"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
Starsonder had not adjusted to the darkness. Most days (could they even call them that anymore?) she stays close to the volcano for the comforting light it provided. She never strays far from the threads of lava that weave across her homeland and the safety they give her. For when she falls asleep, and all is darkness again, she trembles to remember...
No. She won't.
She remembers the devils enough unbidden. She doesn't let her mind wander over such terrible things when she has command over her thoughts. They hadn't returned after that one incident, so she told herself there was nothing to worry about - as long as she didn't leave the warm glow and warmth of orange rivers, that was.
But she shakes her head, clearing it of such thoughts, and desperately looks around her for a distraction. Her ears press forward as she spots an approaching creature, a stallion she thinks, and the girl lets out a light call to hopefully draw him into the light she savors.
Hearts will never be practical, until they can be unbreakable. (But I still want one.)
The Tin Man didn't like the recent shift in natural laws; darkness had fallen, and most importantly, it hadn't been interrupted by daytime. He may have adjusted to the dim light physically, and he enjoyed not being too visible with his white-on-black spots--but nighttime meant predators, and the things that came with the darkness certainly FELT like them. Moreover, his nomadic nature meant he'd been largely lacking in other horses to watch out for him when he took a break.
On the other hand, he also remembered that he'd never liked Tephra that much, either. While the weather was warm and the grass was green and thick, the earth had rivers of itself as well as water--hot, red, and almost liquid. They smelled like fire, and without any magic to keep burns off, he tried to keep away from them.
Another horse's soft call startled him amidst the hissing steam and bubbling lava. "Oh. Hi!"
It sounded like a mare, and the silhouette was certainly horse-shaped, but with the earth and the water's noises constantly in the background, he wasn't quite sure.
The vague horse-shape in the darkness seems startled into stillness by her call. But soon it echoes her greeting in a way that's friendly enough way to convince her he is not a lurking monster, as she had already guessed. Even so, the voice of the stallion is an unfamiliar one. But this raises no alarm in her mind, as she had not met most of Tephra's residents, and she makes the assumption he is one of them. The was hardly a time to be traveling the world. Although she had spent the majority of her young life here, she had not often looked beyond her family for companionship.
There is a brief pause, and in the silence, the apricot filly thinks of how in the times before she would have covered the distance between them with a smile. But now, she is unwilling to leave the warmth and light of the lava and instead calls out again.
"I'm Starsonder," she says, hoping the sound of her vice with ease away any of the uneasiness he may be feeling, as the sound of his had for her. "What's your name?"
04-21-2021, 03:20 PM (This post was last modified: 05-31-2021, 03:11 PM by The Tin Man.)
@ [Starsonder]
Hearts will never be practical, until they can be unbreakable. (But I still want one.)
Yep, it was a mare.
"I'm Tin Man," he says, maneuvering around the lava and its warm steam. He could just make out her coat, a pink-toned orange with splashed white on her legs and stomach. She seemed as mundane as he was, considering the magic in Beqanna--no extra limbs or anything. No extra limbs yet, he reminded himself; she could be a shapeshifter, after all.
"Are you one of the Tephra herd? I'm one of the nomads. I don't come here a lot, but Tephra has some perks for our... uh... situation." A quick tap of his hoof on the earth.
"Hello, Tin Man." She looks at him with a pleasant expression, overly formal in compensation for the uneasiness she finds creeping back. It is nothing he does that contributes to this feeling, simply her inexperience and the state of collapse that she found the world in every morning.
She hadn't interacted with many adults outside of her family group in her almost three years of life, but he seems friendly enough, and she tries her best to be polite. She tries to feel the way she felt about meeting strangers before the world went dark. But it's a feat that's easier thought than executed, and she is relieved when he asks a question to fill what threaded to be an awkward silence.
"I am," she confirms, "My family lives here, my uncle is the leader. I'm sure you would be welcome to stay if you like it here." Her brow furrows as she realizes maybe she has made a mistake, she looks a little closer at him through the half-dark. "But you are a nomad? So do you choose to wander instead of calling a land home?"
05-31-2021, 07:02 PM (This post was last modified: 05-31-2021, 07:03 PM by The Tin Man.)
Hearts will never be practical, until they can be unbreakable. (But I still want one.)
"Yeah, but it's not like I got kicked out of a herd; that would assume I joined one to start with. I started living in Loess a while back, but... it didn't really stick, I think." It didn't help that his most vivid memories were of the plague hitting, and the lizard who gave him the sickness, which rattled him more than he liked and hammered home his natural instincts to move, move, move.
Her offer to stay surprises him, though he's too used to roaming yet to decide. It DOES pull at him, though, especially with the darkness hitting for so long. His old life with humans is starting to fade, bits and pieces shaking loose--but he knows they are mid-sized predators, who get hunted by larger creatures as often as they went hunting for deer or rabbits. They can't see in the dark, stumbling around for a few minutes before their eyes adjusted (and still not well, with how his owner squinted and kept a hand in his mane for reassurance)--but they also had all sorts of fires to help. "I wasn't born in Beqanna; I washed up here from the outside."
It surprises him to say that out loud; he's never done so on his own accord. As far as he remembered, native horses mostly remarked on how unused to magic he'd first been, how obvious it was that he'd come from the outside, but everyone thankfully seemed neutral about it. Everyone needs to keep the gene pool fresh, after all.
"I was from... eh, never mind." A paw at the ground. "I can't really remember." It's half-true, for the specifics would need to be jogged again--he remembers a place called California, the northern half with warm summers and cold, rainy winters. But that was as useful as saying "I had a good pasture and other horses around."
