees like summertime freckles had vanished, replaced by a long vulture-claw scar across the left side of her face. The simple, natural colors of her body had melted into deep black twisted with a shimmering golden marking across the lines of her face.
Although she is too late to witness Grimjaw’s reaction to his new form, she knows well the grief that accompanies such a change.
Wishbone has been hesitant to approach the places of Beqanna she once called home. She’s never been one to shy from a challenge, but something within had shifted when she fell through the portal into the Land of the Living. She finds a bit of comfort in the quieter corners, where she can spend an entire morning grazing with the does and their fawns without speaking to another horse. If her younger self could have seen what she has become, she might have died much sooner.
In this peaceful lull in her life, Wishbone has grown rather fond of visiting the River at sunset. The dying sun casts spectacular colors over the busy, turbulent waters. Mystery unfolds before her eyes as the shadows creep closer and the depths of the river grow darker. She is late to the scene on this particular night, having drifted off into a nap after an exhausting swim in the southwestern ocean. The sound of a stranger’s voice meets her as she steps past the treeline, moving as smoothly as a shadow. It has taken her a while to grow used to the length of her new body — all legs and neck, built like a racehorse — but now she enjoys the way her nimble legs can carry her.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.” Her voice has always been a unique blend of honey and whiskey; her tunes are rough from her childhood spent among Tephra’s ash while a sweet lilt of femininity melts with the smoke. “I’m Wishbone,” she explains simply. The dark mare’s hope is that her name will ease his nerves — not because of who she was, but because a demon of the forest wouldn’t provide such friendliness to a stranger. She knows how the nighttime comes alive in these areas of Beqanna, but as Wishbone’s amber eyes find the stranger’s she is certain he would be able to hold his own against the shadows.
He watches her come closer, and she seems normal enough that he exhales a breath he hadn’t meant to hold in. It’s strange, how tense he’s become since he plunged into the river here. Trouble used to come his way on a regular basis and yet it had never bothered him at all. Chaos was easy enough to take in stride no matter how turbulent his life became. But now? Now he bristles and tenses any time someone comes near, as though a new curse is just waiting to ensnare him.
Her voice is strange in a way he cannot define. Maybe he hasn’t been around enough women in his life to really know what they could sound like, though. His bright red eyes watch her, unabashed in the way they find hers and do not stray politely elsewhere.
Grimjaw gives no indication that he’s heard her name once she shares it. Instead, he takes a few steps closer to see her better in the dim moonlight. “Wishbone. I am Grimjaw,” he finally says, breaking the silence that had just begun to settle in between them. “Is it common to wander alone in the dark, here?” He does not elaborate on the question. Growing up, he had always been taught to be very still at night. All sorts of strange things came creeping from their burrows to snatch little children away.
He blinks to dismiss the memory from his mind. There will be time to dwell when he finds a place to rest his head a while. For now, he would prefer to distract himself, and Wishbone seems like an ideal candidate to keep his mind busy with more pleasant thoughts.
be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
Wishbone has met her fair share of men. One was a golden boy with a smile that stoked the flames in her heart, always pushing himself into her childhood adventures to sweep her away from danger at the last moment. One was a shadow, drawing her closer with his pure intentions but constantly at war with deep darkness encouraging him to slit her throat. One was a creature of the sea with a hunger fueled by instinct, who taught her what womanhood meant and what Death looks like. Each of them has been unique in their own ways and left a different impression on her wild heart.
This man is as unique as the rest have been. The polite way his eyes find hers — without drifting to the lengthy slope of her back or the dip of her shoulders — isn’t something Wishbone had been expecting. She isn’t quite sure how to handle this novelty, as the majority of the men she encounters seem to enjoy at least a brief evaluation. Wishbone finds that remaining silent on the matter is the best course of action to take.
A heavy quiet fills the space between them, deepened further by the silence that slips across the land as night approaches. She knows that the hours past twilight will bring forth their own noises, many of which originate from the Forest not far from their riverside location. During the months Wishbone spent wandering, discovering who the face staring back at her truly was and who it was going to be, she had never ventured too far into the Forest. Its dark pines and tangled depths called to the darker pieces of her soul — pieces that enjoyed the way Ivar had dragged his teeth along her crest, pieces that enjoyed the way Khaedrik’s eyes would flash with a darker level of shadow, pieces that enjoyed the adrenaline racing through her veins when her young foot would slip on a rock during her attempted summit of the volcano.
Wishbone will never admit to the presence of fear, but there is something about the darkness of the Forest that encourages her to seek different sleeping grounds when night draws close. As if he has heard her thoughts, the stranger replies with his name and a question about the growing darkness. Wishbone looks at him closer now, noticing the way Grimjaw structures the question. He is new to Beqanna; someone born of these lands would know about the risks involved in wandering alone at night in these parts of the woods.
The dark mare moves closer as the night gets thicker still. Once the sun hides behind the treeline, the light of day slides away too quickly for her taste. “Only those who feel equipped or brave,” she answers honestly. Her dark face tips in the direction of the thicker woodlands, where the shadows seem to press tightly enough to choke life. “I wouldn’t suggest exploring the Forest at night.” Her amber eyes turn back toward Grimjaw. “Where are you from, Grimjaw?”
It doesn’t occur to him that he could admire her body in whatever depraved sense he liked. Grimjaw thinks she’s lovely, of course, but all bodies are essentially the same to him - blood and guts all wrapped up in skin. They’re all ugly on the inside, that way.
He looks past her to the frigid dark between the trees of the forest. The shadows twist and flex to sculpt all kinds of imagined horrors for him as he stares far too long. All that endless black had never frightened him back in the swamps where he grew up, but he thinks it could genuinely hide awful creatures here. He much preferred fearing the light, he thinks. At least that was a familiar sort of nightmare to deal with.
Grimjaw doesn’t budge when Wishbone lessens the distance between them. His bright red gaze returns to her, though, and he tilts his horned head to study her. So she fears that dizzying night in there, too? He hums softly in thought but whatever conclusions he reaches never makes it to his lips to form into words. Instead, he offers a light shrug when she asks where he came from.
“I was raised in a bayou with crocodiles and wisps. Then I left, maybe a year ago, and started wandering.” He offers no further details or even seems interested in his own tale beyond these sparse facts. “What about you, Wishbone? Where did you grow up and why aren’t you there still?”
The cherry red of his eyes find hers with a calculated degree of interest. He isn’t entirely sure if she still calls her birthplace home but he makes the gamble anyway. The question always makes for interesting answers either way, he thinks.
be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
She has spent a decent amount of her life wandering. The weight of a crown had felt too heavy on her young head; the simplicity of a broodmare’s life was too boring. Tephra had drawn her close in her youth — giving her trails and tides and hills to explore recklessly. Nerine had pulled at the wilderness in her heart — the way the ground disappears into nothingness, the violence of the northern ocean. Ischia had provided a home for her daughters — endless sunny days and enough beaches to practice swimming every afternoon.
All of these homes and the places she had visited Beyond have appealed to her in some fashion, yet they have all rubbed wrongly enough to encourage her elsewhere.
Although the biome is unfamiliar to Beqanna, Wishbone recalls the bayous and crocodiles of worlds Beyond. A faint smile dances across her gold mouth at the memory of the swampland. “We don’t have any bayous here, so you’re in luck if that is why you left.” She doesn’t press the reasons why he might have left his birthplace; if he wanted to explain himself, he would. In all the time Wishbone spent in the Afterlife, pacing the threshold between Death and Life, she had learned that some things are better left in the places of silence.
“I was born in Tephra. It’s a kingdom here in Beqanna.” Her characteristic amber eyes peer into Grimjaw’s red ones, observing how they are set into his dark face like twin flames. “Its most notable feature is a volcano, but you can’t see it from where we are.” Wishbone takes a moment to answer his next question, mainly because her response has a chance of turning into a story that will last until dawn. “I have a restless spirit.” It is the shortest version she can settle on, but something in the way Grimjaw had searched the darkness leads her to guess he is looking for a distraction.
“I’ve lived in many places but at the moment I’m a wanderer, like you. I was dead, and now I’m not.” Again, a simple explanation for a much longer story. A twinkle of mischief shimmers in her gaze. “And I look completely different than in my first life.” Onyx where she should be mahogany; long where she should be compact; elegant where she should be slender.
