"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
12-09-2020, 11:01 AM (This post was last modified: 12-09-2020, 11:02 AM by Reave.)
He sees her take the stone shadow, the only thing left of his birth mother, and there is nothing he can do. Not from here, with so much distance between them and legs too small to close the distance in enough time. For the first time in his very young life, the colt feels fury. It may only be a frozen echo of the once vibrant woman, but it is his mother.
Even as he bursts through the trees towards the windswept moors of the north, he does the only other thing a child would think to do at a time like this, he calls for his mama. Not the stone one stolen by a lightning bird, but the one that glows. The one that comforts. @[lilliana].
He is young and unpracticed, but the fractured visions would no doubt prove unmistakeable.
The flat, stone-strewn grasslands of Nerine prove no obstacle to the boy as he follows with a feverish intensity. Though he cannot hope to catch up to a creature in flight, he can know exactly where she has gone. He had found the birds and the insects and the rodents easy, their simplicity little obstacle to a boy filled with boundless curiosity and wild determination. Dizzying perhaps, but easy.
When he finally reaches the thief, he is breathing heavily, red and white skin slick with sweat. A fury crackles under his skin, burning behind the vibrant blue of his eyes. “Give her back,” he growls (or rather, tries to growl, youth making his voice too tremorous and wispy to be effective). “She wasn’t yours to take.”
12-09-2020, 11:23 PM (This post was last modified: 12-10-2020, 12:45 PM by lilliana.)
The quiet cove that encompassed Brazen's statue was sacred.
(Nothing much remains sacred to Lilliana anymore; she forsook the stars beneath the summit of Tephra's volcano, the River stopped murmuring to her some time ago and the wind - the wind, her birthright - the silence from the wind makes her angrier than she will ever admit to anyone.)
On the pyre of all the things she has sacrificed over the years, it leaves behind something else that burns more intensely: family.
It's a shell. She knows it is hollow and devoid of the soul that once inhabited it. There is nothing left of Brazen in the stone-sculpture that was left behind. But for Lilliana, it had been a quiet place to grieve and to mourn; it had been a place to bring flowers with Reave and share the memories of his birth mother with him. It had been a spot where she had hoped that over time, they both might have found some closure. The little glen could stand as a testament to Brazen's memory; that had been Lilliana's hope, anyway.
And it gets snatched up in moments, taken away by a pair of clutching talons.
She is already on her way by the time the first visions come. They obscure her sight and they are different, somehow, from the memories she projects. This isn't something tinged with emotional residue (though Lilliana is furious as she canters across the Nerinian grasslands). There is no sound - no gull cries coming from the coast, no scent of salt lingering from the nearby sea. It is just the emptiness of the moorlands, coming in frantic waves that send her hoofbeats racing faster into Nerine.
Lilliana - who shares a similar coloring and blue eyes with her adopted son - doesn't look so different from the colt when she comes to stand behind him.
Her mane is tangled and unkempt, with a stray twig entwined in one of her curls. The chestnut's sides are still racing though she has stopped and a thin film of sweat has darkened her neck and flanks. Her gaze, though, remains bright and clear, as angry as a winter squall as she looks at Popinjay.
"There are other ways of getting our attention," the words come clipped from the Taigan. Some part of her even doubts that the little bay mare even had a purpose for abducting Brazen. (She remembers Popinjay as a filly. There are memories of her romping through Taiga with Celina and that life feels like another era. Aten and Lethia's adopted daughter always seemed wild to her, free-spirited that made her think of those who linger too close on cliffsides, who swim into the undertow just for the sake of challenging the tide. Reckless.)
She lifts her head, granting the younger bay a moment to explain.
There is particular care in the way that Popinjay carries the fragile statue in her talons, careful not to crush the hollow stone, careful not to drop it, lest it fall to earth and shatter. There is a gentleness that those who know her may not think she is capable of displaying - this wild girl who has always been rampant as the wild winds tumbling across Nerine - and when she finally finds the place she knows is perfect for the treasure she has claimed, her broad wings angle slowly, spread wide so that her descent is more of a drift than the dramatic freefall that she often favors.
Those great black and red wings pump, thrusting cool wind down over the garden of black carnivorous plants, and they, still young, still maturing, are nevertheless sturdy enough that their dark, twisting stalks seem to only feel the gentle breeze of summer. The empty foot touches down first, wings still unfurled to their full length for balance, and then, to the seeming interest of the northern flytraps (for they turn their heads like sunflowers finding the sun when they sense a presence and taste the air in search of northern scents,) she rests her prize among them and lets her shape fold in on itself; once again small and equine with glossy, dark, wings.
A protected place.
But not hidden. The boy charges at her and Popinjay greets his childish vehemence with her grin wide and small ears turned forward within the sea of her mane. The star across her broad forehead winks teasingly behind the curling forelock, there, then not, but the Cheshire grin remains.
Not hers to take? Popinjay tsks softly at his demands while the Taiga's crimson Guardian arrives in a similar fury. Dark gaze flicks up to find livid blue eyes that match the boy's.
"Wasn't it?" White teeth flash brightly when the Rook laughs, like lightning flashing in clouds. The idea is a preposterous one, "I didn't see you there to stop me, and I did wait."
She had waited. Perhaps not such a long time, but there had been a pause, at least.
"And if I were after your attention, Lobelia, I know better ways to get it than relocating statuary."
There's a wicked turn to her smile for Lilliana, whose name she remembers, now, but butchers anyway for the fun of it. After all, their attitude borders on insulting. She has done them a favor to bring it here, in this place of glory with its honor guard of thick-stemmed fly-traps.
"But... I'll let you try to explain why you think this isn't better. Maybe I'll even let you take her back.
It’s hard for him to understand everything roiling through his young mind in the moment, much less contain it. He couldn’t hope to put words to the restless fury and unacknowledged grief, nor the pang of betrayal he might never understand. It boils over, a wild backlash at the two women who had the misfortune to be there with him in the moment.
Though it does little more than allow his breath to steady, he finds himself standing taller as his blue eyes snap in the confines of his childish features. “LIAR!” he shrieks almost before her claim that she had waited has even left her lips. Though he’d never quite understood why, one of the first tasks he had set himself upon gaining some control of his sight had been to keep watch over his stone mother.
It takes everything in him not to leap forward as he shoves the evidence of her lie forth with little finesse.
As luck would have it however, he has no time to continue any tirade he might be planning. Instead his attention is drawn as the statue begins to slowly crumble, a lick of flame curling on brittle stone edges as it falls into ash.
It takes a moment for the horror to dawn, but when it does, he is rooted futilely in place. His jaw works even as a swell of confused emotion rises like a tide in his chest. It’s all he can do to manage a strangled “What did you do?” before his limbs seem to unlock, allowing him to rush forward heedless of the carnivorous garden.
01-15-2021, 10:35 AM (This post was last modified: 01-15-2021, 10:37 AM by lilliana.)
There are moments - especially in times like now - where she would do anything to absolve the pain of her loved ones. The chestnut mare stands behind her tobiano son but she can feel his anger crashing against her like the not far-away waves of the Nerinian coast. He is wildfire fury and it burns against the vestiges of her heavy heart.
They hadn't been able to save Brazen, to find a cure for her. That was no longer a gift that Lilliana possessed since the moorlands had lost the protection of the Magician, Brennen. But it had been her power to create a quiet place where Reave could mourn the loss of his birth mother. It had been in her power to allow them both time to come to terms with a loss (that will never make sense to Lilliana, regardless of how long she might grieve her friend). Popinjay had taken that from her - clutched an opportunity in her raptor-like talons and flown away with any of those possibilities.
Her youngest boy stiffens and lifts his head and all she wants to do is take him away from this.
Their world is an extremely harsh place. It leaves little room for emotions like joy or happiness and when they do come, the moments are both precious and fleeting. Reave isn't unfamiliar with this - the child had lost his mother before he learned to stand - and yet Lilliana is furious with Popinjay for not allowing her son what little peace he might have had.
There are flashes before her blue eyes - glimpses of stone-Brazen that are not her own - before the colt leaps forward into @[Popinjay]'s garden. It takes her a moment to realize what has happened, a shock that spreads from the heavy dread in her gut in a slow-moving ache to every part of her. Her soul feels like it has turned to stone, like she might become a statue as her deceased friend had.
Lilliana's blue eyes linger on what remains before they lift blazing up to the Rook. Was this what she had intended?
lmao have a post where lilliana says absolutely nothing at all
