"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
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
This is what he has learned:
the things that have died do not always stay dead.
(He had been dead, you see, or something like it. There had been a heart in his chest but it did not beat. There had been lungs, too, but they had reeked of decay.)
He has learned, too, that there is nothing more painful than what it means to live again when death has feasted on the things that make you a living thing. He carries it with him, even still, the pain of rot in his joints and the stench of death on his breath.
He smells more of it now than he ever did when he was dead and maybe this is the strangest thing of all. (It was the frost that kept him from ever smell like a dead thing, you see. It preserved the body. He smells out of it now because the breath forces the smell up out of his lungs, the air carves it up out of his chest and this is not something he can help, no matter how sorry he is for it.)
Things have changed in such strange ways, haven’t they?
Because he had been dead and then he had been made whole again and now…
Now what is he?
He can hardly be called whole now, can he?
With the way the fog rolls off him in pale tendrils. And it is not just that it hugs him, no. It is him and he is it. He had awoken one morning to find that the fog had become him and this had made even less sense than emerging from the underworld already dead. There had been no explanation at all for it.
If he were being honest he would have to admit that he is too much of a coward to go looking for the answers.
So he simply wanders, just as he always has. He wanders and the fog follows in his wake and curls away from his body. And he finds that if he does not like the weather, he can change it and it really is that simple for him now.
He finds himself in the meadow now, which seems to be where he always ends up whether he means to or not. He is not seeking anyone out, for he almost never does, but he finds a familiar face anyway. Though the last time he saw her she was very small and he was dead and the heart started out frozen but had thawed with a painful twinge by the time they parted ways.
He goes to her without making the decision to.
“Aela,” he says, remembering how she had pressed the memory into his mind, remembering how she had been unable (or unwilling) to speak then. And he is so different now that he adds, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Kensley, we met once a long time ago.”
08-18-2021, 01:41 PM (This post was last modified: 08-18-2021, 01:42 PM by Aela.)
This is what she has learned: Aela will always be more.
She had been a girl born mute. Her voice had been through the use of memories that often terrorized her. Glimpses of the past that she could never change or alter. (Not all the memories had been horrible, but even as a child, Aela saw things she should have not.) But through her determination and a little borrow magic from Beyza, Aela learned to speak. There had been a stutter at the beginning, but she overcame that, too.
Now when Aela spoke, she gave orders and made commands.
She made deals with devils and bargained with goddesses.
A far cry from the small child who had barely been heard.
Then, the Darkness came with the monsters and Aela learned how to be greater than both. She survived the Eclipse and saw a dawn that many others hadn't lived to see.
Aela has become many things since that first meeting with Kensley, but she had never forgotten the silver stallion. He had been a wonder to her then, a pristine silence in an overwhelmingly loud world. The young girl has grown into her limbs, the slightly too-long neck and odd curves to become something glowing and golden and ethereal. She is familiar with the sensation of being watched, now. She is familiar with the fact that she has grown so beautiful that she is capable of stealing away a breath, of making hearts stop.
He isn't what he was before, but Aela knows who he is beneath the swirling fog and the frost that glistens across his skin. There are glimpses of the live he's lived - about how these changes came about in the years since they've last crossed paths - and when the golden mare tilts her head up to him, her expression is warm with fascination. How different he seems, and yet as he approaches, his face is as familiar to her as Heartfire's. "Kensley," she says in a voice flourishing with pride, appreciating the chance to finally speak the ice-stallion's name. Aela reaches out in greeting and smiles slightly, "there was never any forgetting you."
Kensley had been the first to see her as something more than just a silent girl.
A child that could have been so easily dismissed and overlooked.
"Your heart is still beating?" the palomino asks, glancing at his broad chest. When the gray had come across her thoughts, that was something Aela had often wondered: had he become a ghost again, or had he - like her - become something more?
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
Despite all of the ways he has changed, at the heart of it, he is still the same.
He is still Kensley.
(And who is Kensley? Or, rather, what is Kensley?
A coward, certainly. Afraid and so dreadfully tired, too.
Kind, perhaps. Steadfast. Maybe these are the things she recognizes.
Maybe this is how she knows him, remembers him.
Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with his skin or his face but with the things underneath.)
She speaks, finally, and his expression softens (or does it simply collapse?) around a crooked smile at the sound of her voice. He knows that she would not have always sounded like this. As a child, the voice would have been different, but it doesn’t matter. It is a gift now, just as it would have been a gift then.
But he shakes his head, the long, dark forelock curling around the deep black eye. He is so terribly forgettable, he wants to argue but doesn’t. Nothing at all worth remembering. But something terrific had happened that day, when she had returned to him all of the things he had been so desperately hiding from.
That was worth remembering.
At her question, he follows her gaze down to his chest, as if he might see through it to the cursed muscle inside that insists, again, again, again. And when he meets her gaze again, there is such terrible melancholy in those dark eyes.
“I forgot how painful a thing it is to be alive,” he admits and then smiles again, though it is rueful at its edges. He rolls his shoulders then, because it was a painful thing to be dead, too.
“You found your voice,” he says, such an obvious thing to point out, but he has not forgotten the way she’d been forced to communicate the first time they’d met. Through touch, through memories. “I trust you’ve put it to good use.”
Aela had been afraid of the world when she had first been brought into it.
Perhaps it was because she remembered the crashing waves, the thundering sound of galloping hooves behind her. Maybe she lost her ability (or want to speak) somewhere along that shoreline, or maybe her mother had used her voice to plead so much, the Gods thought it would be fitting that the daughter should be silent.
She remembers very little about those early days (and that she does remember, Aela has to consider how the memories have been elaborated by others). She can't recall quite where Heartfire had stepped in, or how. She doesn't remember how her spotted milkmother became the familiar one while her birthmother started to fade.
But she remembers Kensley, because he had been so calm.
Because in a world that was roiling with emotion and rife with memories, he had been like finding a quiet copse in the wood or a serene spot by a stream. That world had left her chest so tight with emotions and memories that weren't her own, that almost left her gasping, Kensley had been where she had learned to really breathe.
So she means it, when she says there is no forgetting the man and his cool-hearted soul.
"Not too painful, I hope?" Aela asks, thinking that anyone who troubled him should meet the fury of her flames. He smiles, and the young palomino can feel the edges of her gift stirring, wanting to soften the razor edges in his life. She could help with that, if he wished.
(Would he feel it, if she tried harder? The dulling sensation against the sharp pain?)
"Trying to," she continues on, tilting her head to regard (and admire) the changes in him. The way that his mane curled like fog, the way that his dark eyes churned like coming thunderheads. "But you," she says, "you've become a storm."
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
He will not tell her how painful it is because she is still young, young enough to believe in hope and happiness and all of the beautiful things that youth promises the young. He will not be the one to take these things away from her.
And how could he explain these things anyway? How could he tell her all of the dark things he is responsible for?
He deserves the weight of the bitter guilt that sits like a stone in the pit of his gut, he knows that, but there is something like relief to be found in the idea that she does not see him in the only way he should be seen. (Which is: as a failure, a fraud, a coward.)
The act of living should be torture for him, but for the moment he allows himself to believe that he deserves to set it all down for just long enough to catch his breath, to rest his aching muscles, and soothe his weary heart.
“Nothing I can’t manage,” he assures her and smiles still. Has pain not been his only constant companion? Even more than Kennice, his beloved twin. When did he see her last? The pain of missing her has been with him longer than she has, he thinks.
He remembers the way Aela had looked at him some years ago. Plain-eyed, her expression unstirring. She had seemed such a serious child then and he had remembered his own children but had not had the emotional capacity to ache for them. Not until she’d touched him a moment too long and melted the ice that had protected him from all that pain.
She looks at him that way now, appraising, so much gravity for someone so young.
“Yes, I woke one morning to find that my outsides matched my insides,” he jokes, though it comes out flat. It is too close to the truth to be funny. “I still don’t know how it happened.”
She hopes for a future that she will be recognized for what she is: a goddess. She hopes that those who cross her will either recognize her greatness for what it is, or if they choose to remain blind, then they are willing to endure the darkness because that is what Aela will bring down upon them. She had begun as a girl who couldn't speak, who had been so overwhelmed by this world and the memories it still held that it silenced her into fear.
Aela has become so much more than what she originally was.
A girl with bastard beginnings, who had grown up with help from the Mountain.
A girl who had become a woman with not only a voice to be heard, but a power to be felt.
There are very few that Aela would help - not without a price - but Kensley says that he manages. She was at his disposal, if he had need of her. He only had to ask. (But there is a sense of pride for this man that she has thawed out; a sense of kinship that they have both grown into so much more since their last meeting.) The slight smile that she wears is not her usual one - nothing coy or wry - but uncommonly girlish.
What he says - that he woke up one morning different - is a regular occurence in Beqanna, and yet it isn't, because this was Kensley and he never would be ordinary to Aela.
"It suits you," she finally decides, in the that his ice heart never had. He had been the eye of the storm in her world, the first peace she had truly known, but Kensley should have never been forced to keep that all within. Better he let it all out, that the storm within him wreak on others rather than him. "Perhaps you were always meant to be this way," she offers, because to Aela, Kensley was like her.
Destined for better.
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
It chases a laugh out of him, a sound that catches him by surprise, and the force of the breath disturbs the grass underfoot. But it is warm, tinged by grief as it is, and he shakes his head.
“I don’t know about that,” he counters, the furthest corners of his mouth tied up in a sideways kind of smile. Because Kensley had never believed himself destined for much of anything at all, really. Until tragedy had struck and he had understood beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was not meant to live a life dictated by any kind of happiness.
(And yet.
And yet, Anaxarete had frozen his heart because it was the only way she knew how to help him. She had done it because she loved him. Because she herself had ice where her heart ought to be.
And Aela had thawed him without his asking, simply by existing, simply by touching, simply by communicating.
And surely that meant something, though he has not made any real effort to try to puzzle out the meaning. Perhaps it means that there is happiness left for him someplace or perhaps it simply means that he cannot escape the grief that has burdened him for as long as he can remember.)
He glances down at the fog that curls away from his chest and drags in a shuddering breath.
He was never meant to be a powerful thing, Kensley. This is where they differ. She sees in him something he has never seen in himself, never will see in himself, and he shakes his head again but does not speak.
The silence yawns between them for one charged moment before he lifts his gaze back to her and tilts his head, smiling still. “Where did you find your voice?” he asks and there is an undeniable edge of pride in his tone when he asks it.
She prefers the sound of it to the sideways smile that he gives, where grief lingers at its edges. She is an Empath and isn't immune to feeling the weight in his soul; it wears her down as well. The flames beneath her skin flickering, begging to be set free so that might turn those emotions to ash.
But this is Kensley's grief - not hers - and so she quells her fire.
Aela lets him keep him out, as well his insistence that he wasn't meant for greater things. (They all are; her World will be for the Great Ones but she won't argue with the man who had been the spark that started everything.) She comes closer to him, and much like she had done as a girl, reaches out to lightly touch him on his dark muzzle. The palomino isn't entirely sure how to explain the journey that had started in Pangea - first with Straia and then continued on by Beyza - but she offers him a few glimpses into her past.
(There is the former Dominus telling Aela that her voice was within. Heartfire had said the same thing, and there had been countless hours spent between their shared bond as the young filly struggled to vocalize it. And then there had been pale Beyza, helping her to perfect it.)
Pulling away slowly, Aela glances up to the older stallion. He had been in Pangea, just as the White Magician had been.
"Do you know Beyza?"
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
It is the first time he hears her laugh and he savors the sound.
It had been evident the first time he’d met her that she was greater than she seemed. Silence had not suited her and she had found other ways to communicate. It is simply the sort of creature she is, forging her own path when the world tries to tell her that she cannot.
He does not recoil when she reaches for him again, just like she had as a child. Because this is familiar, this he remembers, and he closes his eyes when she touches him. He closes his eyes and relaxes into the memory.
Straia and then the White Magician and it hitches the breath in his throat.
Because there had been the White Magician and then the black magician, too.
Because he had met his granddaughters only once before the White Magician had spirited them away and his son had plunged that stretch of Pangea into darkness.
She draws away from him, asks if he knows the White Magician, but he does not open his eyes. For a time, he remains that way, remembering. Remembering the darkness and the way that all things had changed because of it. He had changed because of it. And he had blamed his son for it. His son and the White Magician.
Finally, he forces his eyes open and smiles, something placid and plain. He smiles and he nods and he says, “yes, I know Beyza.” He, of course, knows the other side of things better, his son, Jamie.
Had he ever actually met the White Magician? It’s hard to remember now, but it does not feel like a lie to say that he knows her. He had seen her plainly in the three beautiful daughters she had brought into the world.
He thinks of them now and, just as she had done to him, he implants the thought in her mind. Neuna, Decima, Maurtia. The Fates that his son and the White Magician had constructed together. And then he swallows, pulling the thought back into his own head. “Beyza is the mother of my granddaughters.”
Thanks to Gale and the memories of others, she knows what he is supposed to look like. He is gold and blue, like her. They even share a familial smile, one that curves toward ruin. But that is all they ever shared; they never had a quiet moment like the one she shares with Kensley. Brushing her pale muzzle against his is comforting and it makes her think of all the still nights that she had in Pangea.
The only place that she has ever considered as home.
That feeling returns as she stands next Kensley, sharing the memories of her past and catching glimpses of his. Beyza lights up between them (a friend, the Empath realizes; she might have one in the White Magician) until they grow dark and hazy. There is another in their shared visions and recognization bristles against Aela's mind. The black stallion is familiar. Rumor said that he had been the one to bring the Eternal Night and the one who beckoned forth shadow monsters. He had gained more fame by serving as Pangea's champion and there is a new appreciation for Jamie when she opens her blue eyes.
Would he still say that he wasn't meant for great things, when even the blood that flowed from him wrought great changes?
She lingers close, and her slender head tilts towards his, sensing that Kensley still had more to share. There is: not only had he known Beyza from Pangea, but she is the mother to his granddaughters. To three girls - (Aela recognizes the Magic in that number - a beginning, middle, and end); three children of the White Magician and the Nightmaker. Perhaps one might come to Aela's Pampas, where those who resided were making renown as the most beautiful and powerful horses in Beqanna.
Kensley's visions recede like a tide, and Aela braces for the emptiness; filling it with possibilities and plans instead, focusing on committing the images of the three Fates to mind for later.
"Is she still in Pangea?" Aela asks, though the same thought that comes is the same for Beyza as it is for Kensley. "It's been years."
They doused your soul in water, but the flames raged higher. And they called you devil's daughter, such a pretty liar.
