"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
07-27-2022, 02:41 PM (This post was last modified: 07-27-2022, 02:46 PM by Elegance.)
She’d kill her.
If she could not finding Luminesce, if something had the audacity to happen to her twin sister, Elegance would find a way to resurrect her twin and then promptly send her spiraling back to the Afterlife. There was more of their family missing - their mother, what remained of the triplets, the youngest Wylder - and the thought of not finding them almost overwhelmed the pale pegasus to point of tears.
But Ellie hadn’t cried.
Only cursed and cussed every entity and source of magic known to Beqanna, but she hadn’t broken down to the point of tears.
"Luminesce!” the winged female called out over the strange moors. She had moved through the spring wood, traveling weeks through the Forest and then eventually following the River as the weather had begun warm. Winter’s hold grew less and less the further south that Elegance ventured; by the time that she arrived at the Ruins, the mostly-sparse landscape was home to bright green grasses that swayed with the wind.
Her lips curled downward, feeling apprehensive at searching among the odd rock formations and at a place that still held so much mystery surrounding it. There had been rumors of strange sightings here, and while it had been a mild curiosity when it first appeared, the tornado that tore apart her home and displaced several members of her family had eclipsed anything else for Elegance. Her family nearly drove her to the brink of insanity, but at least when they did, she could fly away and know that when she returned, they would still be there.
There was, however, no more Taiga.
"Lumi!” Elegance tried again, muttering something about Carnage and the Reckoning under her breath. Her golden stripes began to glow in irritation and the white pegasus snorted softly, beginning to move in another direction (away from the sea), leaving a trail of frenzied fireflies behind her.
ELEGANCE
image credit to insane<3
@Luminesce tagging you in case you wanted to / felt like posting lumi
This is not his home—not really. There is nothing to tether him here, save for memories that he would likely never shake, and possibly a child or two that he could only assume existed since he hadn’t actually met them. There is no reason for him to stay and watch the place continue to crumble, but perhaps there is a part of him that is sadistically curious to see what the end of the world looks like—and perhaps because he is foolish enough to think he won’t go down with it.
He is, after all, not one of them.
When this world swallows them whole it will spit out the outsiders, he thinks, and the entire ordeal will mesh into the rest of what feels like a fever dream.
Where it will leave him, he is not sure, but he is sure it will be somewhere better than here.
The storm-colored stallion is alone in the ruins, and though he knows there are others nearby, one of many strange things about this particular land is its ability to make you feel isolated. Other voices were carried away, seemingly trapped by the faint fog that hung loosely above the ground. Their figures remained shrouded in the same mist, or obscured by the rock formations that jutted from the ground.
It’s why when her voice pierces through the haze that it forces his attention onto her, his gray eyes surveying the area until it finds her pale form. Even from here he can see—and hear—that she seems irritated, and she has that pointed look about her that says she is searching for someone. Despite his detachment to this place, he cannot ignore the tug of empathy that shifts in his chest. He did not have anyone here to lose, but he is sure the flood and the storms had caused more than their fair share of strife for those that did.
Against his better judgment (a recurring theme for him in this place, he noted dryly) he finds himself walking towards her. Lightning flickers almost lazily across his skin, a summer storm turned to flesh as the storm-cloud wings at his sides drip slow, deliberate drops from the tips of them. There is nothing threatening in him right now—there rarely is, as he is slow to anger, despite what the hum of electricity implies—but the low thunder of his voice is difficult to soften when he asks her, “Are you looking for someone?”
The last time everything changed in Beqanna (at least, the change that Elegance had been alive for; she is aware that there have been several changes over several lifetimes), the Sinking of the South had given birth to this place: the Ruins. It was strange and different and far too bleak for the pegasus’ liking, but she had come here now because there was simply nowhere else left to search.
Taiga, Nerine, all of the North had been lost to the fog. Tephra and it’s sister islands seemed to have been swallowed by the sea or overtaken by the storms and there was no longer a Southern kingdom (Elegance had not yet heard the murmurs of the Pampas, that one piece of the supposedly lost kingdom had been returned and was currently overseen by her own grandmother, Ryatah); with nowhere else to turn, she had come here. The few others that roamed this craggy place seemed to keep a distance from her, as if they could see her well-worn scowl or heard her cursing from a few paces away. Nobody comes, despite the several times she calls out for her sister.
Nobody, it seems, except for the winged stallion that approaches her.
Elegance is still wearing that black look and glowers at sound of hooves clattering against the stones and sediments. Her pale head turns sharply and the blue-green eyes stare straight at the sight of storm given flesh. His skin flickers with lightning strikes and the smaller pegasi begins to to tighten her gold-tipped wings against her barrel, instincr imagining that the electricity dancing along his dark hide might do more than just that.
Her voice is much higher than this, and the hours of searching for Luminesce have made it hoarse, but that doesn’t prevent the striped mare from stating, "My sister.” She side-steps, turning so that she might see him better and so that likewise, he might see her better. "We are twins, identical down to the last stripe.” A hindlimb rises and falls, stamping against the hard earth as if to emphasize those golden markings. Elegance tilts her head, waiting, watching (hoping, though she would certainly never admit it, because that would be to admit her fear) for any sign of recognition in the gray eyes of the mortal storm.
