"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
A winding path of blight and rot carves its way through the forest. Walking this route from the river to the clearing he calls home each day has wrought misfortune to the trees and brush around him. As a child, he had been mindful of the places he walked, careful to spare even the small insects he came across. But with age came indifference. Time eroded that gentle empathy of adolescence and taught him to serve his own interests instead.
So now he walks the same old walk back from the river. A dried, withered twig snags on the ink black of his wings and snaps easily under his step. Years ago, that twig would have slipped right through his wing. He wonders when that changed but shrugs it off. Instead, his pitch dark eyes survey the white-yellow grasses before him. They look so pale against the fiery shades of red and orange that autumn has brought with it. They almost look like bone bleached in the sun.
What an odd thought. Morbidity rarely crept its way into his mind. Perhaps time had changed more than his wings and the timber of his voice.
Still, he presses onward, to his little corner of the forest. The quiet brings him peace. It used to be noisy with birds and various critters; but his presence and that cloud of misfortune drove them away eventually. It’s for the best. They’d likely be crushed by a tree or fall to their death if they lingered. This awful aura is precisely why he seeks out solitude. When left alone, he isn’t able to harm anyone. Freak accidents and grisly deaths only befall the ones he chooses, instead. Nazghul likes being in control this way.
This place is not home, and she does not belong here.
She thinks it over and over, each time her eyes settle on something strange, or something fascinating. And every time, the thought is echoed by a you’ve never had a home to begin with retort, and the snideness of her inner voice makes her gut clench.
That nearly deserted island was meant to be home, was meant to be a sanctuary for her and her parents. Her father, a soldier for Baltia, and her mother, a quiet, unassuming girl from Stratos, had known that raising their daughter in either kingdom would have been met with disdain. Raising her away from either kingdom had, at the time, felt like the only option.
The guilt that took root in her chest when she first realized it was her fault her parents no longer lived in their respective kingdoms was like a slow-moving poison, spreading through her veins and her bones. The domino effect that her existence had on their lives—them leaving their homes, her father eventually caving and returning to Baltia without them, and the downward spiral of her mother—played out in her mind nearly constantly, and she was almost grateful for the series of disasters that led to the revealing of Beqanna.
She does not belong here, but she is not meant to belong.
Even though Beqanna is not without its own vibrancy and magic, she is clearly an outsider. Her Baltian eyes are almost eerie against the soft colors of her face, and the way the pastel, sunrise-colored feathers along her face, neck, and chest stretch to meet the ocean-blue of her body, and the cascade of water that spills from her sides in the shape of wings, all serve as a visual representation of what she is—a collision of the sky and the sea, but not wholly either one.
She didn’t mean to intrude on his corner of the forest, but in her aimless wandering she soon lost track of where was. Even though the flooded waters had caused the size of this land to shrink considerably, it was still larger than the island she had grown up on, and the forests were not nearly so dark. Fear begins to creep up spine, icy and relentless, and though her breathing remains controlled it is her heart that has taken up an erratic rhythm.
She doesn’t see him, not yet, but she cannot shake the feeling that someone is nearby, cloaked in the shadows of the trees, and so finally she calls out tentatively: “Hello?”
— i’ll kidnap all the stars and i will keep them in your eyes —
