"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
Her mother had always told her to listen to the animals. It had never made sense as a child - Oceane was the one who could speak to wildlife; she hadn't inherited that ability. But Oceane stood by her words, had taught Lillibet to listen to the casual chirp of the birds and the quiet rustling of the rodents who had made Loess their home. Usually, such noises sat in the background of her thoughts. They rarely drew much attention, except for in their absence.
It was much the same in Sylva; she'd learned to listen to the natural noises of their perpetually golden forest. She had set out to explore that morning, just the same as usual, with the intention of finding something unfamiliar in the depths of her home. Lillibet had seen much (if not all) of the territory, but the young adult always held high hopes that she would find something new as she wandered.
At first, the ethereal woman couldn't place exactly what it was, but something felt off. When she finally realized what it was, she immediately felt unsafe in the Sylvan forest.
Everything was silent. The animals were no longer speaking.
Lillibet had tried to find her family, but they were nowhere to be found. Her self-preservation forced her to leave without having found them, and now the sickness of her abandonment sits like acid in the pit of her stomach. The forest sits quiet all around her, the aftermath of the earthquake finally settling back into the depths of the earth.
In her shock, she stares blankly into the empty spaces between the tree trunks. Unmoving. Uncertain. When the familiar form of Herrin meanders into her periphery, Lillibet doesn't make direct eye contact with him, but doesn't fail to acknowledge his presence. “It's gone.”
Her amber eyes finally turn to look at him, brow furrowed in ill-hidden panic. “Your creek. It's gone.”
I do not want to move mountains;
I want the mountains to see me coming
and to crumble.
------H E R R I N in short:-------------------------------------------------- all good things are wild and free
A night spent darting between the stars had left Herrin exhausted come dawn. Curled in the dark hollows of a lightning struck elm, the spotted bat is startled from a deep sleep by the rumbling in the earth.
He flies upward, small wings beating rapidly, rising into the bright sky. He feels vulnerable at this size and so flies higher, hardly aware of the shifting of the earth below. When he’s above the red canopy, Herrin shifts into a horse with a pair of bat wings rather than a pipistrelle colored like a cheetah. Taking a deep breath, the stallion looks down at the fiery canopy of his home.
The forest moves, quivering beneath him like a terrified creature, and Herrin feels his own heart clench as the bewilderment and vulnerability meld with confusion and worry as he watches it fall into the sea.
He crosses water that had once been Loess, and lands at the edge of the forest. The salt air is warm in his dark mane, and the long-legged stallion stalks up and down the uneven edges of the new sea. He listens to the summer wind as it dances through the leaves overhead, his dark eyes searching for...something. He is not sure what. A reason for this change? A cause? A cure?
He looks up at glowing Lillibet with a dazed sort of expression, and wonders if perhaps she is somehow involved in this, or at least might know why it has happened. Herrin has felt quakes before, but never anything of that magnitude. Certainly never something with this large of a result.
”What’s going on? Why is everything gone? And the earthquake?”
“I don't know,” Lillibet answers Herrin's first inquiry at a whisper - it does not want to fall from her mouth with its admission of ignorance, but there is nothing else for her to say. She knows nothing more than he does, and their distant view of the new shoreline through the parallel trunks of the Forest inspires cold, overwhelming fear to grip her chest. “I don't know,” she says again, when finally she pulls her gaze from the horizon and to the painted buckskin beside her. She doesn't remember him possessing wings the last time they had spoken.
“Sylva was so quiet,” her lower lip trembles before she forces herself to dissociate from the distress, “All of the wildlife... gone. I couldn't find anyone.” Lillibet's amber eyes turn away from the gold-accented man, clenching her blunted teeth in an attempt to steel herself against the torrent of emotions that threaten to flow freely across her ethereal face. A short sigh falls from her lips, but no words follow; she refuses to voice what she is most ashamed of.
That she had run.
“Where were you?” the question comes out more accusatory than she had intended, but as they peer out over where their home and Kingdom used to be, she finds that she's much less interested in being polite than she is in the daydream that she could someday conceive a storm dangerous enough, and lightning impressive enough, to avenge her missing family.
If only she were more than just a girl who glows.
I do not want to move mountains;
I want the mountains to see me coming
and to crumble.
------H E R R I N in short:-------------------------------------------------- all good things are wild and free
Herrin cannot empathize with the worry that crosses the face of the amber-eyed girl, for he has lost no one in the flood. His mother, though she often lingered in the autumnal woods, was no fool. She would have been far ahead of the rising sea. His acquaintance with others had only ever been in passing, and his half-siblings and friends had long since sought their fortunes beyond the now-drowned lands.
There is a haunted look that remains in Lillibet’s eyes despite the way she so deftly schools her face, and he wonders briefly where her parents are.
The possibility that he might somehow be responsible for this brings an unexpected smile to his face, one that is audible in amusement coloring his voice when answers: “Getting away as fast as I could.”
Herrin feels no shame at all in having saved himself, and he glances to the west. Perhaps there is a place in the Forest where he might find another nice creek. Or should he look for somewhere farther from the sea?
“Where will you go now?” He asks the glowing girl who is no longer the princess of Sylva. Presumably wherever her family is, he thinks, though where that might be he has not bothered to consider until he asks.
The possibility that they’ve drowned occurs to him, a rather sobering thought, and he looks back at the glittering sea rather than meet her eye..
Herrin's sudden and blatant amusement flips a switch inside of the young woman; her near-catatonia is replaced with a quick burst of anger. His smile is met with cold, narrowed pupils. “You're no help,” her nostrils flutter with a snort, “Why are you smiling? Our entire home is gone. People are missing.” She could go on, her anger mounting, but the winged stallion ends their eye contact pensively and Lillibet takes a moment to inhale deeply and turn her own gaze away, averting her attention in hopes that it will help calm her.
Her amber eyes look unseeing over their surroundings as she loses herself in her thoughts; only when Herrin speaks again does she offer him a mirthless side eye.
But when Lillibet opens her jaw to offer him a response, she has nothing to say at first. Her natural instinct had wanted to say that she would go with Link, and her heart sinks as another wave of grief threatens to overtake her again. Her ivory tail slaps with agitation around her glowing hindquarters. “Does it matter?” Her eyes find him again and she wonders why he has so swiftly gone from smiling to pensive. “I won't be trying to infringe upon your privacy again, if that's what you're worried about.”
I do not want to move mountains;
I want the mountains to see me coming
and to crumble.
------H E R R I N in short:-------------------------------------------------- all good things are wild and free
Herrin realizes rather quickly that he’d not said the right thing, for there is brittle anger in her narrowed eyes. He’d seen it just for a moment before he glanced away, and heard it in the words that bring the realization that yes: Lillibet has lost her family.
It is a struggle to empathize, and is a task he abandons quickly.
There would have been no one to mourn Herrin had he been swept away in the floodwaters. He does not mind that, and he is reminded of that as he thinks of the glowing girl beside him. To be attached is to risk loss. Better to remain alone, so that nothing can be taken away. Not by death or disagreement or catastrophic, kingdom-destroying floods.
Yet despite his disinterest in attachment, the spotted stallion is not an inherently cruel creature. He does his best to look at her without her noticing (he is hoping she is not crying), only to meet her agitated gaze and the clarification that she won’t be bothering him again.
He once would have considered that a good thing, Herrin knows, but the world feels like a different place now. So rather than turn and walk away as he might have in the Sylvan forest, he says instead:
“The water didn’t come too fast. I’m sure your family got out. Maybe they’re just on the opposite side.”
Lillibet's indignation seems to have struck something. Herrin's change of attitude does not go unnoticed by the ethereal girl, and she affords him her forgiveness (she suspects he would continue on unbothered even if she held steadfast to her attitude) with a quiet sigh and pursed lips. She nods her gold-striped head once, amber eyes searching his face even as the thought of her parents' chosen hovel, a cave somewhere deep in the Sylvan forest, plays ominously through her head. “Yeah, maybe.”
Perhaps Oceane, too, had heard the quiet of the wildlife before the quake. She calms herself with the thought that her mother had endured much in her life, as had her shifter father, and it was unlikely that something like this would have ended their lives.
Her gaze flicks to the sky for the briefest of moments, instinctively searching for the outline of her mother's flying frame.
When Lillibet looks back to the buckskin tobiano, her anger has slipped back beneath the surface and the newest wave of grief has passed. “What about you, Herrin? Where will you go?”
I do not want to move mountains;
I want the mountains to see me coming
and to crumble.
------H E R R I N in short:-------------------------------------------------- all good things are wild and free
‘Yeah, maybe’, she replies, and Herrin follows her gaze up toward the sky. Is she looking for something, he wonders? Or perhaps someone, he decides, knowing the ability to take to the sky is not an uncommon trait among the residents of Beqanna.
Not one that Lillibet has though, Herrin realizes, and while Yeah, maybe her family is on the other side of this expanse of water, it is still quite an expanse of water. Certainly not one he could swim in any of his bodies, and in truth not one that his bat-like form is comfortable with. His one trip out to sea had left him confused and disoriented, the soft clicks of his echolocation of no use in the empty air above and ever-shifting waves below.
He is thinking of that, and how the whole world is feeling a little more like that now that the shock of the quake and flooding are wearing off. He’s still thinking of it when she asks what he will do, and it colors his voice when he answers: “I’m not really sure.”
Will the water spread? Will the whole world sink until even the highest peak of the Mountain falls below the waves? The questions have no answers, leaving Herrin with an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. He shoves it away, attempting to lighten his own mood more than Lillibet’s when he says: “It’s a shame that none of my shapes are made for a life underwater.”
Herrin's confirmation that he, too, is unsure where he will venture now that Sylva has disappeared beneath the sea leaves Lillibet with an increasing sense of being displaced. She swallows hard, tries to press the feeling away with a clearing of her throat as she turns her amber gaze away from the tobiano stallion.
The ethereal girl takes a moment to consider their options, together and separate. They could part here, never to see each other again. Or they could decide to journey together, and from there their options are three: linger in the commonlands, attempt to finagle their way into someone else's kingdom, or find a place of their own.
Lillibet is drawn away from her thoughts as Herrin speaks again, hisvoice a bit more lighthearted this time. "How many shapes do you have?" she asks, intrigued and unbothered by etiquette. Her gaze inspects him, settles briefly on the feline spots that dot his sides, and then returns to his obsidian eyes.
She sighs, the sound exasperated, as she offers an idea that is only half-joking. "We could claim a land together," and wait for her family to find them, with a place to call their own again, "I hear there's a quiet canyon to the east."
I do not want to move mountains;
I want the mountains to see me coming
and to crumble.
------H E R R I N in short:-------------------------------------------------- all good things are wild and free
She asks about his shapes, and though Herrin answers quickly, there is a flicker of caution in his dark eyes. It is not that he thinks her query rude, for what does he know of manners, raised in the woods by a madwoman? Their first meeting has occured to him, her surety of self, and though it might only be a result of her lofty pedigree, there remains still the possibility that she might be a credible threat.
And yet he tells her “Two,” on his next breath, a long blink and look away hiding the surprise at the quickness of his own decision. “A cheetah, and a bat.” At the final word, he shifts the long limbed of his leathery wings, and the ears that turn to listen to her are rather wide and pointed.
“A canyon?” he repeats slowly, trying to think of where she might mean. Though Herrin had known the woods of Sylva better than most, much of the world beyond remains a mystery. He’s never had a reason to venture beyond the Commons, though he knows there are other lands and if he concentrates very hard, he might even remember what they were called.
Before he even attempts to do so though, he finds himself shrugging his winged shoulders in agreement. It almost surprises him, but then - where else would he go? “Why not?” He continues, adding quickly: “But there better be trees too. Or at least caves.” Canyons are more likely to have caves, he thinks. Perhaps he can find one of his own.
