"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
07-31-2021, 06:00 PM (This post was last modified: 07-31-2021, 06:03 PM by Radiance.)
R A D I A N C E
She should have reveled in the eclipse, but she had not.
To see Beqanna plunged into the same darkness she was always reaching for should have been a delightful thing; she should have been thrilled at the chance for the world to witness how lovely the darkness could be. The way it pulsed and throbbed, like an entity with countless heartbeats, searching for those that knew how to bend and mold it. To show them how even though the dark was rightfully something to be afraid of it was also something to be admired and celebrated.
She should have been pleased at this chance to show them all the things she could coax the shadows into doing; how she could be the moon and they the tide, a delicate balance of pushing and pulling.
Instead, she had been jealous.
To see the way the shadows crawled so intimately across the shoulders of everyone, twisting and coiling in a way she was all too familiar caused her skin to prick with irritation. Especially since so many of them didn’t even appreciate it. So many just kept complaining about the sun, lamenting its absence and begging for its return. It was irritating enough that soon she found herself also wishing that the sun would come back, since clearly the general population was too weak to handle it, and her patience was worn entirely too thin.
She breathed a sigh of relief when the sun finally rose again, and once again, the shadows could belong to those that actually loved them.
It is daylight now when she lingers at the edge of the meadow. An overcast day, with the air smelling of rain and only the faintest, watery streams of light managing to break beyond the cloud cover. Radiance has brought with her a thin veil of darkness from when she was in the forest, a smoky cloak of shadows that billow at her feet and up her sides as she walks through the lush grasses and blossoming flowers. She gives her surroundings a cursory glance, flitting over the various faces, but largely ignoring them.
It is a golden figure in the distance that causes her to pause, coming to a standstill and tilting her delicate head. There is something about her that is familiar—the way that she carries herself when she walks, a magnetic pull that draws eyes to her without really having to try. Radiance closes the space between them, and it is once she finds the striking blue of her eyes that the name is there on her tongue, recalled as if they had just spoken days before rather than years: “Aela.” There is a smile curving across her mouth, though it is subtle and mostly guarded. “What a pleasant surprise.”
and every day is like a battle but every night with us is like a dream
08-06-2021, 08:26 PM (This post was last modified: 08-06-2021, 08:36 PM by Aela.)
YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela wasn't able to break the darkness. When the Eclipse had blanketed all of Beqanna, the golden girl had stubbornly held her glow. In the early days of the Endless Night, Aela shined and illuminated and glowed because there is nothing in her that will yield to anything but her own desires. It hadn't taken her long to learn that it was her light that drew the monsters and it didn't take her long to learn that what they were - what they really were - was shadows of their former souls.
And there had been a part of the palomino that enjoyed dismantling them, taking them apart emotion by each separate thread of emotion because they had tried to steal her shine.
She hadn't been able to break the darkness. Aela didn't have the ability to bend it or shift it to her will. But it had taught her to feel, to scour deeper through the shadows than she ever had before. She had challenged the monsters and the limits of her Magic and now, with the sunlight warm on her gilded back, the Pampas mare felt she was beginning to reap the rewards of that understanding. There was more (there was always more with Aela) and as the palomino gracefully maneuvered through the crowds of horses, she could sense all the various emotions radiating from them.
It would be better - easier - to keep her distance from the others but Aela is always pushing herself. She wants to understand her own limits as much as she wants to know the limits of others. The laws of Magic have always been intriguing and so the slender mare moves past them. There is a sense of anger from one - a rush of anxiety from another - and Aela takes a quicker step than she otherwise might.
Until a familiar face draws her attention.
"Radiance," Aela murmurs to her counterpart, equally surprised to see the gold sabino here, wondering if she might be equally surprised to hear her speak. She eyes the shadows curling from her skin, billowing from her like smoke with slight admiration. The blaze beneath her skin burns, eager for a chance to smolder against the darkness. Her blue eyes brighten with curiosity and her smile curves slightly. "What brings you out of the shadows?"
There is a flicker of surprise on her gold-shielded face when Aela actually speaks her response, having been mentally preparing for that unsettling intrusion into her mind, like the last time they encountered one another. It was one of those things Radiance couldn’t ever quite decide how she had felt about it. On the one hand, she was fascinated by it, and she couldn’t help but to wonder what it would be like to have such a gift herself. On the other hand, she did not like anything being used on her that made her feel invaded, which lent an overall feeling of dislike when she thought of it.
“It seems some things have changed since I last saw you,” she offers, her direct way of speaking seeming to sharpen what was actually a curious observation. But there is a smile still on her lips, wispy as the tendril of shadows she controls. She doesn’t really like many others, often finding them tedious and boring, but she does find Aela appealing. She reaches for her with a single ribbon of shadow, as if her darkness might be able to see all the changes better than her own eyes.
It hovers for a moment, suspended near the other mare’s face, before it withdraws and returns to the bed of roiling shadows at her feet. “The light, actually,” she says in response to Aela’s question. “Would you believe that I almost missed it during the eclipse?” She punctuates the question with a laugh and an almost incredulous shake of her head. “Everyone seems different, so I suppose I’m just taking the time to discover what those differences are.”
hot and fast and angry as she can be i walk my days on a wire
08-29-2021, 01:22 PM (This post was last modified: 08-29-2021, 01:27 PM by Aela.)
YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
As a girl, she had never considered how her echoes might have been perceived as invasive. Others spoke to her - addressed her with their voices - and since Aela had none, she responded the only way she knew how. With borrowed memories and mental pictures, trying to project what she might have said. It was her only way of communicating.
Why should she have to apologize for it?
Aela will never apologize for anything. She is too proud. There is nothing within her that she has learned to be sorry for. "Some," Aela muses back to the black-and-gold female. An evasive answer to Radiance's direct observation. Her light tone is an obvious confirmation of what the other mare was speaking of. There are others as well: they are both older. They had both grown into their legs and their coats, their flowing manes, and tails. There was nothing left of the girls that had once crossed paths, just a lingering memory surrounding the two much as Radiance's shadows did.
Her blue eyes linger on the gold-edging of the sabino, admiring the way that she glinted in the sun. She had grown to be rather lovely.
But the shadow that comes trailing from Radiance makes the palomino lift her head speculatively, watching as it continued to come closer. It reminded her of something that Skandar might do, the way that he often played with other shapes and forms when he took them. The way that magma cooled and dripped from his strong jaw. The way he could become a monster - like those during the Eclipse - and use that wispy shape to fade into the shadows.
Could Radiance do something similar? (And it makes her wonder what else she could do with those swarming shadows?)
"You know," she reveals to her companion, sharing a similar mindset with the other mare. "I didn't really mind it being gone." The sun beams down from above, breaking through the trees. Despite the darkness during that time, "It seemed to wake everybody up." She didn't particularly care for the monsters, just another obstacle in her path to greatness. But they had gone with the return of the sun, with (if rumors were true) only a few remaining in the deepest and darkest parts of Beqanna.
"Some things are the same," Aela said, giving a graceful shrug of her shoulders. The sun has returned to rising and falling, the autumn had brought the return of mindless fucking, and come spring, the consequences would be crying out for their mothers. She glances back down at the shadows stirring at Radiance's hooves and Aela decides to bring a little light to their conversation, sparking a small flame near her own; curious as to how the two magics might interact. She glances up, watching the sabino's reaction with a wry smile. "Some things are new."
“Fear has a way of waking you up,” she says, thinking back to the way everyone had reacted to the eclipse. There had been confusion at first, as everyone waited for the darkness to pass. The confusion had quickly given way to a wide-spread anxiety, followed by fear once the creatures that lurked in the dark were discovered. Radiance cannot say that she had been afraid, exactly. A part of her was still too arrogant to think anything could happen to her—that overconfidence and sense of immortality all youth seemed to possess. “And it seems like everyone is afraid of the dark.”
She watches Aela watching her shadows, and she cannot deny the flicker of pride that warms in her chest. She liked when her shadows were appreciated, when they held someone’s attention even for a moment. And when Aela sparks a flame at her feet there is only a flicker of surprise, and then admiration in her own dark eyes.
The way her shadows curls away from the light of the flame reminds her that she has her own light, that of which she rarely uses. Her beams of light that could cut through most anything, but Radiance so preferred the dark that she hardly ever called upon it. The shadows on the ground eventually settle, though, letting the light of the flame waver against it, and Radiance meets her companions gaze with a knowing smile, “You were not afraid in the dark, were you, Aela?”
and every day is like a battle but every night with us is like a dream
Her nostrils flared slightly, and the palomino couldn't help the wry smile that curled against her pale lips. It was her favorite emotion; the easiest one to summon and to wield against another. When she only had her Echoes, the memories of what others were afraid of were the easiest for Aela to command and press into minds. It was how she learned that the emotion could carve away all the others so smoothly, and as she has gotten older, her Empathic abilities had grown stronger. Now, it wasn't only the memory of what they feared that Aela could project into them; she could become Fear itself.
For someone who was on the path for divinity, she found those interactions the most exhilarating.
She glances up from Radiance's shadows as the sabino continues to speak about the Eclipse and the darkness that so many others were afraid of. The golden woman peers to the other from beneath her flaxen forelock and tilts her lovely face towards the tri-colored mare. Aela surprises herself by genuinely laughing - something that she doesn't do often - and answers evasively, "I had to learn to be scarier than the monsters." She admits and watches the way that her fires flicker against Radiance's settling shadows, an almost perfect balance of light and dark.
"And what about you?" Aela asks after the shadow-weaver, still smiling coyly. Her admiration for her companion's ability - to command the fearsome Dark itself - lingered as she looked down again where their two powers of flame and shadow intermingled.
Aela’s laugh inspires a smile of her own, something that is strangely open and almost inviting in comparison to the guarded way she often behaved around others. She would not go so far as to say she trusted Aela—she saw too many things in the other mare that mirrored herself, and she would never advise anyone to trust her, either. But she did enjoy her company, which was more than she could say for just about anyone else. “And I’m sure you can be terrifying,” she says, and though her tone is light-hearted, nearly teasing, she means every word of it.
She knows Aela is someone she would rather have on her side than to go against, but she wonders if Aela knows that she should think the same of her.
That there is more to her than her ability to weave and bend the shadows, though they are things that she still keeps close to her chest. She is sure no one would be surprised to know that someone with such an affinity for the dark would harbor their own internal darkness, but it still was not something she put on display, hiding it behind pretty smiles and magic tricks.
But something about Aela made her want to show her more. Perhaps because she is a pretty girl and Radiance is not immune to pretty things, a weakness she did not like to admit that she has.
“No, I am not afraid of the dark because I can control it,” she says calmly in response to her question, and those small tendrils of shadow winding their way upward in the space between them. She feeds them as they go, until they are no longer ribbons but rather a roiling cloud that hovers above their heads. She tilts her head, watching her creation as it shifts and churns with a thoughtful expression. Her eyes turn back to Aela, her own coy smile curving across her lips. She sends up a beam of light, the bright white of it piercing the shadows like a dagger, letting the dark bleed down around it until both the dark and the light disappear. “And because I can get rid of it just as quickly,” she adds with a satisfied smile and a slight shrug of her shoulders.
and every day is like a battle but every night with us is like a dream
