"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
There has been rumors and whisperings of a place to the north, a place home to shifters and their kind. A place he wondered if now housed Spirit and Maze. They were like him, he recalls - young and eager to learn. But that was so long ago now, and things had changed. Still though, there might be a chance that he could find a home there too?
Only one way to find out, he had resolved, and so had begun his journey.
He’d ended up closer to the edge of Beqanna where the sun slid beneath the horizon. Nerve blamed it on the storms and the dark and not the terrible sense of direction he possessed. Anything but that. And really heought to have shifted into something useful like a bird or a canine of some type, but instead he had chosen to be a hare initially. That was also a poor choice, all things considered - for a few different reasons.
Perhaps he wasn’t as grown up as he had originally thought.
Another good reason to seek help in Hyaline.
He was too tired to do much of anything then though, concluding that he’d have to wait awhile again before he’d be able to shift. So for the time being, he’s nothing more than a simple black stallion with peculiar violet eyes.
The threat of boredom loomed closer and closer, until someone’s voice nearby had him peering through the scrubby foliage to watch as a blue mare did something....different. “Where’d ya learn how to do that?” Nerve asked, revealing himself from the canvas of leaves, “And, uh, just for the sake of clarity....what was that exactly?”
Ohh, Ionia was always lost. That’s the way she liked things all the time, a bit silly and pointless. ‘Cept these days, she had a little bugger literally buggin’ the shit out of her everywhere she ended up. What could she say? You get drunk off berries and end up in Pangea once, and your eternal punishment is some critter following you around, houndin’ you about how you “killed their father” on a hungover bender. And then, to top things off, the sun went and died.
Just up and POOF! Gone! All black all the time, which put a real damp’ner on her party plans. Or… her plans to party. Indefinitely. Like, what the hell was she supposed to do now that everyone was all freakin’ out and now that there were monsters and whatnot coming around, messin’ up things? Hell, it reminded her of the plague stories from when she was a girl.
Damn Beqanna, always going and messin’ things up with radical nonsense.
...never listen to me! Ionia heard the tiny, high-pitched voice of her companion animal as it clung desperately to a knot in her mane. She was busy walking and thinkin’, so whatever he’d been naggin’ her about had gone swoop right over her pretty little head. She groaned and a gust of jet-fire came blowing of her mouth, lighting up the shadows and catching the tail-end of some nasty creature as it chittered and slunk off toward the darker nether regions of this already desolate world.
“Oh. My. Gawds. Would ya shut UP?!” She berated the freaky little bug, whippin’ her head around to take another snap at it with her teeth. The insect-scorpion thing narrowly avoided the attack, scramblin’ out of the way at the last second with an irritated stream of insect-scorpion curses. She’d told it so many times to get lost! But it kept on buggin’ her, sayin’ that it wouldn’t let her rest until it’d gotten revenge for it’s father, who Ionia had burnt to a crisp a while ago. With the way things were goin’ between the two, it looked like the little pesky thing would gets its way.
“WHY. ARE. YOU. SUCH. A. DRAAAAAG!” She screamed, lighting up the sky and surrounding area with some heavy flame-throwing skills. The sparkle of fire came directly from her mouth and had some pretty impressive range, if she had the say-so herself. She just wished it wasn’t because she was irritated half to death.
Fuming, Ionia stomped her hoof like a petulant child and closed her eyes, takin’ a deeeeeeeep breath to try and get herself under control, and that’s when another horse popped out of the bushes takin’ both her and her little companion by surprise. Ayeee! It squealed like an Ewok from that Star film she’d never heard of before or seen, because this was Beqanna and Star Wars didn’t exist. Ionia backed up with a, “Woah woah!” That spurted out a little more flame from the excitement.
“Okay first of all: you scared the shit outta me. Second of all… do what, exactly? Breath fire? Scream into the void?” She asked the stranger, trying to steady her racing pulse. Damn he’d come outta nowhere! What was wrong with people out here! Didn’t he know there was a freakin’ apocalypse going on or something??
No wonder she and her little passenger had freaked out (at least he thought the little insect dude was startled, he couldn’t really tell from his view point). That might’ve been his fault. Maybe because it was dark, and he was also black in coloring naturally, and he might not have eased into the conversation like a gentleman would do per se. He supposed announcing himself quietly versus popping out of the bushes loudly could have been the better choice. Yeah, looking back on this later he’d realized that was a very bad mistake (just another tally to the list of mistakes for the day), but hey, at least he learned a little lesson here.
Probably.
“Look, I’m sor- OH SHIT,” he yelled, ducking as she spurt out a little more fireworks that bedazzled her own series of Woah’s. “I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY!” , he tried again, believing that she was reprimanding him for his unfortunate and poorly timed entrance. Nerve didn’t open his eyes again until she had continued on, mentioning him scaring her and asking exactly what he had been referring to. Well, actually he had only dared open one eye, and didn’t open the other until his heart had stopped trying to fly from his chest. But then he opened the other...once he thought he was safe. Which didn’t take all that long.
Probably.
“I don’t know, I don’t know what any of that was. That’s why I was asking!” he lamented, finally raising his head enough to get a clearer view of her and her hitch hiker now that the imprint of bright, blinding flames had faded from his eyes.
A shift in the wind brings the scent of something burning nearby, though nothing appeared to be alight in their near vicinity. “Hey,” he questioned, wondering if he might be losing it for real this time, “Do you smell something burning?” Little did he know that a wee part of his mane had caught one of the sparks of flames, but he’d surely find out about that soon enough and put it out in a timely manner.
