"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
Sickle thinks she knows exactly where Malik is but she is not yet brave enough to go there. Not when everyone else seems to have forgotten her brother is missing in the first place, not when she seems to be the only one who remembers he had been there at all. It’ll be up to her to get him, then, but it is no simple thing to cross the mountains and walk into the place where she met her dad.
(Where she had died, but Sickle does not know how she has also seen time and memory been altered around her in different ways.)
So she searches for other things, other signs that someone else has seen him. And when that fails she goes to find something familiar, needing it.
She is flanked by her mother’s companion - Malou only has one foal to watch over now, after all - and through the trees they are followed by her own. A panther and a phoenix following the yearling with flowers in her mouth, who flickers between shapes and animals and colours because of her agitation and grief.
It takes her a few tries but she finds the pond she remembers swimming in, a muffled and quiet “Asterope?” rising into the morning air. She is suddenly worried that the filly she had met here no longer exists either as she places the tropical flowers she’s brought as a gift on the surface of the pond and then lays down at the edge as an iridescent blue fawn and waits.
How long does it take for solitude to drive one mad?
Asterope surely must be halfway there.
An injured elk had staggered to the edge of the pond and there had been some vicious yearning in her chest to help it (something in her that said she could help it), but it had bolted as soon as she’d reached for it and she’d slipped beneath the water’s edge and had not surfaced for weeks.
Or was it months?
She stays below so long that the fish no longer fear her, but instead come to rest in the tangles of her mane and her tail. And she wishes she could speak to them, find some comfort in their company, but she sings to them beneath the water’s glass-still surface and they do not seem to understand.
She is tucked away in a grove of weeds when a ripple finds her. She watches it from below. No doubt another woodland creature come to soothe their parched throat, she thinks, and stays beneath.
But then she hears it. Her name is like a rumor from above and her heart stutters, stammers, twinges, and she moves slow, careful for the thin line between water and air.
First it is only the eyes that break the surface and she sees that it is only a woodland creature curled up there at the edge of the water. But there is something different about this animal and she remembers the color, the same color of an otter-turned-filly who’d found her once.
Her gaze flits heavy between the deer and the flowers as the rest of her surfaces and, finally, she grins.
“Sickle?”
these who are shaking
Drops of dew from their hair
The fawn’s eyes remain fixed on the surface of the pond, darting around to make sure there is not a single spot where she could miss her friend’s arrival. In between a blink, eyes appear just at the surface and Sickle’s head rises up - completely alert. The teal Asterope then rises out of the water and Sickle feels such an overwhelming sense of relief that a few tears shine in her eyes.
It is a silly thing to cry over, but the knowledge that the pond nymph is just as real as her memories had told her meant everything - and must mean that Malik is real as well. Off in the mountains far from her side, but real. Malou the panther settles down somewhere in the treeline and her phoenix companion perches on a branch overhead.
“I was worried I dreamed you up.” She admits quietly, rapidly blinking away those troublesome tears as she shifts (accidentally) from a fawn to a fox and finally to a filly lying beside the pond.
Her gaze moves to the flowers that float around the other girl, a variety of tropical blossoms in a rainbow of colours. They seem brighter here than they had in Tephra, but also lonelier away from the world they had been taken from.
Sickle finds this thought uncomfortable so she gestures to them, and her smile grows a little more as she starts to talk again. “They’re from the jungle where I live.”
What would it mean to be a dream?
Perhaps they are both dreaming.
Perhaps someday she, too, will wake to find that she is free and the wings that lie heavy and useless against her sides, that weigh her down in the depths, are meant for more than burdening her with the knowledge that she will never be able to put them to use.
In the waking world she could have convinced herself that the tears in the fawn’s eyes were a mere trick of the light, but there is hardly any light at all here save for the soft glow they both emit. It is no trick of the light and she swims closer still, careful not to disturb the flowers. Close enough to lay her chin on the soft earth, close enough that she might lend the fawn-fox-filly some comfort.
“I’m here,” she whispers. “As long as you’re here, I’m here.”
A strange thing to say, no doubt. A thing that neither confirms nor denies her existence. But she thinks it’d be all right if she only existed in Sickle’s mind. Even if it’s lonely. (And she is so terribly lonely.)
The flowers.
The nymph turns her attention from the edge of the pond, back to the flowers, and smiles. They are unlike anything she has ever seen. She had been born someplace dark and then marched into the darkness. These colors are rich, vibrant. They are the color of real things. She reaches out to gently touch them.
She means to thank her friend for this gift and the way that it has reawakened something in her heart (which has begun to turn to stone, she thinks), but something else comes out when she opens her mouth.
“What is a jungle?”
these who are shaking
Drops of dew from their hair
The filly with her soft, iridescent glow tilts her head and gives Asterope a smile when their heads are laying near each other on the soft ground that borders the pond. The relieved tears do not clear up and she doesn’t know what to say in response - but she finds the words she’s given to be comforting. They’re both as real as each other, and that’s enough.
Even if some days, Sickle isn’t sure what she is - and maybe that means she isn’t real at all.
But the flowers are an easier topic to talk of, even if they look lonely as her friend here in this pond, and at Asterope’s question a small smile spreads. She lifts her head again, feeling a piece of her heart steel itself so she will not continue to cry.
Her gaze drifts upwards, to take in Asterope’s world - trying to find a way to explain something outside of it. “It’s kind of like this forest, but everything is more vivid. And it’s warm all year so the trees are always green.” Sickle describes the thick leaves and how every inch of the forest seems to be filled with life. She tells Asterope about the waterfall, and the clear waters that run from it into the wide expanse of the ocean. The colours she talks about play across her coat in brindled streaks, aiding the visual.
“You'd like it, I think.” She adds finally, some sadness seeping in. She can only bring the jungle to Asterope in pieces, she cannot bring her friend there - where she could float in crystal clear waters bordered by flowers and have more visitors than she would here.
She could have touched her, she thinks.
Could have reached right out and grazed her nose and she wonders if Sickle would have recoiled, if she would have skittered away into the darkness of the forest and left her alone again.
Perhaps it is this she craves the most: touch.
Even more than company.
But the thought passes just as quickly as she shifts her focus to the flowers floating on the surface of the pond and she is consumed instead by the warmth of the idea of friendship.
She had existed, for a moment, outside of this darkness. Sickle had thought of her in her jungle, so far away, plucked these flowers from their homes and brought them here to her. And Asterope is undeserving of such kindness but she loves them deeply and she does not know how to preserve flowers and she will mourn them when the petals come free from the stem and sink to the bottom of the pond. But for now they are beautiful and they are hers and her friend thought of her, thought she would like them, and she carried them all this way for her.
For the moment, she is not lonely.
And Asterope listens to what it means to be a jungle, how it’s like the forest except more vivid, and she turns her own gaze to the canopy overhead. Dark, drab. Sometimes bright birds come to rest in the boughs over the pond but they never stay long and they are the only color she ever sees and she shows them her wings but they never seem interested.
She smiles.
“How did you come to live there?” she asks, eyes shining, as if there is any chance at all that she might someday have any hope of living there, too.
these who are shaking
Drops of dew from their hair
Sickle’s eyes drift upwards to the canopy as well, but she is thinking of whether she could tear away some of those branches and create more light. Her mind fills with ideas - like how maybe next time, she’ll steal a young plant from Tephra. She’d accidentally uprooted one before and she thinks she could do it again. That way it could grow here and Asterope would always have a piece of the jungle with her.
It doesn’t occur to this young girl yet that maybe there is a reason why plants in Tephra do not grow everywhere else - but it is a nice dream to have all the same. And gives her an excuse to come back.
Asterope's question is an easy one to answer, but unfortunately offers no ideas on how the nymph might be able to join Sickle in the jungle. “Oh, I was born there.” It is easy for her to believe this to be true, all her earliest memories are of the jungle and the trio of herself, Wishbone, and Malik. The way they played and their laughter filled the humid jungle up. There is no recollection of how it had actually been another land, and how a white mare had led the twins into Tephra before leaving them there.
Realizing she'd used I instead of we, she corrects herself. “Well, my brother and I were.” Sickle’s smile fades away again as she thinks about Malik and she wants to slip into the water - wants to sink down and see if her worries will fade away with the light. But this feels like an intrusion, even though Asterope had welcomed her in once. This is her friend’s home - what right did she have to poke around and explore?
So instead she just stretches out one of her legs to splash the surface when she asks “Do you have any siblings?”
Asterope had been born in the darkness and then led into more darkness by a father who seemed made of the darkness. Her gaze falls heavy on the flowers and her heart spasms and she reaches for one, touches it gently with her nose, thinks maybe it will fill her with color, too.
Sickle is her most treasured friend, she thinks. And not only because she is the only friend who has ever bought her gifts. But because she is the only friend who has ever stayed. The only friend who has ever come back. The only friend who has spoken freely, candidly. The only friend who has ever acted as a salve for the great loneliness that lives inside her.
And she knows that the colors of the flowers will wilt and fade and be lost to the sediment at the bottom of the pond, but she will remember them always.
She shifts her focus back to her friend at the mention of a brother and notes the shifting of her expression. She knows it well, the sadness. The kind of specific grief that goes along with losing a sibling. So she finally reaches out to touch her, bumping her knee gently when she extends a coltish limb into the water.
She looks at her a long moment and says, “I have two sisters.” And in this, she hopes that Sickle understands that what she really means is, I know, I know, I know. She knows what it means to love and lose. Because it must go without saying that she has not seen her sisters since they were taken from her one at a time, marched away into the darkness until she was the only one left.
“What happened to him?” she asks quietly, an invitation for Sickle to trust her with her grief.
these who are shaking
Drops of dew from their hair
Sickle manages a small smile when Asterope touches her knee, appreciating the comfort that the touch provides. It is in the iridescent girl’s nature to find solace in the touches of others. Her mom had held her when she had returned from Hyaline and that was how she had known that things would be okay.
Two sisters her friend tells her and Sickle can already feel her heart breaking. Twice the loss.
Who held Asterope when she was sad?
Her friend invites her to share her grief, so Sickle does. “He was stolen. Our dad is…” But no words Sickle can use to describe her father feel accurate. A monster might be too strong because she knew the curse wasn't his fault and ‘not too nice’ is putting things mildly. He scared her, made her feel younger than she was. “He lives in another kingdom across the world. He took me away there when I was younger but gave me back... and then he took Malik instead.” Sickle inhales a shaky breath, and her eyes shift to the floating flowers as she crumbles and her voice grows quieter as she continues, telling Asterope her truth. “Sometimes I wonder if I had been stronger or better, our dad would’ve kept me and then Malik would still be safe in the jungle.”
Her head droops until it rests on the edge of the pond again and she lets this failure of hers wash over her.
In the near-silence of this spot in the forest, she returns the invitation to share grief. “Where are your sisters, Asterope?” Sickle asks in a voice so small it barely disturbs the surface of the water where she has rested her head - her eyes shining with tears but remaining focused on her friend.
09-10-2021, 01:30 PM (This post was last modified: 09-10-2021, 01:31 PM by asterope.)
Are they all awful?
The fathers of Beqanna.
She has begun to go mad with her loneliness, but she understands that this is a thing that binds the two of them. And she will tuck Sickle’s heart into the empty space beside her heart and she will keep it safe. She will hold this truth fast and hard between her teeth.
There is nothing she can do to help her, she knows. She cannot march into the wilds of Beqanna and find him, neither the father nor the brother, but she can keep the heart safe.
This is a thing worth being sorry for: the separation of young siblings.
(She knows because sometimes she misses the sisters so desperately that she can barely breathe around it, even if she can hardly remember them at all.)
And so she is sorry but she doesn’t know how to say as much. So she just goes on touching the knee gently, peering up at her friend with soft eyes.
Perhaps it will mean something that Asterope will always be in the last place Sickle left her and there is some consolation in knowing this.
They are too young to be so introspective, the girls at the edge of the pond, but the nymph shakes her head and says, “you can’t blame yourself.” It is too heavy a burden to bear for someone so young and she has come to find that things have a tendency to play out exactly as they were meant to, though she does not know how to explain this.
“You don’t know that he’s not happy wherever he is, right?” she asks and means for it to be encouraging, comforting, if only because she likes to imagine that the sisters are happy wherever they are.
And where are they?
She shakes her head again and admits, “I don’t know. Our father took them first and came for me last, but I like to think they’re happy, too.”
Happy like perhaps Sickle’s brother is happy.
these who are shaking
Drops of dew from their hair
